The Bres Is Calling It Quits

Breslin the Writer is calling it quits. After more than a half-century as a newspaperman, including 42 years as the hardest-working columnist in America, Jimmy Breslin has decided enough is enough.“I’m not gonna write daily columns anymore,” The Bres said yesterday. “It took 400 days straight to write my last book and I didn’t miss a column. I can’t keep working like that and keep the quality up.”This was after yesterday’s Newsday came up on the stands and a note inside told the world of what had been a closely held secret: no more Breslin in the mornings.This is like Paul Revere falling off the horse in the middle of the ride; Abe Lincoln sitting down before getting to the punch line in the Gettysburg Address; Affirmed throwing it in 100 yards before the finish line to let Alydar get up by a nose.“It’s like a thousand people leaving the room,” one of Mr. Breslin’s oldest pals and colleagues, Pete Hamill, said. “But for chrissakes, he’s 75. You just can’t do it anymore.”No one of any age did it quite like Breslin the Writer: up before dawn working on yet another book – he’s written at least 15 – and then out looking for a column, pounding pavement, climbing tenement stairs, and always patrolling the precincts of the poor and the underdog.He didn’t do celebrity journalism: He doesn’t know any. He’s covered fires, riots, presidential assassinations, and what jaded editors call “cheap” murders, all from the front lines.At the height of the Crown Heights riots, Breslin the Writer took a cab to the battleground. A gang of young, angry blacks, seeing a white reporter in their midst, dragged him out of the car, sliced his pants off to get at his money, and left him standing in the street in his underwear. He may never have found a pair of pants, but he filed an intensely personal column that captured the horror of those nights better than any TV camera did.In May of last year, when a Harlem woman named Alberta Spruill was “scared to death” after police mistakenly barged into her apartment, Breslin the Writer was among the first at the scene.“We went looking for a picture that night and couldn’t find any that didn’t have Breslin standing on the doorstep,” said an assistant managing editor at Newsday, John Mancini. For years, he’s gotten an almost daily phone call from the columnist demanding, gruffly, “What’s doin’?”“When he got excited about a story, it got me excited,” Mr. Mancini said. “He has great news sense, and if he’s on the line yelling about something, you know it’s good.”A man of few spoken words but many printed ones, Breslin the Writer started in the business working in the old Hearst newspaper building down on South Street. He did grunt work in sports until they let him start writing. They never let him stop.He used to cover the fights, where the sports columnist Jimmy Cannon, perhaps hearing the footsteps of the new kid on the block, accused him of making up quotes. In 1962, he started writing a city-side column for the old Herald Tribune that, for the first time, brought the rhythms of the street onto the pages of a newspaper. Critics tried to dismiss him as “a cop with a typewriter.”But a year later, he set a new standard for generations of columnists: breaking from the pack. After President Kennedy was assassinated, Breslin the Writer let the others chronicle the official preparations for the funeral. He interviewed the gravedigger.The years brought thousands of columns brimming with anger, swagger, and humor. He branded an Australian-born press baron “Tar Baby Murdoch,” duked it out on the news pages with a Post columnist, Steve Dunleavy, for ownership of the “Son of Sam” killer, and broke open a city parking scandal in the 1980s that put people in jail.He won a Pulitzer Prize, and he also managed to churn out such books as “The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight” and “Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game?”His latest, “The Church That Forgot Christ,” is classic Breslin, a searing indictment of the Catholic Church for covering up the pedophile scandal – and a reminder that a priest’s job is to lead the flock, not molest it.He’s kept going through a tough year that saw the death of his wonderfully talented daughter, Rosemary, and now he says it’s time to slow it down.Mr. Mancini doesn’t quite believe it.“He’s going to file a lot more than we think,” he said. “He can’t stay away.”

The Bres Is Calling It Quits

The Bres Is Calling It Quits

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