The good folks at the Library of America (LOA) recently sent along their collection of New York columnist Jimmy Breslin’s essential writings. (Some of you may recall I wrote about this back in April.) I’m about halfway through the collection.
Some of the columns I remember reading as a kid, including the columns he wrote about Howard Beach’s fight against France over the landing of the noisy Concorde jet in John F. Kennedy Airport. Breslin even flew to France to defend the people of this Queens neighborhood. He summarized the entire affair in an essay from The World According to Jimmy Breslin (1984) titled, “How I Shot Down the Concorde All By Myself.” Editor Dan Barry chose to put this essay in the LOA’s Essential Writings collection.
If you are a Breslin fan, I’d encourage you to buy the LOA anthology, but you can read this particular essay here.
Here is one of the original columns from May 1977. This is how I would have encountered the story as an 11-year-old:
Sorry for the faded image. This was the best I could do.