'I'd Like To Have Everything, You Know, Nice.'

Good question from Roy Peter Clark: I've been thinking a lot recently of the famous piece — about 1,100 words — that Jimmy Breslin wrote 50 years ago this November for the New York Herald Tribune on the burial of the assassinated president JFK. What stands out — after a half century — was Breslin's focus on the gravedigger.

Clifton Pollard was pretty sure he was going to be working on Sunday, so when he woke up at 9 a.m., in his three-room apartment on Corcoran Street, he put on khaki overalls before going into the kitchen for breakfast. His wife, Hettie, made bacon and eggs for him. Pollard was in the middle of eating them when he received the phone call he had been expecting. It was from…