OBIT - JIMMY BRESLIN- #5373 - SCRIPT of cut uploaded to scoop on 9.23.2016 BRESLIN: I always knew from the sports writing, don’t go where the others go. Go to the losers’ dressing room at all times. music TITLE CARD: THE LAST WORD TITLE CARD: JIMMY BRESLIN REPORTER TITLE CARD: animation of signature VO: As columnist, novelist, biographer and raconteur, Jimmy Breslin witnessed and chronicled the American 20th century with an eye for life lived in the lanes of the overlooked, and the unwritten. He also contributed two classic titles to the literature of cosmic ineptitude: “The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight,” about a crew of dissolute Brooklyn Mafiosa, and “Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game?” about the 1962 New York Mets. Ultimately Breslin’s most enduring love was newspapers and he produced pieces that changed journalism. SOUND UP FROM KENNEDY BURIAL In 1963, the funeral of President John F. Kennedy drew reporters from around the world. BRESLIN: They’re all herded together and they were talking about how Jacqueline Kennedy walked, what Truman looked like at graveside, or the planes overhead. Well forget about it, that’s nothing. VO: Breslin found Clifton Pollard - the man who had dug the President’s grave. BRESLIN:He was getting three dollars and one cent an hour to dig the grave. And// when he was through with it, he//He tried to get back to watch the funeral and they wouldn’t let him back.//. You’re looking like a bum, you’re a laborer. SOUND UP FROM KENNEDY BURIAL BRESLIN: While they were having the big funeral services he just went over the hill and dug another grave. SOUND UP FROM KENNEDY BURIAL BRESLIN: //I remember, when it was all over, he looked at the grave, they fixed it up late in the evening. And I remember him just saying, ” it’s an honor to have done this.” FOOTAGE: KENNEDY BURIAL - TAPS. VO: Among journalists, his account of that day became a genre of its own. For years afterwards, editors would send reporters out to stories with instructions to look beyond the obvious, to tell their tale through the gravedigger. VO: Born in 1930 in Queens, New York, Breslin grew up with dreams of the sportswriter’s life... BRESLIN: We used to get the Long Island Press at home on 101st Avenue where I lived. And I’d spread it out //on the living room floor and read it. .Carl Lundquist, that was my favorite writer,// I had a...a candle in my mind to him.// He covered the major league baseball roundup. // He would start with the game of the day and work his way through the schedule. And all I dreamed of was Lundquist in a—riding in a Pullman car from St. Louis, then he’d go up to Chicago//well the pullman cars were at Sunnyside Yards, we used to go down there and stand on the hill and look at them and dream we were going away in them. //I didn’t know that Lundquist was on 42nd Street, and he used to put a different city on top of the story every day, then he took the Long Island Railroad home to Long Island. He never went anyplace. VO: After getting his start on the obituary desk at the Long Island Press, Breslin became a leading figure in what became known as the New Journalism. He and writers like Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe and Pete Hamill brought literary techniques and personal voices to their work. BRESLIN: //you’ve got to let the people come in and see something. Set a scene. 02:13:30 // You gotta have people talking. Let them hear the people involved talk. SOUND UP FROM CIVIL RIGHTS MARCH VO: In 1965 as the civil rights struggle was reaching an epic climax, Breslin was in Alabama covering a march from Selma to Montgomery for voting rights. At the front of the march was Dr. Martin Luther King. The very last man was Albert Turner, a bricklayer, who wanted to vote. BRESLIN “What bothered Albert Turner on this night was the figure on his pay stub. It said that twenty-seven dollars and fifty-two cents had been taken out for income taxes. He looked at the stub and a strange thought ran across his mind. If the government can take $27.52 a week, then it can give back something to Albert Turner, like a vote in an election. //He represented to me everything in the south. People taking a chance to force change that had to be. SOUND UP FROM CIVIL RIGHTS MARCH VO: Breslin traveled widely, always writing to the rhythm of of columnist’s deadline. He spent the afternoon of June 4, 1968 in Los Angeles, reporting a column about gun violence. That evening, he went to the Ambassador Hotel where Robert F. Kennedy was holding a rally to celebrate winning the Democratic presidential primary in California. Breslin: I walked into the kitchen just as they were breaking from their rally. //And I’m in the kitchen and this guy ah—holds a gun out at Kennedy and shoots. Nat sound news coverage of shooting Breslin://There was hysteria there, they were screaming and yelling, but they couldn’t get the gun out of the fellow’s hand, I remember that. //All of a sudden they threw him onto the steam table, and ah everybody pushed and I winded up sitting on his legs and Roosevelt Grier just put an arm over him at that end and he couldn’t move.// Nat sound news coverage of shooting Breslin: They stamped feet on his hand to get the gun out, and that was that. VO: Shaken by the assassination, Breslin took a break from the news. He wrote his first novel - a best-selling Mafia satire — based on his reporting about the Gallo crime family of Brooklyn called “The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight” Nat Sound: Movie Breslin: They had a gang war. There was a war between kidnappings and shootings. ,Tthey kept hitting telephone poles when they shot. Nat Sound: Movie Breslin: They had a lion in the basement....[pop]/t/ook a lion on a leash around Mulberry Street.[pop].. I had to be nuts not to hang out with that act. VO: The movie, which flopped with the critics, featured a very young Robert DeNiro. Breslin: He got $750 dollars a week for that movie. He must get $750 dollars uh, to brush his teeth now. VO: Breslin himself became a performer in 1969, when he officially entered the race for New York City council president on a ticket with fellow writer Norman Mailer, who was running for Mayor. Their campaign featured a plan for the city to secede and become the 51st state. A: //that’s a bad idea, isn’t it. That we could be all alone here with our money, and living a nice life... VO: Much to the relief of themselves and people who knew them well, neither Mailer nor Breslin were elected. VO: During the summer of 1977, when New York City was hit by a vast power blackout and massive looting, Breslin also was writing about the 44 caliber killer, known Son of Sam, who shot one of his earliest victims just a few block from Breslin’s house in Queens. ­ BRESLIN: Then some weeks after that, a college student named Virginia Voskerichian is walking from...from the subway on Queens Boulevard down from the station square and //from the bushes jumped a guy with a gun and he held...she got terrified and held a big textbook up to her face and he shot through it and she was dead. VO: After months of terrorizing the city with a spree of shootings that left five people dead, the killer sent JImmy Breslin a letter. BRESLIN: It was printed in big backslash printing, marvelous cadence, hello from the sidewalks of New York and the ants that dwell in the sidewalks and the dried blood in the cracks in the sidewalks of the city// signed Son of Sam. VO: Breslin used his column to plead with the deranged killer, but on July 31st he struck again, this time in Brooklyn, murdering 20-year old Stacy Moskowitz and wounding her boyfriend. The news sent the simmering city into complete panic. SOT Brown=haired woman Getty 176746614: You have to be careful - you have to watch where you go now, how late you stay out.. Ultimately It was a parking ticket issued near the scene of the Moskowitz killing that lead police to a suspect and finally cracked the case. David Berkowitz was sentenced to six consecutive life sentences for the killings. BRESLIN:I never heard from him again except Christmas card from the devil, he sent me. Once or twice. // VO: He might not have been everyone’s idea of a man of letters but the range of Breslin’s writing was matched by few in his era. He wrote biographies of Damon Runyon, the chronicler of Prohibition New York, and of Branch Rickey, the Brooklyn Dodger executive who integrated baseball by signing Jackie Robinson. In columns for the Daily News and New York Newsday, he was one of the earliest voices demanding dignified care for people with AIDs. He won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1986 after exposing the use of torture by rogue police officers in Queens. BRESLIN: It’s a great thing, though. A newspaper column you just put yourself into it and make sure that people will want to read it the next day, it gives them something. It’s a great obligation to the reader. VO: He filed his last regular column on November 2, 2004, and kept working on new books, plays and film projects. When the Times spoke with Breslin in 2007 he was 77 years old and about to release his latest book, “The Good Rat” about one of his favorite subjects - Mafia families. Q: How do you want to be remembered? 12;33 Audio drop out BRESLIN: What does it matter? Please don’t talk about me when I’m gone? I mean I don’t care what you say or what you do, if I’m not here it don’t count. MUSIC OUTRO CREDITS © 2016 THE NEW YORK TIMES