Yuen: St. Paul columnist Rubén Rosario told stories with conviction and empathy

When a legend falls in the journalism world, you can be sure of one thing: The stories will flow.

Longtime St. Paul Pioneer Press metro columnist Rubén Rosario had stories in spades. He covered crack dens in New York, exposed police scandals in the Twin Cities, and interviewed everyone from prostituted women to families of murder victims.

And those of us lucky to have ever been in his orbit all have stories about Rosario. He died Wednesday at age 70 from complications associated with his decade-plus battle with multiple myeloma.

One of my first journalism jobs was at the PiPress about 20 years ago, sitting next to him as he worked his sources on the phone, sometimes in English, other times in Spanish, to get the full account.

Rosario was old-school. Unlike other newspaper columnists with strong opinions, he didn't have a screed-filled podcast. He was too busy chasing stories to build his personal brand. Every word he wrote was backed up by shoe-leather reporting.

Born in Puerto Rico, he grew up in New York, worked at the Daily News, and moved to Minnesota when he landed a city editor job at the Pioneer Press in 1991. Loud with a pronounced Bronx accent, and always cheering for his New York Yankees, Rosario had a presence that drew others in, said former reporter Chuck Laszewski.

"He's completely the antithesis of Minnesotans," Laszewski said. "He had great hair — I mean, really great hair. He comes in with the mustache and the hair and the swagger, and you couldn't help but want to hang out with him."

One of his first tests was an initiation not by fire, but by heavy snow: the great Halloween Blizzard of 1991, according to friend and colleague Les Suzukamo.

"I remember leaning over to him and whispering something like, 'Don't worry. This is unusual. It doesn't snow like this all the time at Halloween,'" Suzukamo recalled. "I'm not sure he believed me, but it was one of the few times I've ever seen that famous 'Don't f— with me; I'm from New York' face wobble a bit."

Rosario's wife, Laura, said when they moved to the Twin Cities, he didn't foresee spending the rest of his life here. (After all, the New Yorker had once assumed St. Paul was a place in Florida.)

"He said, 'I'm going to give Minnesota five years,'" Laura Rosario recalled. "Every time the five years was up, he said, 'I'm going to give Minnesota five more years."

Rosario wanted to give his kids a life he didn't have. He grew up in working-class neighborhoods where not everyone thrived. Exposure to hardship made him resilient, but he wanted something different for his kids, Danielle and Jonathan. One day as the family was exiting the driveway of their home in Rosemount, he looked especially pensive. "I can't believe I live in a house like this," he told his wife.

He would go on to write more than 2,000 columns for the Pioneer Press, according to the newspaper.

Outrage and humor

"He had a sense of outrage, and he also had a sense of humor," said editor Mike Burbach. "Those things don't always go together."

Even in his outrage, Rosario's pointed criticism was always constructive, Burbach said. He earned the respect of cops and judges, immigrants and the everyday people, by being himself: straightforward with his sources and empathetic toward the most vulnerable.

In 2013, he wrote a column that disclosed he was sexually abused by a teen cousin when Rosario was just 7.

"I'm not ashamed of him anymore," Rosario wrote of his younger self. "He is no longer dumb or stupid. I thank him for helping me to be nobody's fool, to develop a healthy skepticism about human nature that has served me well in my chosen profession, and to be more empathetic and passionate about this and other issues and the plight of others."

Rosario had kept it a secret for decades. Laura didn't even know until she found him in the bedroom crying one day. He confessed he had been molested and debated about whether he should write about it one day.

"I said, 'I think it would be healing, not only for you, but for people who read it,'" Laura said.

Rosario reached countless readers with essays like that one. He also showed generosity to high school students involved with the ThreeSixty journalism program at the University of St. Thomas, where he volunteered his time.

In the Pioneer Press newsroom, I was far from the only younger journalist of color who was in awe of his work ethic and longevity in a bumpy business.

"He was a tough guy with a warm heart," said Pioneer Press reporter Fred Melo. "He strolled across the room on my first day on the job. The first words out of his mouth were, 'Puerto Rican?'"

Rosario guessed incorrectly (Melo's family is from the Dominican Republic), but the ice breaker grew into a lasting friendship.

"He always encouraged my writing, giving me attaboys when he liked the piece. When he thought I soft-pedaled, he'd say, 'You gave the cops a nice press release on that one,'" Melo said. "The idea that a guy like Rubén could make it in Minnesota, a place I hadn't seen a lot of East Coast Latinos, bringing his East Coast attitude, was fascinating and inspiring."

Even elected officials respected Rosario. Sen. Amy Klobuchar said, "Rubén Rosario embodied the best of local journalism. He was a powerful writer who used his column to share the stories of those often left out of the headlines, from Minnesotans in the throes of opioid addiction to families facing eviction to his own experiences growing up in the Bronx."

It's worth noting here that Rosario's passing is also a gut punch because of what he represented: a time when there wasn't anything a smaller regional newspaper couldn't do.

Newsrooms are a shell of what they used to be. It's not just because of changing business models (thanks, Craigslist) and the profit-sucking vampires that made a trend of acquiring local newspapers, forcing journalists to do more with far, far less. When I worked at the Pioneer Press in the mid-2000s, about 200 people were on the news staff. Now there are only 40, all heroes.

Rosario retired in April of 2020, the beginning of an abyss of COVID-related uncertainty. The newsroom had gone remote except for a few diehards, including Burbach, Rosario and sports editor Tad Reeve — all older men whom Burbach described as "high risk" during the pandemic. There was no sheet-cake sendoff.

"On Rubén's last day, I ran out and got a six-pack," Burbach recalled. "Tad, Rubén and I were just sitting, drinking beer."

The last time Rosario and I were in touch was just a few weeks ago. He sent me a note encouraging me to "keep knocking them out of the park." He said he was moved by the column I wrote — a Latina woman with stage 4 cancer who prayed to God that she will live long enough to see her youngest son graduate from high school. Maybe that resonated with him because he had the same dreams and was lucky enough to see them come true.

At that point, he was feeling optimistic about his health. He always called himself a "super rat" because he managed to survive so many ailments, from sepsis to double pneumonia. He was diagnosed with multiple myeloma on April Fool's Day in 2011.

But in his retirement Rosario still wrote the occasional column, out-crafting many of us with his wit, wisdom and sense of conviction. He made a point to write an annual piece on Optimist Club scholarship winners who overcame terrible hardships, from childhood abuse to incarcerated parents.

I asked Melo why our late colleague insisted on covering this annual story about "hardscrabble youths who embody the moxie and verve to persevere and overcome obstacles," as Rosario once wrote.

Melo didn't skip a beat. "He saw himself in those kids."

A funeral Mass will be held 10 a.m. July 18 at the Cathedral of St. Paul, with visitation starting an hour earlier.