Commemoration of a Correspondent

NEW YORK, NY — On March 19, 2017, the world of journalism lost one of its greats; legendary New York City newspaper columnist, Jimmy Breslin, passed away at the age of 88 in his Manhattan home. Although no official cause of death has been released to the public, Breslin was recovering from pneumonia prior to his death.

During the 1960s and 70s, Breslin was a vanguardist in the development of “New Journalism,” where novelistic techniques are applied to the news to add narrative tension and immediacy. His career started as a sportswriter for the New York Journal-American and he wrote a book called, “Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game?” about the woeful inaugural season for the New York Mets. In 1963, Breslin took a role as a news columnist with the New York Herald Tribune, and the rest is history.

Throughout his career in the newspaper industry, Breslin applied his sportswriting mentality to his work in the newsroom. The New York Times said that Breslin, “avoided the scrum of journalists gathered around the winner, he would advise, and go directly to the loser’s locker. This is how you find your gravedigger.” Breslin used this approach to successfully prowl the streets in order to find stories of the common man in New York and beyond.

Jimmy Breslin covered stories that quickly gained national attention. In 1963, his column told the story of Clifton Pollard, the man who dug President John F. Kennedy’s grave for $3.01 an hour and was not allowed to watch the funeral, but still felt it was an honor to dig the grave. In 1965, he covered the voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery, where rather than talking about Martin Luther King Jr. at the front of the march, he chronicled the story of the very last man in the march, Albert Turner, a bricklayer who wanted the right to vote. In 1986, he won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary for his column on a single man named David Camacho. This column humanized the AIDS epidemic, which was widely misunderstood at the time of publication. Perhaps most famously, in 1977, Breslin received a note from the serial killer known as Son of Sam, who killed five young women in New York with a .44-caliber revolver, and he worked with police to use his column to call for his surrender.

The Pioneer would like to thank Jimmy Breslin for his work and sacrifice to always find the story, regardless of the subject.