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by Joe Snyder
Art Buchwald, one of my favorite newspaper columnists, died of kidney failure recently. He was 81 and was once described as "Will Rogers with chutzpah." He was an honest lampooner of Washington politics and its antics, plus our American lifestyle, and reached millions through his syndicated columns that was a mainstay in over 550 newspapers.
A Pulitzer prize winner, he was honest about his talent of putting words together. "My craft is more sketching than writing. My column is almost a cartoon in words. If suffering is an essential ingredient of great comedy," said The London Independent, "then Buchwald was proof."
His mentally unstable Hungarian immigrant mother was institutionalized just weeks after he was born. His Austrian immigrant father’s business failed just weeks after he was born. Born with rickets, Buchwald spent years in orphanages and foster homes where he fought misery with humor. "I made fun of authority figures from my school principal to the social worker who visited each month. Performing for laughs was my salvation."
Buchwald turned to writing after serving as a Marine in WWII and attending college. Emulating Hemmingway and Joyce, he moved to Paris and was soon hired as a nightlife columnist for the New York Herald-Tribune. Postwar Europe lay shattered; every party and palace was wide open to Americans with money. Buchwald simply joined the crowd.
He took Elvis to the Lido, and lunched with Lucky Luciano in Naples. Just before Grace Kelly married Prince Rainer, he claimed he hadn’t been invited "because the Buchwald family and the Grimaldi dynasty has been feuding for 500 years." His invitation from the prince was hand-delivered the next day.
Buchwald’s column was popular, and he recycled his 8,000 columns into at least 30 books, and he was in demand as a public speaker. He suffered bouts with depression and his 40-year marriage with his wife, Ann, ended in 1992. She died two years later.
A funny thing happened on his deathbed. He didn’t die. He had been told his failing kidneys would kill him but he refused dialysis and lost a leg. He somehow got better and did what he had been doing for decades – he wrote about it. Calling himself "the only person who became famous for dying," he wrote his last book – "Too Soon To Say Goodbye," a funny and moving account of his experiences.
In his funeral chapter, he specified his ashes be sprinkled "over every Trump building in New York. Watches should be banned," he said so people can’t keeping checking the time during the service."
That’s my kind of a guy!