Jimmy Breslin was one of New York's most famous and most visible newspaper guys. The man even ran for Mayor with New York's even more famous writer, Norman Mailer. He also wrote a famous novel, "The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight." Breslin was famous enough to lend his sloppy look and New Yawk accent to a TV beer commercial. The sage newspaperman's literary appraisal? "It's a good drinkin' beer."
The latter is Jimmy in a nutshell. Other beer commercials want to take about "great taste, less filling," or being "the champagne of bottled beer" or whatever? Jimmy was the kind of writer who laid it down...and let it stay there. Simple, tough and truthful. "That's it," he said in the commercial, as if he'd just thought of it, "a good DRINKIN' beer." What else do ya do wit ya beer? Fuggedaboutit!
But the New York Post forgoddaboutit. They went with an AP all-purpose obit. There was a faint line that Breslin once worked for the Post.
Eh. So what. "Pulitzer Prize Winning Journalist." Did he write four or five hit songs? Do a duckwalk on stage? Secretly record women in the bathroom of his restaurant? Was he the subject of a video sold on the cable show 'Midnight Blue' asking, "Is That Chuck Berry Pissing [on a white woman]?" Nahhhhh.
It was a perfunctory obit for Breslin, who suffered a stroke years ago, recovered and then wrote a book called, "I Want to Thank my Brain For Remembering Me." After all, Breslin didn't write: "I was motor'vatin' over the hill, I saw Maybellene in a Coup de Ville."
Perhaps the Post didn't want to give a lot of space to Breslin because he actually wrote most of his best work for The Daily News?
The "front page" of the Daily News website was not Chuck Berry. It was Jimmy:
New York's two tabloids gave people a split decision on the importance of Jimmy Breslin. Over at The New York Times, there was an apology about how a "full obituary" would be online very soon. Even so, what they had up in the hours after Breslin's death was announced was already much more (just in terms of paragraphs) than AP or The New York Post. It was, of course, also better written. One of those paragraphs:
"Early on, Mr. Breslin developed the persona of the hard-drinking, dark-humored Everyman from Queens, so consumed by life’s injustices and his six children that he barely had time to comb his wild black mane. While this persona shared a beer with the truth, Mr. Breslin also admired Dostoyevsky, swam every day, rarely drank in the last 30 years, wrote a shelf-full of books, and adhered to a demanding work ethic that required his presence in the moment, from a civil-rights march in Alabama to a perp walk in Brooklyn — no matter that he never learned to drive."
That's describing a colorful guy. An important guy. "A good reading' guy." You enjoyed reading Breslin.
No, writers are not entertainers. Not usually. But Breslin actually was. He was colorful enough to get face time on TV, and he in every New Yorker's face for many decades, via his columns.
Jimmy Breslin and Chuck Berry were contemporaries. Breslin died at 86. Berry died at 90. If you discount the very stupid double entendre song "My Ding a Ling" in 1972, Berry's hit-making ended nearly 60 years ago! He wrote "Maybellene" in 1955, "Roll Over Beethoven" in 1956, "School Day" in 1957, "Rock & Roll Music" and "Johnny B. Goode" in 1958. That's his handful of hits.
Breslin covered local news for over thirty solid years, including national news; his story on JFK's gravedigger at Arlington Cemetery dates from 1963. Then there was the similar story in 1980, where Breslin reported on the guy who rode John Lennon to the hospital. And more.
The morning papers that covered Breslin in two very different ways, ultimately shows that not only can petty politics be a factor in how a man is remembered (New York Post refusing to give much space to a man who mostly wrote for the News), it underlines how little writers are valued. Even on a slow news day, and without Chuck Berry's large duckwalking shadow, Breslin would not have gotten any more lines from AP. This is Associated Press. Breslin as one of theirs.
But hey, Jimmy was knocking out columns, but not "knocking' 'em out like Johnny B. Goode."
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