Here it is, here it is. Buried under the dust of many days gone by and marked “Jimmy Breslin,” here’s my manila folder born Feb. 27, 1964, the night after a kid named Cassius Clay knocked off an ex-con named Sonny Liston for the heavyweight championship of the world.
The file is quite thick. In fact, things being how they are, and age (mine) being what it is, it might take the remains of a lifetime to read all the fading, crumbling newspaper columns stuffed into the Breslin file.
Fortunately, there’s a new book, “Jimmy Breslin: The Man Who Told the Truth” (Penzler Publishers), by Richard Esposito, to whittle some of the material down to a more easily consumed 396 pages.
The book is a delight. Esposito has captured not only the essential Breslin, who was the best newspaper columnist of the second half of the 20th century for my money. He’s also brought to life the world of urban America race relations, politics, cops and/or robbers, and Breslin’s police lineup of such characters as the bookmaker “Fat Thomas” and the career arsonist “Marvin the Torch.”
Breslin could make you cry or laugh, sometimes in the same column. What he did best was take you where no other reporters went. Most famously, when all other reporters were capturing the grim pageantry of John F. Kennedy’s funeral, Breslin was interviewing Kennedy’s gravedigger.
Before Breslin, we had generations of newspaper columnists who interpreted economic conditions by citing dry government statistics. Their columns read like term papers. Breslin instead went to housing projects to see how the poor were putting food on the table. There’s your real-life economy.
He knew the difference between heroes and those who were faking it. When Donald Trump called for the death penalty for the innocent “Central Park Five,” Breslin wrote, “Beware the loudmouth taking advantage of the situation and appealing to a crowd’s meanest nature. … Such violent language sounds as if it were coming from someone who walks around with bodyguards.”
He called Rudy Giuliani “a small man in search of a balcony.”
When his first wife, known as “the former Rosemary Dattolico,” died after a long struggle with breast cancer, Breslin wrote, “Always, she was outraged by those who rushed about, shouldering past others, horses in some cheap race, as they pawed for material success. She knew that life belonged to those who seek out the weary, sit with the defeated, understand the clumsy.”
When his daughter, 47-year-old Rosemary Breslin, died some years after the mother, Breslin imagined, “Here in the hospital room … was the mother sitting on the end of her bed, as the daughter once had sat on the mother’s for a year unto death. They both were named Rosemary. When the mother’s last breath told her to go, the daughter reached in fear, but her hand could not stay the mother’s leaving.”
Now, as his daughter dies, Breslin writes, “Suddenly, the last breath came in quiet. The young and beautiful face stared into the silence she had created. Gone was the sound of her words. The mother took her hand, and walked her away, as if to the first day of school.”
This manila folder of mine is filled with Breslin sentences so good that tossing them aside should be considered a crime against literature. Certainly, a crime against journalism.
I got lucky with Breslin. I discovered him at the McKeldin Library in College Park in my freshman year at Maryland. The library carried the great out-of-town newspapers, back when we still had such things. I went looking for Red Smith’s piece in the old New York Herald Tribune to see what he’d written about the Clay-Liston fight.
Instead, I found this guy Breslin, and his lead sentence hit me so solidly that I wrote down the entire column on a scrap of copy paper, which remains in my Breslin file.
The column opens, “Sonny Liston’s blood-flecked eyes stared out of a vacant, jailyard expression while he chased Cassius Clay.”
The column goes back into my manila folder, which stays with me forever. As does Breslin.
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books, including “Journeys to the Heart of Baltimore” and “Michael Olesker’s Baltimore: If You Live Here, You’re Home.”
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