A unique voice lost in landscape of opinion

The newspaper business will never be the same.

Jimmy Breslin, 75, has written his last newspaper column.

I discovered Breslin when he and Tom Wolfe dueled for the daily prize of the best daily feature in the late New York Herald Tribune. I discovered the Trib because it was the best-looking newspaper sold at the kiosk at Boston’s South Station.

The column that knocked me out was from July 1966 when Richard Speck killed eight nurses in Chicago.

Breslin wrote a column about the neighbors finding blood on the sidewalk. I can still remember where I was when I read it, in a lousy cafeteria on Atlantic Avenue.

When John F. Kennedy was assassinated and a horde of news wretches descended on Washington, Breslin broke from the pack and interviewed the solitary figure who was digging the president’s grave. That column is still taught in journalism (a term Breslin hated) school.

He gained national fame when he became a pen pal with the murderous “Son of Sam” after he joined the New York Daily News in 1976. He finally won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1986 for stories that “consistently champion ordinary citizens.” He joined Newsday in 1988.

He actually ran for mayor in 1969 on a slate with Norman Mailer on a platform to make New York City the 51st state and promised to ask for a recount in the unlikely event the pair emerged victorious.

Breslin was always fighting for the underdog against city hall, the White House, the governor – whatever was needed. He was born in Queens and never left it, no matter where he went. He walked into the tenements and grocery stores and jailhouses and courts and bars, wherever the stories were. He used the same words, but in a much different manner.

His characters included Marvin the Torch, an arsonist who “built vacant lots” for a living.

Some of his memorable columns included a celebration of rejecting the advertising game, a brief interlude. “I busted out of the place in a hurry and went to a saloon and drank beer and said for the rest of my life I’d never take a job in a place where you couldn’t throw cigarette butts on the floor. I was hooked on this writing for newspapers and magazines.”

He said: “A job on a newspaper is a special thing. Every day, you take something that you found out about and you put it down and in a matter of hours it becomes a product. Not just a product like a can or something, it becomes a personal product that people, a lot of people, take the time to sit down and read.”

In his book “The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight,” Breslin said, “Out in the ocean, a rope is put around the man’s neck. The other end of the rope is attached to an old jukebox and it is thrown overboard. The man invariably follows.”

Breslin lived in an era of two-fisted drinking reporters (not journalists) and participated fully. “When you stop drinking, you have to deal with this marvelous personality that started you drinking in the first place.”

On what propelled him for 40 years of column writing, Breslin said, “Rage is the only quality, which kept me, or anybody I have ever studied, writing columns for newspapers.”

Gay Talese, one of Breslin’s contemporaries and one of the first practitioners of “New Journalism,” said Breslin was “hard-working, hard to like, but damned good most of the time. He epitomized legwork. He really is there. He was all over the place. The energy he brought to journalism is a thing of the past. He never was a guy that relied on anyone else to help him out.”

His Newsday editor, Donald H. Forst, said, “I don’t know of any ballplayer, musician, composer who’s been that good consistently over the years. He had a great work ethic and he knew the heart of what he turned out.”

All right, he wasn’t infallible.

His last column guaranteed a John Kerry victory on Election Night. He called Ralph Nader the “village idiot” and predicted that the president’s losses from the battleground states would read like “the casualty list from Gettysburg.”

Rage. The day after his erroneous swan song, Breslin admitted “So, I’m wrong. Who remembers the next day? Nobody!”

He plans book projects on Queens, naturally, then another on Branch Rickey, the man who hired Jackie Robinson and changed baseball.

I will read them all.

Send complaints and compliments to Emmet Meara at emmetmeara@msn.com.