You can take the boy out of the Bronx, but you can never take the Bronx out of the boy.
Former St. Paul Pioneer Press columnist Rubén Rosario, a tireless advocate for the powerless, grew up in the Bronx and earned his journalism stripes working at the New York Daily News.
Rosario – who moved to Minnesota in 1991 and worked at the Pioneer Press for almost 30 years – died Wednesday morning at the M Health Fairview University of Minnesota Medical Center in Minneapolis, from complications related to multiple myeloma. He was 70.
Rosario, of Rosemount, was “a real journalist – a shoe-leather, go-to-the-scene, get-on-the-phone, ask-the-questions, check-it-out journalist,” said Mike Burbach, the editor of the Pioneer Press and a longtime friend. “He had plenty of opinions, as a columnist should, but he was a journalist first.”
Rosario specialized in writing about public-safety issues and covered some of the most notorious crime cases in New York City and Minnesota, including high-profile organized-crime trials, subway gunman Bernard Goetz, the Etan Patz disappearance, the Central Park jogger murder and controversial police shootings. He once 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.
“His sense of justice came through in everything he did,” said U.S. Attorney Andrew Luger, who got to know Rosario when he was an assistant U.S. attorney in Brooklyn in the late 1980s. “My rule was if Rubén wanted to interview me or talk to me, I always did it. I admired his hard-hitting, get-to-the-bottom-line approach. There were no frills and no nonsense. Every single interaction I had with him was rewarding.”
After five years as city editor and head of the public-safety team at the Pioneer Press, Rosario became a featured columnist in 1997. His first column 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. More than 2,000 other columns followed, including columns on Jacob Wetterling, the Interstate 35W Bridge collapse, and the beating death of 3-year-old Desi Irving.
“But it’s the columns about lesser-known folks that stick with me,” Rosario wrote in 2020. “I wanted to write a column highlighting unheralded ordinary people and issues that deserved more attention or were simmering under the public radar screen. 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.”
Rosario wrote in 2013 about 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. “Gladys Reyes chose a pink dress with yellowish and red flame-like streaks at the top of the front for her prom dress,” he wrote. “If there’s a girl anywhere who deserves to wear a pretty dress and look like a princess on this special day, it’s this kid. I remembered the first time I saw her more than six years ago. She was lying on a bed at Regions Hospital’s burn unit, pain etched on her 11-year-old face.”
In 2008, Rosario wrote about the unmarked gravesite containing the bodies of six children, ages 5 to 11, who had been found strangled 10 years earlier in St. Paul after their 24-year-old mother, Khoua Her, called 911 to report she had killed them.
During a time when most of the Twin Cities news media were focused on the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Rosario interviewed the man who dug the graves of the three boys and three girls. His first sentence: “Pat Hogan will never forget the day he dug a mass grave wide enough to fit the bodies of six children side by side.”
Rosario believed that the “time-honored purpose of journalism was to ‘Comfort the afflicted, afflict the comfortable,’” said Laura Rosario, his wife of 46 years. “He always wanted to make right what was wrong.”
RELATED: Read more of Rubén Rosario’s columns at twincities.com/author/ruben-rosario.
Jonathan Rosario said his father’s commitment to social justice, racial equality and to the people in his community never faltered – whether he was writing in New York City or the Twin Cities. “He wrote his own story by writing about the lives of others,” he said. “People who would have otherwise gone unknown – blips on the radar of life — he brought to the forefront; he turned the lens of identity into front-page news and a spotlight for the voiceless.”
Former Pioneer Press writer David Hanners said Rosario was “a warrior for all that is good in this world.”
“There are a handful of people who set the standard for courage, nobility, ethics, honor, a sense of justice and a keen way with words,” Hanners said. “He was a rare one. He was a crackerjack reporter and writer who had an eye for great detail and a heart that was alternately big and unsparing. He wrote with a streetwise eloquence. He believed in ex-cons trying to lead new lives, and he had little sympathy for uncaring bureaucrats.”
Proud ‘Nuyorican’
Pioneer Press columnist Rubén Rosario in St. Paul, Jan. 23, 2013. (Ben Garvin / Pioneer Press)
Rosario wrote honestly about his own life, too. In a 2013 Pioneer Press column that ran with the headline “Today, I need to tell you about a little boy,” Rosario wrote about how he was sexually abused as a child by an older cousin.
“He was brave in ways most of us are not — not in the physical courage of the moment, but in the longer-lasting courage of personal revelation,” wrote longtime friend and former Pioneer Press writer and editor Les Suzukamo. “He did it not to win awards but to help people — readers — understand the terrible toll of abuse and how pervasive child abuse is and to maybe show a little more compassion for the victims.”
Rosario, a proud “Nuyorican,” a New Yorker of Puerto Rico descent, quickly embraced life in Minnesota after moving here just one month before the famous Halloween Blizzard of 1991, Suzukamo said.
On the night of the blizzard, which dumped 28.4 inches of snow on the Twin Cities, Rosario was on the job working as an editor, Suzukamo said. “He looked a little shell-shocked,” he said. “He was still going through the culture adjustment of moving from New York City to Lake Wobegon. He was getting razzed a bit by the newsroom locals about whether he was enjoying his first Minnesota ‘winter.’ 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.’ 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 kept his drawn-out Bronx accent – he answered his newsroom phone, “Row … zarr … reeee-o …,” oftentimes while wearing his New York Yankees ballcap. He also kept his New York attitude, which “he wore like a badge of honor,” Suzukamo said. “He used it like a shield and sword. I think it was one of the reasons why he was so good at developing sources, particularly in law enforcement. He wasn’t intimidated by the cops here. If they pushed on him, he shoved right back. Cops respect strength, and Rubén was strong where it counted.”
Rosario, who was bilingual, often volunteered to translate for other reporters in the newsroom. Former Pioneer Press senior editor Art Coulson said Rosario was once tapped to help cover a story about a local man who had drowned in Puerto Rico.
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“When the reporter called the police officer on the case, she found that he spoke only Spanish,” he said. “Rubén stepped in and offered to translate. Rubén put the phone on speaker and asked the first question. The officer responded in Spanish and spoke for two or three minutes. Rubén turned to the reporters and editors gathered ‘round and said, deadpan, ‘He says no comment.’”
Rosario dedicated countless volunteer hours to helping young journalists, working as the intern coordinator at the Pioneer Press and volunteering with the ThreeSixty journalism-mentoring program at the University of St. Thomas. One summer Pioneer Press intern said she learned more about reporting from overhearing him than she’d learned in any journalism class.
Rosario was “dedicated to the underdog in a way only the truly strong can be,” Suzukamo said. “He supported underprivileged young people who overcame immense obstacles to chase their dreams and young reporters and interns in journalism. I think he saw a little of himself in them. I hope they see a little of him in themselves going forward.”
Cancer diagnosis
In 2011, Rosario was diagnosed with terminal-stage multiple myeloma, an incurable blood cancer. Long days of “chemo, radiation, and test results that confirmed the incurable nature of his disease” followed the diagnosis, but Rosario’s character shined through, Jonathan Rosario said. “Not once did he complain. Not once did he ask human nature’s usual ‘Why me?’” he said.
In 2020, the Minnesota Society of Professional Journalists presented Rosario with a lifetime achievement award. That same year, he published a book of his columns, “Deadline Minnesota.”
Two years later, after more than a decade of hibernation following aggressive chemotherapy, two autologous stem-cell transplants and several hospitalizations to combat pneumonia and other high-risk illnesses, Rosario’s cancer returned. He wrote about the return and his funeral plans in a column published in November 2022.
Left: Rubén Rosario is pictured in 2012 after his initial multiple myeloma diagnosis and treatment. (Ben Garvin / Pioneer Press). Right: Rosario is pictured in November 2022 after a cancer relapse. (Courtesy of Rubén Rosario)
“One of the first things I did was review and update my will, health care directive, beneficiary financial records and cremation/funeral arrangements,” he wrote. “Nothing fancy. My no-frills cherry-red cremation box is patiently waiting in the basement, where it’s been for several years now. My folks will decide service, location and where that box with my ashes will go. The only addendum request was adding two of my favorite pieces of solemn but soul-stirring music — Antonín Dvořák’s New World, Symphony 9, Largo segment, and Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings. If there’s a celebration-of-life gathering, I hope they also throw in Rubén Blades, El Gran Combo, Santana and Earth, Wind and Fire among others to lighten the service playlist, but that’s up to them.”
Rosario grew up in the Bronx and graduated from Fordham University in 1976 with a bachelor’s degree in communications. He met his wife, Laura Lemons, in 1975 after he finished working his part-time ushering job at Madison Square Garden. Their first date was going to see “Jaws,” she said.
“I believe it was divine intervention that brought us together,” Laura Rosario said. “We were meant to be together. One of the doctors asked him how long he had been married, and he said, ‘Not long enough.’”
The two eloped on March 10, 1978 – in a City Hall ceremony with a justice of the peace – and then married again six years to the day later at St. Columba Catholic Church in New York.
Rosario worked at the New York Daily News from 1976 to 1991 – the newspaper he’d grown up reading. Among his first jobs: copyboy and mail sorter.
“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,” he wrote. “It was like having Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson, Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays, on the same team, and I was the ball and bat boy.”
Rosario underwent a CAR T-cell procedure in June, but had complications after the surgery, and entered hospice last week.
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Family members “sent him off with so much love and donned him in true New York fashion – literally,” said Danielle Rosario, his daughter. “He was wearing a Yankees jersey and ball cap. He wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.”
In addition to his wife and children, Rosario is survived by his father, Rubén Rosario, and his siblings, Ronald Rivera, Myrna Ortega, Nilda Ferrise and Hector Antonio Rosario.
A Mass of Christian burial will be held at 10 a.m. Thursday, July 18, at the Cathedral of St. Paul, with visitation one hour prior at the Cathedral’s St. Joseph Chapel. Burial will be at Resurrection Cemetery in Mendota Heights.
The Cremation Society of Minnesota is handling arrangements.
