He had pouchy eyes, smoked a cigarette, and sat at the kitchen table in an undershirt, black tuxedo pants, and bare feet. His fingers danced nervously on the valves of his brilliant gold-plated horn.
 
On weekend nights, Chernecke played in the Blue Moon, which was under the el, three blocks from his house. Now on a rough, fuzzy Saturday morning after a bust-out night at the Blue Moon, he had me, this Catholic school kid who instinctively blew his notes louder when an el train passed. The only thing you’re learning is to compete with an el, he said. But he had such deplorable personal habits that he needed the three dollars for a lesson desperately.—from a new story by Jimmy Breslin, “Trumpet Lessons, Life Lessons“

I first encountered Jimmy Breslin, who turns 86 today, in the pages of the New York Daily News in the 1970s, when I first fell in love with newspapers. (Like all things related to love, my immediate affection for newspapers was inexplicable and still fills me with joy.)

My father used to buy the News on Sundays for reasons I never learned but I think had to do with making sure there was more than one colorful comics section available in the house to amuse my sister and me. I loved the comics sections, but I also read every columnist.
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Yet each man kills the thing he loves,
By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word,
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!
 
Some kill their love when they are young,
And some when they are old;
Some strangle with the hands of Lust,
Some with the hands of Gold:
The kindest use a knife, because
The dead so soon grow cold.
 
Some love too little, some too long,
Some sell, and others buy;
Some do the deed with many tears,
And some without a sigh:
For each man kills the thing he loves,
Yet each man does not die.—a section of Oscar Wilde’s poem, “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”

Oscar Wilde was born on this date in 1854 in Dublin, Ireland.
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… [I]f you let your whiskers grow I will try and get the rest of them to vote for you you would look a great deal better for your face is so thin. All the ladies like whiskers and they would tease their husbands to vote for you and then you would be President.—Grace Bedell, letter to Abraham Lincoln dated October 15, 1860

Grace Bedell, an 11-year-old girl from Westfield, New York, wrote a letter to Abraham Lincoln, candidate for U.S. President, on this date in 1860, in which she urged him to grow a beard. “You would look a great deal better for your face is so thin,” she wrote.

Years later, she recounted that she saw a photo of Lincoln and was struck by the deep lines around his mouth and his high forehead and thought there up a solution.

Her letter in full, as reproduced in AbrahamLincolnOnline.org:
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