Jimmy Breslin RIP

Another giant is gone, Jimmy Breslin, the plain speaking journalist who touched the hearts of millions as a reporter for the NY Post.

WASHINGTON — The gravedigger doesn’t have any reason to lie to you.

If the grave is deep enough and wide enough, that’s all that matters. The lies can be told by the shiny casket going into the dirt, by the funeral parlor salesman who talked the grieving relatives up the gold-patina model, and by those mourners who didn’t really want to be there.

But the man who shovels out the deep hole in the ground with a back hoe has no reason to embellish. He’ll just tell you what he thinks, if you ask.

He hung up the phone, finished breakfast, and left his apartment so he could spend Sunday digging a grave for John Fitzgerald Kennedy. November 1963

The lesson is, if you want truth, you have to leave your desk, step away from your computer, and must certainly ignore your Twitter feed.

“Breslin hardly ever came to the office. He just sent his stuff in,” said Anthony Mancini, a journalism professor at Brooklyn College who worked at the New York Post in the late 1960s when Breslin wrote for the then-liberal paper.

“Jimmy got up in the morning, and put on his shoes. He never learned to drive, so he walked, took the subway, a cab, whatever,” said Denis Hamill, a former New York Daily News columnist and friend of Breslin’s.

“He wouldn’t sit at a desk and think up what to write. He would form his opinion based on the legwork that he did,” Hamill said. “He went out and really did the work.”

He will be missed, big time. RIP