Marvelous.
Jimmy Breslin was standing at the bar.
Which is where he did some of his best work across 65 years in the newspaper-writing business.
But times change. Friends die. Newspapers close. The Internet soars.
And now Breslin orders a Diet Coke in Sardi’s restaurant on W. 44th St. where the Deadline Club is inducting him and several other journalists into its Hall of Fame.
“I wish this was whiskey,” says Breslin, 83. “Whiskey cured everything. Those days are gone. And I don’t wanna be here. I have work to do. I’m not worth any f—— award, I can tell you that much. I wanna be home working on my book.”
What’s it about?
“Who knows? It’s about New York. So what else is doing?”
I tell him that the night before I reread his excellent column about the gravedigger Clifton Pollard, who was “honored” to be digging President John F. Kennedy‘s grave a half-century ago this month.
“That one’s old. Like me.”
It holds up, I say.
“First, out to Dallas,” Breslin says. “Awful.”
In Dallas, Breslin wrote another classic column for the New York Herald Tribune, “Death in Emergency Room One,” about the scene at the hospital following Kennedy’s assassination. Read these two columns and you can skip all the 50th anniversary hoopla and be transported back in time by Breslin’s astounding and telling details, which preserve in cold amber that terrible time in American history.
You’ll also know why he’s going into the Hall of Fame and why he has a Pulitzer Prize and a George Polk Award and why those columns are still taught in journalism courses.
“When I got to Washington, there were 5,000 reporters interviewing each other,” Breslin says. “So I went to Arlington Cemetery to see what was doing. Here was this fella, black working man, and he was digging Kennedy’s grave with a backhoe. He made sense of the story for me. By doing a day’s work. Like I should be doing right now.”
Breslin said what irked him most was that Clifton Pollard was barred from attending the funeral. “That’s what was wrong with the country,” Breslin says. “Still is. The working guy isn’t good enough to stand with the big shots.”
And, so, Breslin ended the celebrated column on the funeral, with its indelible portrait of Jacqueline Kennedy at the graveside, with Pollard, who although rebuffed, goes about digging graves for other folks, still feeling “honored” to have dug JFK’s burial plot. “I sent that one in, took a train to New York, took the subway out to Queens. Living in Forest Hills Gardens was like cheating on life. And I spent two days, 48 f—— hours, in Pep McGuire’s bar on Union Turnpike getting stewed.”
Marvelous.
In the five decades since, Breslin has found the gravedigger in almost every big news story, approaching the grand stage from the wings.
“I grew up in Richmond Hill-Ozone Park, 101st Ave. and 134th St. and went to John Adams High,” he tells me at the Daily News table, sitting with other Daily News columnists past and present: Mike Daly, Mike Lupica, Pete Hamill.
“I played football. I played trumpet. I could draw. I could do everything half-a—-. I had a history teacher there, McGill. He said I could write a little, but that I had no talent for attendance. He suggested I go see a guy he knew at the Long Island Press on 168th St. and Jamaica Ave. I was 16. I became a copy boy. Not for long. I started writing stories. They put them in the newspaper. You could go to bars and interview people. They paid you money. I liked it. I wish I was home right now writing my f—— fiction book instead of this awards bull—-.”
The induction ceremony featured funny and touching speeches from new Deadline Club Hall of Famers Cindy Adams, Graydon Carter, Bob Herbert, Carol Loomis, Linda Mason, Norman Pearlstine and Bill Moyers. Breslin shared an anecdote about an electrician from his childhood block who would fix his grandmother’s wiring and then travel up to Sing Sing to pull the switch on condemned Death Row convicts. “He got $150 a shot,” Breslin said.
The story revealed the world of colorful New York characters that Breslin came from, including a “terrific struggling artist named Al Hansen who made extra money getting shot out of a cannon at the Ringling Bros. Circus. Those were my people.”
Breslin shared them all with us, real-life screwballs in hilarious New York tales.
When the awards luncheon ended, Breslin said, “Okay, now I gotta go do some f—— work.”
Which is what Clifton Pollard, JFK’s gravedigger, did 50 years ago this month.
Marvelous.
