Jimmy Breslin
Jimmy Breslin died yesterday, at either 86 or 88 depending upon the published source.
He walked away from his column in 2004, and had not been at the bullseye of New York journalism for many years, but because the impact he had on the city and American journalism was so profound, the news of his death brought back many fond memories of his columns, as well as the couple of times I brushed passed him during my undistinguished career as a newspaperman.
Breslin was one of my heroes. He made you laugh while he skewered the high and the mighty. A prose poet of the sidewalks of New York, he loved tossing darts at politicians. An example: of Mayor Ed Koch, who, like Claude Rains in Casablanca, claimed not to be aware of a parking violations shakedown headed up by the leaders of the Queens Democratic Party, Breslin wrote, “Koch works incessantly at knowing nothing.”
Always self-deprecating in print about himself and his profession, he once wrote, “Don’t call me a journalist. I hate the word. It’s pretentious.”
Like Breslin, I was proud to be an ink-stained wretch.
I didn’t know him, but I met him a couple of times while working. When the newspaper that first hired me, The Long Island Press, folded in 1977, Breslin celebrated its demise in The Daily News. Yes, celebrated. It was the most hilarious obituary I’ve ever read. What I didn’t know at the time was that he nurtured a quarter-century-old grudge. The Press had hired Breslin as a clerk in 1948, his first job in the newspaper business.
Newspapers were on life support as early as the mid-1960’s when a strike by the pressman’s union thinned out the ranks of New York City dailies. Each time a paper folded, there was an obligatory tear-stained obituary about how the culture of daily life was diminished with the stilling of another voice of the people.
Breslin would have none of it. The Press was not a distinguished voice of journalism by any measure. The paper tilted Democrat in its Queens editions and Republican in its Nassau and Suffolk runs. When Jimmy Carter was elected president in 1976, the Queens edition headline read “Jimmy Carter elected 39th President of the United States” and the Nassau-Suffolk edition front page headline read “Ford Carries Nassau and Suffolk”. The Press left no subscriber on the table.
So when the paper folded, fittingly enough on April Fools Day, Breslin wrote that its demise was not a cause for mourning, because The Long Island Press was “the Rikers Island of American journalism.” He then went on to tell a hilarious tale about how he was fired from his first job.
Breslin was a hired as a clerk and copy boy, he wrote, and his main duty was to run newspaper copy to the typesetters. In the days before “cold” type — stories sent electronically to editors and then printing presses — articles were set by pressman who inserted individual lead ingots into frames, “hot” type, letter by letter and character by character, which a printing press then ran newsprint over to create the newspaper. Clerks also fetched old newspaper clips from the paper’s “morgue” for reporters to reference as background.
At the Long Island Press, clerks had an additional job responsibility. The paper’s sports editor, Mike Lee, ran a numbers ring out of the sports department offices on the third or fourth floor of the Press offices at 168th Street and Jamaica Avenue. Breslin carried betting tickets from the newspaper offices to customers and back again.
One night, he wrote, he got soaked returning in a heavy rain from a numbers run. When he reached the office, he took off his clothes and fell asleep. Buck naked, he awoke to the early morning screams of the female cleaning staff and was abruptly separated from his first job.
I crossed paths with Breslin when I covered the Son of Sam Killings in 1977. An eager cub in my second year on the job, I was the first reporter to label David Berkowitz “The .44 Caliber Killer” after the brother of two girls he shot in Queens, a laid-off cop, told me the assailant, not yet identified, used a .44 caliber pistol. This was shortly before Berkowitz began to write to Breslin and The Daily News labeled Berkowitz “The Son of Sam.” This was also just before The Press folded.
In March, Berkowitz killed a young woman named Virginia Voskerichian who was returning home from work, emerging from a subway stairwell in Forest Hills Gardens (incidentally, where Breslin lived). Berkowitz waited for her on a sidewalk in the dark at the top of the stairs and he shot her point blank in the face, fleeing the scene. A witness gave a police artist an accurate sketch of the killer, but it conflicted with a description given to the police a few months earlier by two of Berkowitz’s surviving victims. So the papers published this accurate sketch of the killer, but told the public they only wanted to speak to the then-unidentified person “as a witness.”
The night following the murder, I had drinks at a Charley O’s steakhouse with the Queens Chief of Detectives, John Keenan, some of his subordinates and Jimmy Breslin, taking down every word the detectives uttered in his reporter’s notebook. The police had set up an informal command center at the restaurant. I recall Keenan, in classic Noo Yawkese, solemnly intoning, “There will be justice for Virginia Voskerichian!”
I used the quote in my story the next day, and I was proud that the same quote made it into Breslin’s story as well. I reveled in the spotlight I briefly shared with the great man and to this day, 40 years later, I remain proud that, for one story, I was able to stand in the shadow cast by New York’s champion of the workingman and poet of the streets.