Jimmy Breslin, Who Helped Define The Newspaper Column, Dies At 88

"The call bothered Malcolm Perry. 'Dr. Tom Shires. STAT,' the girl's voice said over the page in the doctors' cafeteria in Parkland Memorial Hospital. The 'STAT' meant emergency. Nobody ever called Tom Shires, the hospital's chief resident in surgery for an emergency. And Shires, Perry's superior, was out of town for the day. Malcolm Perry looked at the salmon croquettes on the plate in front of him. Then he put down his fork and went over to a telephone.

"'This is Dr. Perry taking Dr. Shires page,' he said.

"'President Kennedy has been shot. STAT,' the operator said."

Those words appeared in The New York Herald Tribune under the headline, "A Death in Emergency Room One." They were written by Jimmy Breslin, who helped define the modern newspaper column, winning the Pulitzer Prize, a George Polk Award and numerous other accolades along the way.

He uncovered political corruption, police brutality and climbed numerous flights of stairs, working as hard as he could to tell the stories of ordinary people.

Jimmy Breslin died Sunday morning after battling pneumonia. He was 88. He had been hospitalized last Wednesday but only spent one night in the hospital. He had seemed to be improving.

And he could turn a phrase. He referred to former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani as a "a small man in search of a balcony." After Ted Kennedy made his famous apology speech during his 1994 campaign, Breslin derided it as "a speech most other drinkers make with a borrowed quarter."

While Breslin turned many politicians into copy, his heart was always with the ordinary person, the underdog.

"You get a little picture that reflects the whole," he said. "You can get the readers interested in the life of one guy and he can reflect the whole life around him. And it's a better picture than the politicians can give."

When people talk of Breslin, who wrote not just for The Herald Tribune but also for Newsday, The Daily News and authored more than a dozen books, the conversation inevitably turns back to the reporting he did in the days after Kennedy had been assassinated.

"When President Kennedy was killed, Breslin was on the first jet from New York to Dallas," Richard Wald and James Bellows would later write. "He knew it was his story. He became so wrapped up in it that, after filing 'A Death in emergency Room One,' he went out, re-did all the research that he had gathered in the first place, and tried to file the story again. When he finished covering the Kennedy funeral in Washington, he was unable to talk to anyone for several days."

It was while in Washington covering the funeral that he then wrote a second classic piece, one that has been taught in journalism schools and eyed with admiration by numerous reporters since.

"It's an Honor" is the name of the piece, and it tells the story of Clifton Pollard, who worked at Arlington National Cemetery and dug the grave for Kennedy.

Clifton Pollard was pretty sure he was going to be working on Sunday, so when he woke up at 9 a.m. in his three-room apartment on Corcoran Street, he put on khaki overalls before going into the kitchen for breakfast," Breslin wrote. "His wife, Nettie, made bacon and eggs for him. Pollard was in the middle of eating them when he received the call he had been expecting.

"Pollard is forty-two. He is a slim man with a mustache who was born in Pittsburgh and served as a private in the 352nd Engineers battalion in Burma in World War II. He is an equipment operator, grade 10, which means he gets $3.01 an hour. One of the last to serve John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who was the thirty-fifth President of this country, was a working man who earns $3.01 an hour and said it was an honor to dig the grave.

Breslin was born Oct. 17, 1928, in Jamaica, Queens. His parents, he once said, were "a saint and an alcoholic." His mother, a substitute English teacher, worked for years as a case worker and then manager in the city's welfare agency. His father, the alcoholic, left the family when Jimmy was 6.

He went to John Adams High School and then spent some time at Long Island University before eventually dropping out since he was already working at The Long Island Press, covering cops and then sports.

It was as a sports writer that he first made a name for himself, and within a few years he was working for The Journal-American in New York. While there, he continued burnishing his reputation, freelancing pieces for magazines like Look and then publishing his first book, a biography of the then-legendary horse trainer, Sunny Jim Fitzsimmons.

In 1960, he quit newspapers to focus on freelancing.

That led to his having the opportunity in 1962 to spend a lot of time with The New York Mets as they undertook their first season. The Mets were a gift to New York, which had lost the Dodgers and Giants to the West Coast. At the same time, they were a bit of a curse.

Under the tutelage of the great Casey Stengel, who had guided the Yankees to several World Series championships, the Mets were the opposite, taking losing to a new level as they proceeded to drop a then-record 120 games in their first season.

They were so bad that Stengel exclaimed once, "Can't anybody here play this game?" Breslin had the title for his second book.

This led to a fortunate turn for Breslin.

The Mets were owned by Joan Whitney Payson. Her brother, John Whitney, was the owner of The New York Herald Tribune. He loved the book and arranged for his editors to run excerpts from it.

When the Mets, early in their second season — just as the excerpts started to run — had a four-game winning streak, the paper convinced Breslin to write a piece, for free, for the front page.

What Breslin did not know until after the story ran, was that the paper had bigger plans for him. The Herald Tribune was looking for someone to write a New York column for them. Breslin fit the bill.

After the paper went to press, Whitney along with his top editor, James Bellows, met Breslin in the Artists and Writers Restaurant downstairs from the paper's offices.

"Hey, I got to hand it to your sister," Breslin told Whitney, as Bellows later recounted. "She's one hell of a broad."

Bellows would write that Whitney agreed, and then brought up the idea of a column.

"You ain't got enough money to make me work for a newspaper," Breslin told him. "I worked for Hearst, Newhouse, and Scripps-Howard, and they all stink. There ain't enough money in the world to make me go back."

Whitney, a millionaire when being a millionaire really meant something, disagreed. And had his way. Breslin was back in newspapers.

"He began to discover Breslin was his most salable commodity," Wald and Bellows would say. "You take in the sights that other people see and you turn them out through the lens that makes you an individual, and suddenly other people see them better.

"That's why he always writes about Breslin and why people go on reading about Breslin and why he keeps on living like Breslin."

He quickly developed a reputation for seemingly endless work. He gave the impression of being up before anyone, on the phone to the city desk, friends, reporters at police headquarters, spokesmen for public officials. Always looking for the next story.

"What's doing?" he would ask.

And, for the readers of the Herald Tribune, the answer had been turned into stories that took them from Harlem to London to Vietnam.

"Inside the church, the heavy air conditioner in the wall kept the narrow hallway cool," he wrote in Harlem Notebook. "Carrol Tyler and Sandra Hopkins, who had just been married, stood under the machine while the guests squeezed in front of them and kissed the tall, striking bride and shook hands with the groom and then went out through the doors and into the hot Sunday afternoon sun."

During a trip to Vietnam, he wrote: "They came, one after another, in casts and with bloodstains on their sheets, and the nurse's tanned hands pulled olive-drab blankets over their broken bodies and she talked quietly and looked into the faces of each of them."

He also introduced readers to many of his friends, including several who lived on the other side of the law.

"Marvin the Torch never could keep his hands off somebody else's business, particularly if the business was losing money," he wrote of one who would make many appearances over the years. "Now this is accepted behavior in Marvin's profession, which is arson."

Unfortunately, it was not to last. Even then, the newspaper business was contracting. By 1966, The Herald Tribune merged with two other papers, but that only lasted one year, and Breslin was once again out of the newspaper business.

He helped turn the paper's Sunday weekly magazine, New York, into a standalone publication that is still there. And he spent almost one year writing for The New York Post, which at the time, was a very different — liberal — newspaper.

There, he covered two more political assassinations.

"Here he was, trying to get dressed for dinner, and he had no tie," he would write in April, 1968, of Martin Luther King Jr.

Just more than two months later, Breslin was standing within feet of his friend, Bobby Kennedy, who was running for president.

"The gun did not make a very loud noise," Breslin wrote. "Four or five quick, flat sounds on the low-ceilinged room and Kennedy disappears and a guy behind him disappears and people screaming and running and here is the guy with the gun."

While writing for the Post, he had also been finishing his first novel, "The Gang that Couldn't Shoot Straight." A parody of the mob wars in Brooklyn, it was the jackpot for Breslin. It sold well, it was made into a movie, most notable for being Robert DeNiro's debut. It brought Breslin enough money that he quit the Post to focus on books.

Though, in 1969, there was another distraction — he ran for City Council president on a ticket headed by Norman Mailer, who would run for mayor.

Their slogan was "Throw the rascals in," and their platform was to make New York City the 51st state. Breslin — running against five other people — finished fifth with just more than 75,000 votes, outpolling Mailer, who finished fourth in a field of five with just above 41,000 votes.

After that, buoyed by the money from "Gang," he continued freelancing and writing novels.

He spent some time living in Ireland, researching his novel, "World Without End, Amen," which follows New York cop Dermot Davey between Ireland and New York. While in Ireland, Breslin befriended people from the IRA and Sinn Fein, which led to a late-night raid by Irish police.

He followed that with a stint as writer-in-residence at The Washington Star, where he reported on Watergate, material that became his next book, "How the Good Guys Finally Won."

He became such a celebrity that he pitched beer, appeared in ads for Scotch, even hosted an episode of "Saturday Night Live."

In 1976, he returned to newspapers, agreeing to write a column three times a week for The New York Daily News.

His first column for the paper was about the murder of a teenager. With it, Breslin made it clear that if it happened in his city, he would take notice.

"It was another of last week's murders that went almost unnoticed," he wrote. "People in the city were concentrating all week on the murders of elderly people. Next week you can concentrate on the murders of the young, and then the killing of the old won't seem so important.

"Dies the victim, dies the city. Nobody flees New York because of accounting malpractice. People run from murder and fire."

The timing of Breslin's return to newspapers also led to what was maybe his biggest brush with infamy.

That July, an 18-year-old named Donna Lauria became the first victim of the serial killer who was known as Son of Sam. The killer, whose real name was David Berkowitz, would kill six people using a .44-caliber revolver.

One day in 1977, Breslin got a letter from the killer.

"Hello from the gutters of N.Y.C., which are filled with dog manure, vomit, stale wine, urine and blood," the killer wrote. "Hello from the sewers of N.Y.C., which swallow up these delicacies when they are washed away by the sweeper trucks."

The News immediately turned over the letter to police who asked them to print it. The newspaper did so, along with a column by Breslin, with a front-page headline, "Breslin to .44 Killer: Give Up! It's The Only Way Out."

"The only way for the killer to leave this special torment is to give himself up to me, if he trusts me, or to the police," Breslin wrote. "If he wants any further contact, all he has to do is call or write me at the Daily News. It's simple to get me. The only people I don't answer are bill collectors."

There would be more letters — and they would be printed. Some media outlets, not knowing that Breslin had been asked to publish the column, castigated him for it as well as the fact that he and his long-time friend, Dick Schaap, were writing a novel based on the case.

Berkowitz was arrested a couple of months later.

That year also brought Breslin the start of what would be one of his longest ongoing feuds — the election of Ed Koch as mayor of New York. Koch defeated Mario Cuomo in the primary. Cuomo, who had made a name for himself fighting for homeowners, had endeared himself to Breslin.

When Cuomo was elected governor five years later, Breslin wrote glowingly of him.

"Here was Cuomo, of Queens, who spoke of Ronald Reagan as a threat to everything the country stood for, who said that being mean was a disease, who spoke of the old and the blacks," Breslin wrote. "If all Democrats are old, he is new."

Koch was always eyed suspiciously.

When the mayor — famously a bachelor — said one campaign season that he wanted children, Breslin wrote that he read those stories "with the eye of a criminal."

While the city rebounded from bankruptcy under Koch, it also saw the murder rate start to rise and the number of homeless increase.

It led to many columns where Breslin demonstrated his compassion, including one written after a homeless man had taken to living on a traffic island that Koch regularly drove by on his way to City Hall. Koch had the man arrested.

Breslin responded by setting up a beach chair, umbrella and radio on the island and staying there, resplendent in a bathing suit and Hawaiian shirt.

In 1981 came one of his most poignant columns.

Breslin had always incorporated family and friends into his work. This included friends such as Marvin the Torch and Klein the Lawyer but the occasional stories of his family, particularly his first wife — and the mother of their six children — whom he always referred to as "the former Rosemary Dattolico."

After a long fight with cancer, she died that year. The paper ran the eulogy he gave as a column.

"About a year ago, when she was unwell to the point, where even she was unsure, she offered during prayer to her God, a suggestion that she thought was quite good.

"Her youngest had experienced difficulty through the start of his school. Then suddenly, he expressed great interest in attending one school.

"His mother developed great faith in the situation.

"And so, she proposed, give me this year while my son goes to this school. Let me try to help him out as best as I can. Then that should do it. He will be on his way.

"And I will be perfectly happy to be on my way.

"Providing the school works out."

The following year, he married Ronnie Eldridge, a widow with three children who was an official with the Port Authority; she was later elected to New York's city council, representing a district on Manhattan's Upper West Side, where Breslin moved. Breslin had six children. It was not an easy merger at first, as he recounted in a 1983 column, "Mix Me a Family."

"We placed nine children from two marriages under one roof and asked them to get along famously," he wrote. "Both marriages had ended with somebody unfortunately passing away. So the nine children had no other parents outside the house to run to with complaints."

He then wrote of the efforts to get the family — a mix of Judaism and Catholicism — to celebrate both Easter and Passover.

"The Eldridge-Breslin Passover-Easter will consist of two persons," the column concludes. The families would grow to love and appreciate each other, Breslin assured people.

In 1985, Breslin uncovered what would become a tremendous police scandal: how officers in Queens had used a stun-gun to torture a drug suspect. That column, along with several others, led to two officers being convicted and several commanders being transferred. And a Pulitzer Prize for commentary.

The following year, many thought Breslin had a chance to win a second straight Pulitzer.

His affection for many of the politicians who ruled, Queens was put to the test when Queens Borough President Donald Manes tried to kill himself and ended up in the hospital.

On Saturday, Jan. 11, Breslin went to the hospital looking for a story. He saw Manes' wife, who said her husband was in rough shape, before she was whisked away.

Then, Breslin overheard a nurse complain about "the nerve of this FBI agent" who had taken a parking space.

That sent Breslin to find his friend, Mel Lebetkin — immortalized in many columns as Klein the Lawyer — to find out why the FBI was interested in Manes. It was the beginning of the unfolding of the Koch administration, pulled under by a giant scandal at the city's Parking Violations Bureau.

"I felt like the Celtics about to lose a game in the Garden," he later told a reporter. "I had to prevent the worst possible crime from occurring — embarrassment to Breslin."

A few days later, he followed it up with a second column, which ran under the headline "Boulevard of Broken Schemes."

"This is the scandal of our time, and from now on I will bring it to you first, and with the most fury because I am personally aroused. I have been betrayed by my own boulevard, and in future days I will give neither quarter or comfort."

It reached the point where, after another Breslin exclusive, the great Murray Kempton — writing for another paper — wrote of Breslin:

"The mayor and I awoke yesterday to see the substantial figure of Jimmy Breslin of the New York Daily News shrunk almost to the point of invisibility on the horizon across which he was running so far ahead of us and everyone else."

Koch hated Breslin's coverage.

Appearing on Larry King's talk show on CNN, Koch took a swipe at Breslin.

King asked him if he would run a again. Koch said yes, for a fourth, fifth and sixth term.

"Then what?" King asked him.

"Then I'll give the eulogy at Jimmy Breslin's funeral," said Koch, who would die in 2013.

In 1988, having already won the Pulitzer Prize, a George Polk Award and more, Breslin decided it was time to move on from the News. Approached by New York Newsday with a very generous offer, he accepted and jumped ship.

It was at Newsday that Breslin, whose bad behavior rarely went beyond being a pest to his editors by failing to turn in expense reports and attacking his own paper in print, found himself in real trouble for the first time.

In 1990, he heard that a young Korean-American colleague of his had attacked one of his columns as sexist.

Breslin responded with a newsroom meltdown, attacking the woman with racial and sexist epithets.

He was suspended for two weeks, which did not mollify some who thought he should be fired.

"I am no good and once again I can prove it," he wrote in an apology to his colleagues.

In 1994, he was diagnosed with a brain aneurysm. He recounted his struggle through it — and his recovery — in "I Want To Thank My Brain For Remembering Me."

While at Newsday, he encountered the story of an unauthorized Mexican worker who died in a Brooklyn construction accident. He turned it into a book, "The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutierrez." It was perhaps his most powerful work.

His last column for Newsday was written on Election Day, 2004. He predicted John Kerry would win.

"I invented this column form," he wrote. "I now leave, but will return here for cameo appearances. Thanks for the use of the hall."

That same year, he had also a published a very angry book about the Catholic Church — "The Church that Forgot Christ" — that brought to mind his saying that "rage is the only quality which has kept me, or anybody I have ever studied, writing columns for newspapers."

He continued to write, contributing an occasional column as well as books. His last book came out in 2011 and was about Branch Rickey, the Brooklyn Dodgers executive who signed Jackie Robinson.

His last published piece was an excerpt from his autobiography — a work he made one of granddaughters promise she would finish if he was unable to.

Tragedy continued to reach out and attack Breslin from time to time.

In 2004, his daughter Rosemary died of a rare blood disorder. She was 47. Five years later, his other daughter, Kelly, collapsed in a restaurant and died days later.

In 2008, he published "The Good Rat," the true story of two corrupt cops and the Mafia, just as this reporter was getting to move from New York to Oregon.

"You'll die in Oregon," Breslin wrote in a copy of the book.

This reporter didn't, but Breslin has gone on to argue with the great copy editor in the sky.

He is survived by his wife, her three children, four of his children and 12 grandchildren.

This story will be updated.

Photo: David Shankbone