My Pete Hamill Story

This week we lost one of the giants of journalism. Pete Hamill worked at five different New York Newspapers as a columnist and at one point was even the editor of the New York Post. Growing up around New York he was one of main reasons I fell in love with journalism at a young age in the 60s. He and the his close pal Jimmy Breslin romanticised every corner of The city. When I finally got to my first full time job as a reporter at the San Francisco Examiner in 1974, the first thing I did was find a way to get Hamill to write for us. How that happened, and how the experiment ended, was a story I will never forget.

I have two wonderful anecdotes about my time with Pete Hamill in the mid 70’s. They go back to my first job in the business, when I went to San Francisco to work at the Examiner as a reporter and Asst to the Editor, right out of grad school (I had gone to Harvard Business School after graduating from the Newhouse School at Syracuse). I was hired directly by Randolph Hearst, then publisher and chairman of the Hearst Corp.

When I got there in 1974 one of my first friends was Will Hearst III (now chairman). We were both about 25 and he was apprenticing at his grandfather’s first newspaper and like me had a mix of entry level journalism and a taste of management training. Randy Hearst really wanted his nephew, Will, to liven up the paper and was hiring a lot of scrappy young reporters to help.

Anyway, I had this idea that we could hire my idol Pete Hamill to write for us from NYC. He was my favorite New York Post columnist who I had read growing up in NYC. Pete’s politics were very liberal and would be a great contract to the existing Hearst lineup of very conservative columnists, and I thought, quite attractive to the very liberal San Francisco audience. He had just quit the NY Post, which was owned and run by Dorothy Schiff in those days, because she wouldn’t pay him more than $300 a week.

So I suggested it to Will and he told me to call Pete and see if he would do it.

Somehow I got him on the phone and he agreed to meet with me to talk about it, because he was going to hang out with his new girlfriend on the west coast that weekend anyway. But he was going to LA so he suggested I meet him at her place in LA on Friday night.

I flew down from SF, rented a car and drove to the address Pete gave me up around Mulholland Drive.

I got there late, and it was already dark, and when I got to the house I had to drive through a gate a long way to get to this house on the hill, but I couldn’t really tell much about the house.

I got to the door and knocked. A few minutes went by and light finally came on and the door opened. Standing before me was a soaking-wet Shirley McLain, who nevertheless was quite striking, and said to me, “you must be Larry Kramer. Pete’s plane is late but he told me to make you feel at home. Come on in and have a beer.”

I turned around, looked at the night and just knew no one would ever believe me. Being outside the orbit of the NY Tabloid World those days, I had no idea who he was dating at the time.

A couple wonderful hours of conversation later. Pete showed up from the airport and we all had a big laugh. We talked about newspapers late into the night and I told him he had to meet Will and would understand how much fun it was working with him to shake up his family paper.

He took the job and started writing, from NY, a few weeks later, in the Sunday paper.

The second story is about what happened next.

All of the Hearst brass in NYC, led by Will’s dad, William Randolph Hearst II, weren’t really in the loop on hire because we were worried about what they would think about his politics.

The first column was about the Phoenix program, the US Government program to bring to the Vietnamese who had worked for the US during the war in Vietnam. Since the war had ended badly, they were no longer welcome in their home country and we were saving them from likely repercussions. The story was about how our government was paying them a lot to move to Las Vegas and they were becoming regulars on the tables at the hotels.

No one in the Hearst organization seemed threatened by that column, so the first week seemed to go well. The second column, was also ambiguous. Then a week later, I was working early Saturday morning on the city desk when the teletype behind me started clanking away with Pete’s third column, which called for the nationalization of the oil industry.

I don’t remember how many more weeks he was allowed to write for us, but it wasn’t many.

Pete had a good laugh about it, and we stayed friends for a long time, but we didn’t get to see each other again for quite a while because I didn’t get to move back to NYC for many years.

Just thinking about him makes me nostalgic for my days growing up in the New Jersey suburbs of New York. I was a huge fan of the Brooklyn Dodgers and with Pete’s love affair with all things Brooklyn, he owned me. I read every word he wrote, as soon as I could. Every Saturday night I would drive to a classic New Jersey late-night diner to pick up the early edition of the NY Post so I could read his column before I went to bed.

Thanks for everything Pete. I don’t know what New York will be like without you.