Staff Member Guestie: Requiem for a Scribe

Between trips to the liquor store, our man in the OBX penned this remembrance of Pete Hamill, a New York original and a throwback to a different era of newspaper man. Within it, Hamill's words, a turn of multiple phrases that'll leave you wishing you could ever write like that. "...the permanent present tense of the trade", indeed.

Pete Hamill’s death this week was another cruel reminder of the demise of newspapers and the people that made them part of the fabric of towns and cities everywhere.

Hamill was a columnist, magazine writer and best-selling author. He traveled the world, knew the famous and infamous, and wrote about people and places far and wide. But mostly, he was a newspaperman, New York through and through.

Born in Brooklyn, he wrote for five New York City papers and outlived three, as one of his obituaries put it.  His knowledge of the city was encyclopedic, but he once wrote, “In the end, the only thing the true New Yorker knows about New York is that it’s unknowable.”

Hamill was part of a vanishing breed of newspaperman – the columnist who tried to take the pulse of a

city, the reporter who is comfortable at city hall or a crime scene or a local tavern or a neighborhood fair, the sort of voice that caused people to reflexively pick up the paper to read what he thought.

New York was blessed with a slew of such voices, among them Jimmy Breslin, Mike McAlary, Russell Baker and Red Smith (Breslin wrote a column, on deadline, the night that John Lennon was assassinated that is equal parts wizardry and journalism).

Metro columnists were a staple and in some cases the face of city newspapers – Breslin and Hamill, Mike Royko in Chicago, Mike Barnicle in Boston, Jim Murray in Los Angeles, Herb Caen in San Francisco, Molly Ivins in Dallas and Fort Worth, Carl Hiaasen in Miami. Many of them died or moved on, and as newspaper staffs were gutted in the past 25 years, the position in many places was deemed expendable.

Many major newspapers still employ columnists, some of whom are excellent. But you won’t find David Brooks or Peggy Noonan or Leonard Pitts at Engine Co. 14 to talk about firemen’s pension funds or roasting city council members over budget shenanigans.

Hamill wrote with grace and empathy, a two-fingered-typing poet. He approached his work with an explorer’s curiosity. He often said that being a high school dropout and getting what he thought was a late start into newspapering – he was 25 when he landed his first job – were ample motivation. We are unlikely to see his kind again, thanks to the jackals of commerce and the march of time.

Enough gasbagging from me. Here’s an excerpt from one of Hamill’s collections:

“For me, the work itself was everything. I had grown up under the heroic spell of the Abstract Expressionist painters, and one of their lessons was that the essence of the work was the doing of it. … In my experience, nothing before or since could compare to walking into the New York Post at midnight, being sent into the dark, scary city on assignment, and coming back to write a story for the first edition. No day’s work was like any other’s, no story repeated any other in its details. Day after day, week after week, I loved being a newspaperman, living in the permanent present tense of the trade.

“This is not to claim that I’ve produced an uninterrupted series of amazements. Reading over a quarter-century of my journalism for this collection, I have often winced. If I’d only had another three inches of space, or another two hours beyond the deadline, perhaps this piece would have been better or that piece wiser. There were newspaper columns that I wish I’d never written, full of easy insult or cheap injury. There were many pieces limited by my ignorance. Too many lazily derived their energy from the breaking news to which they served as mere sidebars. … Sometimes I completely missed the point, or didn’t see the truth of a story whose facts were evidently there in my notebook. But this is not an apology. It is the nature of such work that that it is produced in a rush; the deadlines usually force the newspaper writer to publish a first draft because there is no time for a second or third. Once that piece is locked up in type and sent to the newsstands, there is no going back; the writer can correct the factual error, but it’s too late to deepen the insight, alter the mistaken or naïve judgment, erase the stale language that was taken off the rack. He or she can only vow never to make that error again and start fresh the next day.”