"At 19, everything is possible and tomorrow looks friendly." -- Jim Bishop
James Alonzo "Jim" Bishop (November 21, 1907 – July 26, 1987) was an American journalist and author.
Born in Jersey City, New Jersey, he dropped out of school after eighth grade. In 1923, he studied typing, shorthand and bookkeeping, and in 1929 began work as a copy boy at the New York Daily News. In 1930, he got a job as a cub reporter at New York Daily Mirror, where he worked until 1943, when he joined Collier's Magazine. He remained until 1945.
His plans to write for Hollywood producer Mark Hellinger ended with Hellinger's death. Bishop later wrote a Hellinger biography. From 1946 to 1948, he was executive editor of Liberty magazine, then became director of the literary department at the Music Corporation of America until 1951. He was then founding editor of Gold Medal Books (the juvenile division of Fawcett Publications) until 1953.In the 1950s, Bishop would do his writing at the Jersey Shore in Sea Bright, New Jersey, going back to his home in Teaneck, New Jersey on weekends to see his wife and children. In 1957, he started his column, "Jim Bishop: Reporter" with King Features Syndicate, which continued until 1983. It also landed him on the master list of Nixon political opponents.
The remainder of his career was spent writing biographical books about notable figures, and Christian-themed books. His book The Day Lincoln Was Shot was published in 1955, and became an instant best-seller. Bishop also wrote The Day Christ Died,The Day Christ Was Born, and The Day Kennedy Was Shot.
The day Lincoln Was Shot was dramatized on TV twice, first as a 1956 live special starring Raymond Massey as Abraham Lincoln and shown on the Ford Star Jubilee anthology series, and again as a 1998 made-for-television film starring Lance Henriksen as Lincoln. The Day Christ Died was made into a television film in 1980, starring Chris Sarandon as Jesus Christ, and Keith Michell as Pontius Pilate.
"A good writer is not, per se, a good book critic. No more so than a good drunk is automatically a good bartender.""A newspaper is lumber made malleable. It is ink made into words and pictures. It is conceived, born, grows up and dies of old age in a day.""Archaeology is the peeping Tom of the sciences. It is the sandbox of men who care not where they are going; they merely want to know where everyone else has been.""Books, I found, had the power to make time stand still, retreat or fly into the future.""Gimme: an agreement between two losers who can't putt.""Golf is played by twenty million mature American men whose wives think they are out having fun.""It is difficult to live in the present, ridiculous to live in the future and impossible to live in the past. Nothing is as far away as one minute ago.""It is impossible to read for pleasure from something to which you are both father and mother, born in such travail that the writer despises the thing that enslaved him.""Nobody understands anyone 18, including those who are 18.""Scoops of mint ice cream with chips of chocolate cows.""The future is an opaque mirror. Anyone who tries to look into it sees nothing but the dim outlines of an old and worried face.""The reporter is the daily prisoner of clocked facts. On all working days, he is expected to do his best in one swift swipe at each story.""Watching your daughter being collected by her date feels like handing over a million dollar Stradivarius to a gorilla.""When you read about a car crash in which two or three youngsters are killed, do you pause to dwell on the amount of love and treasure and patience parents poured into bodies no longer suitable for open caskets?"