Frank Beacham's Journal

Pete Hamill was born 87 years ago today

Pete Hamill, New York Post, 1993

Photo by Fred R. Conrad

Pete Hamill was born 87 years ago today.

Born to Irish immigrants in Brooklyn, Hamill grew up playing stickball in a blue-collar neighborhood. However, even at an early age, he was fascinated with comic books and novels. With the neighborhood tavern the center of his community's social life, he started drinking at an early age.

Although his love for books had won him admittance to an elite high school in Manhattan, he felt out of place and dropped out.

Motivated by his love of comic books and art, Hamill went to art school and became a graphic artist after a period of drifting and living in Mexico. He eventually landed a job at the New York Post, which turned into a writing job and a regular, widely read column.

A heavy drinker, Hamill finally quit on New Year's Eve in 1972. His memoir, A Drinking Life (1995), describes his lifelong relationship with alcohol and draws a colorful picture of life in Brooklyn in the 1940s and 1950s.

In addition to non-fiction works and journalism collections, Hamill has penned ten novels, two books of short stories and over 100 short stories for newspapers. Hamill won a Grammy Award in 1975 for the liner notes to Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks album.

Of his many and diverse works, one of my favorites is a small volume written in 1999 called “Why Sinatra Matters.” It is a masterpiece of great nonfiction writing.

A friend of Robert F. Kennedy, Hamill helped persuade the senator to run for the presidency, then worked for the campaign and covered it as a journalist. He was one of four men who disarmed Sirhan Sirhan of his gun in the aftermath of the Robert F. Kennedy assassination in Los Angeles.

Hamill died on August 5, 2020, at NewYork–Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist Hospital. He was 85, and suffered from heart and kidney failure at the time of his death, in addition to having fractured his right hip in a fall.

Here, Hamill speaks at St. Francis College in 2011

A national TV audience watched O. J. Simpson's white Bronco move along Los Angeles' freeways 28 years ago today

Twenty-eight years ago today, TV audiences were transfixed by a white Bronco moving along the freeways of Los Angeles.

Since that pursuit of O.J. Simpson, car chases have been a fixture of the L.A. zeitgeist. Many viewers are unable to look away from the near-daily helicopter footage on local news and, more recently, on social media feeds.

The O.J. chase is often cited as the beginning of the obsession. But Los Angeles Magazine traced the first live police pursuit to 1992, when the police chased a red Volkswagen driven by a murder suspect, pre-empting “Matlock” on TV in the process.

Geoffrey Alpert, a criminology professor who wrote a book on police pursuits, likened the public fascination to watching Nascar: “thousands of people in a stadium waiting for a crash.” (Tragically, hundreds of bystanders die as a result of police chases each year.)

But Alpert held the O.J. chase slightly apart from the broader public obsession. “The O.J. chase was a slow-speed chase,” he said. “It was a celebrity issue.”

Image of the O.J. Simpson chase on June 17, 1994.

Thanks New York Times!

Above photo by Joseph R. Villarin

Katharine Graham, former publisher of the Washington Post, was born 105 years ago today

Katharine Graham, Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward, managing editor Howard Simons and executive editor Ben Bradlee at the Washington Post in 1973

Katharine Graham — A Personal Remembrance

Katharine Graham, former publisher of the Washington Post, was born 105 years ago today.

Publishers are normally not the creative people that I celebrate on these pages, but Graham was special and unique. In early 1974, I went to work as an investigative reporter for Post-Newsweek Television, which was owned by the Washington Post.

This was the period during the Watergate scandal, in which Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein had an integral role in bringing about the resignation of President Richard Nixon that summer. Unlike newspapers and other news outlets today, Graham supported real, hard hitting reporting.

When Woodward and Bernstein brought the Watergate story to Post editor, Ben Bradlee, Graham supported their investigative reporting and Bradlee ran stories about Watergate when few other news outlets would touch the story. As a result, Graham was the subject of one of the best-known threats in American journalistic history.

It occurred in 1972, when Nixon's attorney general, John Mitchell, warned reporter Carl Bernstein about a forthcoming article: "Katie Graham's gonna get her tit caught in a big fat wringer if that's published." As an act of intimidation, the Nixon administration also set its Federal Communications Commission onto the Post’s broadcast properties. Graham was under severe pressure in those years and she rose to that pressure.

On my first day at work at the Post’s WJXT-TV in Jacksonville, Florida, I was surprised to get a personal phone call from Katherine Graham. She welcomed me and acknowledged the pressure we were under at the time.

But her real message was clear. “If you receive pressure from anyone — anyone at all — not to do your job, I want you to call me directly,” she said. “That’s very important.” She made me promise to call and gave me her direct number.

I never did call, though the next year at Post-Newsweek I was threatened, sued and publicly called every name in the book. The station defended every lawsuit and we won them all. We worked hard and got it right. It was the era of good, tough journalism — long gone today.

It was always comforting to know in those days that I was backed by the real iron lady, Katherine Graham.