It is with great sadness that I report the death of my friend Pete Hamill.
As an adolescent I was more familiar with his dating life, Jackie Kennedy Onassis and Shirley MacLaine, as reported in the New York Post by Earl Wilson, than his first-rate journalism, that later inspired me.
We connected through his daughter Deirdre, who was a subscriber to THE PARIS INSIDER and as I am proud to say Pete became as well.
We discovered that we had much in common: born on the same day, June 24, marriages to Latin women, fluency in Spanish and a passion for our hometown, Brooklyn.
I was delighted to produce and host an interview at the Hotel du Louvre in Paris and proud that Pete spoke at one of my Paris in New York Literary Festivals.
Always a stand-up guy, his work was informed by the humanity instilled in him by Anne DEVLIN, his Irish immigrant mother. He was liked and respected by the totality of the ethnic populations that define New York.
In the Yiddish that he learned as a child when he was a Shabbos Goy, he was a true mensch.
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| Béatrice de Géa for The New York Times |
"If people say nothing can be done about Brownsville, they lie. If this country would stop its irrational nonsense and get to work, every Brownsville would be gone in five years. Get the hell out of Asia. Stop feeding dictators. Forget about airports, SSTs, Albany Malls, highways. This country can do anything. And if Brownsville stays the way it is for another year, someone sleek and fat and comfortable should go to jail."
When Donald Trump took out full-page newspaper ads in 1989 calling for the death penalty of the five men arrested in the Central Park Five rape case (all five would eventually have their convictions vacated), Hamill wrote in the Post: "Snarling and heartless and fraudulently tough, insisting on the virtue of stupidity, it was the epitome of blind negation. Hate was just another luxury. And Trump stood naked, revealed as the spokesman for that tiny minority of Americans who live well-defended lives. Forget poverty and its causes. Forget the degradation and squalor of millions. Fry them into passivity."
