I met Pete Hamill at a book reading some years ago. He was lovely, affable, and we talked about Park Slope, where he grew up.
There were a lot of characters back then, he told me.
“There still are,” I said.
Hamill was fascinated that gentrification hadn’t killed the gentleman who repeatedly asked for a cigarette on Union Street, the “man in white,” – yes, he never wore anything but a white sweat suit -- or the woman in the black skirt. The one she wore every time I saw her, winter or summer, rain or shine.
On Memorial Day weekend the weather was lousy. Folks were wearing coats and scarves. There was less iced tea and more soup. But there was time to finish the exquisite A Drinking Life, Hamill’s memoir of growing up in what we now refer to as the South Slope, during the Depression and World War II.
In Hamill’s extraordinary storytelling hands memory and detail create a long-gone Brooklyn where kids owned the streets and drinking made you a man. It also got in the way of his relationship with his father and eventually nearly broke his ability to write.
I’ve always loved the great journalists of the 20th century, those hard-boiled men and women who lived for the printed word. Hamill is at the top of this list, a master of his craft, a New York storyteller of the first order.