A Goodbye to Jimmy Breslin, Teller of Truths

nhboy

Ubi bene ibi patria
" In a time of fake news and alternative facts, we have lost Jimmy Breslin, a brave and brilliant teller of deepest truth.

Early Sunday morning, this 88-year-old genius newspaper columnist and novelist roused his wife, Ronnie Eldridge, with a question.

“How do you open a can of soup?”

She got up and the two of them spent a magical hour together, sipping soup and talking. They finally returned to the bed and he reached for The New York Times, which he always read so he could declare it unreadable. She drifted off after asking him not to get up again without letting her know.

He of course disobeyed her and was up and around when she woke up again shortly before 7:30 a.m. He approached the bed and she asked him how he felt. He told her he felt terrible.

He then pitched over onto the mattress.

On thousands of other days, Breslin had set out with pad and pen to cover the latest story, often pulsing with the adrenaline burst that comes with a tight deadline, pushing himself yet again to do his very best, hyper-focused so as not to miss the telling details, opening himself up to feel what the subject was feeling, almost becoming the subject, composing the narrative in his mind even as it unfolded.

He had been the doctor on duty when John F. Kennedy was rushed into a Dallas emergency room and the gravedigger who prepared the president’s resting place and a scared young soldier in Vietnam and Mafia boss Vincent “Chin” Gigante and a young woman waiting for the results of a life-or-death medical test and a family living without heat in cold so bitter the walls of the apartment were covered with ice.

He had also been a father of a murdered cop and a detective who captured a famous serial killer but then had to go to his second job lugging birdseed at a warehouse because he needed the extra dough to make ends meet and a Mexican immigrant who traveled to New York to feed his family and ended up drowning in a sub-standard cement pour and a little girl who proved to be the toughest kid in Brooklyn, sitting down at a murder scene and doing her homework for the next day. "

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/03/20/a-goodbye-to-jimmy-breslin-teller-of-truths.html?via=twitter_page
 

Larry Gude

Strung Out
Thats funny.
I think Breslin thought the presidency was beneath him.....

I searched up an old clip of him on Letterman. Pretty funny but not exactly the towering sort of intellect one might expect given his obits. He's just some poor bastard who HAD to go make money somehow to raise 9 kids!

[video=youtube;4Is4Ge73h0Q]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Is4Ge73h0Q[/video]
 
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