Opinion: Remembering Jim Dwyer, New York's Subway Storyteller, Pulitzer Prize Winner

A true reporter knows you don't have to venture to the other side of the world to find great stories. Look right in front of you.

Jim Dwyer was 19, and a Fordham student, when he saw a man on the ground, shaking on a sidewalk in the Bronx. He was having an epileptic seizure. Jim was among the strangers who stopped to try to help. But there were also people who passed by and muttered, "'junkie, 'scumbag,' that sort of thing," he later wrote for the student newspaper, The Fordham Ram.

"The seizure subsided," he went on, "and those of us who had stayed with him learned he was a veteran and had been having seizures since coming back from Vietnam. A few minutes later, off he went. But that moment stayed with me."

Jim Dwyer would go on to win a Pulitzer Prize for commentary, write or co-write six books, and thousands of columns, for the old New York Newsday, The Daily News, and then for The New York Times.