The memories of more than 43 years as a full-time newspaperman rushed unimpeded inside my noggin like a tsunami this week as I finalized paperwork and cleared out my desk. This is my last week at the Pioneer Press. My last column runs this Sunday.
I had two professional loves of my life. My first love was the tabloid New York Daily News, the paper I grew up reading and where I began in 1976 as a freshly minted college-educated copyboy sorting mail, placing horse bets and fetching coffee, beer and sandwiches for reporters and editors at what was then the newspaper with the largest circulation in America.
I worked a 7:30 p.m. to 3 a.m. shift for a time as a sports tabulator, anxiously waiting for the late baseball scores to arrive from the West Coast before I could put that data-driven sports page to bed and ride the No. 7 and then the No. 1 subway line back home. Damn those traitor Dodgers and Giants, and other left coast teams. That job was followed by a non-stop, adrenaline-filled 11-year stint chasing scoops, too many murders and intriguing cases while competing with rivals from three other dailies as a crime-and-courts reporter.
Then came my second love, the three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning broadsheet affectionately called the PiPress, where I have spent the past 28 years and eight months as a city editor, public safety team leader and metro columnist.
The rat-tat-tat recollections — sad, tragic, heart-tugging and funny — marched in chronological order as I boxed books, family portraits, trinkets and memorabilia collected over the years.
There was the time in the early 1980s when then Daily News health reporter Heidi Evans and I posed as young lovebirds to expose an unethical abortion mill operation in Manhattan.
Evans, pretending she might be pregnant, went to an exam room to have her urine tested. She came back to the waiting room. A few minutes later, someone came out to inform us that she was indeed with child. She placed her head on my shoulder at hearing the news. We told the staff we would think it over and left. One problem — it was my vial of urine she covertly had tested.
“Rubén Rosario contributed to this story” remains the best tagline of my career.
There was the time I went undercover inside a drug den, smoked crack and wrote a front-page, first-person account of a drug that was then devastating Harlem and other poor, inner-city neighborhoods during the mid-1980s.
I wrote about and also helped cover a flurry of high-profile cases — the Central Park Preppie murder, a social club intentional fire that killed 86 people, subway gunman Bernard Goetz, the Etan Patz disappearance, the Howard Beach and Bensonhurst racial killings, controversial police shootings and numerous mob trials in Brooklyn.
My last piece for the News was a front-page story in August 1991 about how the FBI “G” team finally caught the late Gambino crime family godfather John Gotti on social club wiretaps talking about hits and boasting he was “Cosa Nostra till I die.”
It was the beginning of the end for the original “Teflon Don,” who was ultimately convicted of racketeering and died at the super-max federal lockup in Colorado.
But there were the lesser-known stories out of thousands I penned for the tabloid that resonated as much in the memory bank with me.
There was the 17-year-old immigrant girl lured with a friend to an abandoned tenement by a released convicted rapist who sexually abused both young women and stabbed her friend to death. The teenager leaped off a fifth-floor window to escape her assailant. She barely survived but agreed to tell me what happened while bandaged up to her eyes at a Bronx hospital for numerous fractures. Why? She wanted her story told so that other girls would not make the same mistake she and her friend made in trusting a stranger offering them jobs.
There was Yuri Sosa, an 18-month-old boy from Peru requiring life-saving heart surgery his mother, Carmen, could not get at home. A kind-hearted Brooklyn couple collected enough money to fly the mother and son to New York to see a heart surgeon. I wrote up their plight.
The late New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner read it and financed the operation, which was a success. The couple sent me a letter of gratitude on the boy’s behalf along with a small saint’s medallion as a token of their appreciation. I still have the medallion. It’s inside my dresser drawer.
I blew past downtown St. Paul from the airport my first time in Minnesota. I did not think the small cluster of tall buildings near Spaghetti Junction was really downtown. The drive felt a bit long. I stopped by a gas station on Maryland Avenue or Little Canada Road off Interstate 35E.
“Where’s downtown St. Paul?” I asked the attendant. He walked outside with me and pointed south.
“You see that building back there with that number one on the roof? That’s downtown.”
Toto, I muttered to myself, we are not in Manhattan anymore. But I’m glad I headed back.
My first column appeared in the summer of 1997. It was about the unsolved murder of Davisha Brantley Gillum, a 4-year-old girl killed a year earlier in a gang-related drive-by shooting at a gas station on St. Anthony Avenue.
There have been well over 2,000 others since then. They include the heart-breaking Jacob Wetterling case, the I-35W bridge collapse, the beating death of 3-year-old Desi Irving and a related series on the child-protection system that I was told helped convince lawmakers and the courts to publicly open up child-in-need-of-protective-services hearings.
But, again, it’s the columns about lesser-known folks that stick with me. Take Gladys Reyes, the young West St. Paul girl who lost her arm and suffered serious injuries when she was struck and dragged by a hit-and-run driver.
There was the sexually molested 16-year-old Bloomington girl who publicly and courageously confronted her assailant in open court. There was the late Victor Watters, the young cancer-stricken boy and ward of the state who was adopted by a loving family with a child undergoing treatment for the same cancer. There was the moving testimonial by St. Paul cop Dave Longbehn, who survived a life-and-death struggle with a gunman who had shot and killed another police officer hours earlier. He killed his attacker and encountered the man’s sister by chance years later. There are the hard-luck-but-resilient back stories of the kids annually awarded Optimist Club of St. Paul college scholarships.
I wanted to write a column highlighting unheralded ordinary people and issues that deserved more attention or were simmering under the public radar screen.
I worked in the same newsroom for a time with the best of the best, columnists who reported their tales and whom I considered my mentors — Pete Hamill, the late Jimmy Breslin, and Juan Gonzalez. I admired Mike Royko from afar and thought the world of the late Pioneer Press wordsmith Don Boxmeyer.
The last thing I wanted to do as a columnist was sit behind a desk and pen easy cheap shots or witty pontifications. Some do this well. But it’s not in me.
Given the pandemic, this might be one of the worst times to walk away from a full-time job. But the paper’s owners made an offer in response to the impact of the virus outbreak that I felt I needed to take at my stage in life.
Like many newspapers, the Pioneer Press has taken quite a hit in recent years. We had roughly 200 newsroom workers just 15 years ago before control of the company shifted and the pace of change in the whole industry quickened. We’re now down to about 45.
But my current colleagues are among the most talented, hard-working journalists around. They are doing an incredible job covering the virus outbreak. They have also done it before, day in and day out in all kinds of ways. They and the readership deserve investment in their futures and in quality journalism.
There’s no rocking chair for me yet. I’m wrapping up a book of selected columns over the past 22 years and pursuing other opportunities. I’m also grateful that I can still write an occasional column for the paper.
There are mixed emotions but no regrets. I had the best job in the newsroom. It was a privilege that I never took for granted. As my editor said recently, “you’ve had a hell of a run.”
I have indeed. I’m blessed. Take care and be safe.
