Six Decades Later

 “The bookends of success are starting and finishing.”    Dr. John Maxwell

2009, New York City: Pete Hamill, the distinguished Writer in Residence at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University, made the New York Times “400 Most Influential New Yorkers in the Past 400 Years” list. When an old attorney friend, Thomas Hickey, went by Hamill’s office to congratulate him on the honor, Hamill confessed, “It is an awesome honor, but I would much rather have a Regis High School diploma on my wall.”

When Hickey, a Regis High School graduate, asked the journalism giant what he meant, he was shocked to learn that Hamill had never graduated from Regis, the elite college preparatory high school on New York City’s Upper East Side. Hamill had dropped out of the class of 1953 at age 16. It was something that no one knew about him. Quitting school had always gnawed at and embarrassed him.

Hamill, the oldest of seven children, was born in 1935, in the blue-collar Park Slope neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York. His parents were Catholic immigrants from Belfast, Northern Ireland. His alcoholic father drifted from job to job and his mother worked at Wanamaker’s Department Store to help support the family.

An outstanding student, Hamill was accepted as a sophomore at Regis, an all-male Jesuit High School. He could handle the rigorous curriculum, but coming from a poor Brooklyn family, he didn’t have the fancy car, or nice clothes and shoes like the rich kids from Manhattan. After a year, Hamill dropped out and became a sheet metal worker in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

In 1952, Hamill enlisted in the Navy and served four years. After his discharge, he used the G.I. Bill to study writing and art at Mexico City College, but he didn’t graduate. Hamill decided to give writing a try. His story about a Puerto Rican Olympic Boxing champion, was published in the Atlantis, a New York City daily newspaper.

This success inspired him to write multiple letters to the editor of the New York Post asking for a job. He never got a response. In 1960, Hamill showed up at the newspaper’s office in New York and hung around until they hired him. His dogged persistence eventually led to a beat reporter position at the Post. Three years later, he was a correspondent with the Saturday Evening Post in Europe. Hamill later worked as a war correspondent in Vietnam, Lebanon, Nicaragua, and Northern Ireland.

During a distinguished 50-year journalism career, Hamill wrote for the New York Daily News, New York Post, Newsday,the Saturday Evening Post, Esquire, and Rolling Stone, among many others. He worked for four New York City newspapers and had assignments worldwide. He is the only person to be chief editor for both New York City tabloid newspapers, the New York Daily News and the New York Post.

Pete Hamill covered eight U.S. presidents. He was a close friend of Senator Robert Kennedy and was influential in Kennedy’s bid for president in 1968. Hamill was standing near the Senator at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on June 5, 1968, when Sirhan Sirhan assassinated him. He helped apprehend Sirhan. Hamill dated several celebrities including former First Lady Jackie Kennedy, actress Shirley MacLaine, and singers Linda Ronstadt and Barbara Streisand.

He authored a dozen books, including ten novels and two collections of short stories. Hamill received numerous literary awards during his distinguished career, including a Grammy Award in 1975 for Best Liner Notes on Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks album. In 2005, Hamill received the coveted Ernie Pyle Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Society of Newspaper Columnists.

After Thomas Hickey learned of Hamill’s dropping out of Regis High School, he contacted the school’s president, Father Philip Judge. On June 26, 2010, two days after his 75^th birthday and almost six decades after he dropped out, William Peter Hamill finally received his diploma from Regis High School.

On dropping out of high school, Hamill lamented, “It was one of the dumb things that kids do. I had convinced myself, full of 16-year-old melancholy, that it was the only thing I could do. It was dumb, but it forced me to live the kind of life I lived. To be a newspaper man is the best education.”

In 2006, the self-taught, street-smart, legendary New York journalist died from heart failure in a Brooklyn hospital. He was 85. Pete Hamill was a common man with an uncommon desire to finish what he started.