Pete Hamill RIP

Oh boy, this one hurts.

In a year pockmarked with too many sudden deaths, the news that Pete Hamill has died really stung.

Pete Hamill was ... so many things. A legendary reporter and editor (a "newspapaper man" he always called himself), a bard of the city's working class, it's forgotten men and women, a white man who cared and wrote constantly about the struggles of the non-white city, creator of the romantic "New York alloy", a man who moved easily between NYC's worlds of grimness and glamour, the quintessential New Yorker.

Hamill wasn't only a great newspaperman and wordsmith. He wrote novels. He reported from the terror zones of Ireland, Lebonon, and Vietnam. He even wrote liner notes for a Bob Dylan album (winning a Grammy too). Oh, and there were some classy dames in his life too: married twice, he also dated, among them, Jackie O (ever the gent, he never talked about it publicly). Hamill's life and career are a chronicle of NYC in the second half of the 20th century, and the first two decades of the 21st -- his voice, in print and on air, gave it a depth, a profundity, that made the madness made sense. 

Pete Hamill lived this city in full and left it fuller. 

I had no idea who Pete Hamill was until the early 1990s when, as a teenager, I heard about this bizarre situation at The New York Post where he was hired, fired, hired again, then fired again by three different owners, including the eccentric Abe Hirschfeld and the mogul Rupert Murdoch. Pete was so respected, so beloved by his staff, that they mutined when he was fired, and all the owners wanted his great talents to edit the paper but only on their own terms. And Hamill made it very clear, he could never be bought.

RIP Pete. This city won't be the same without you. 

Read my coverage of Pete Hamill over the years here.