JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC

We’re in Florida, having a good time, but I got terrible jolt yesterday morning: Ernie Torriero, a good friend and former colleague at The Star, is dying of Covid in a Washington, D.C., area hospital.

Although vaccinated and boosted, he got a case of Covid after Christmas that infiltrated his lungs. Despite being on a ventilator, the doctors have determined he will not survive. Soon he will be taken off the ventilator.

Saturday, Ernie’s wife Antje Torriero explained the situation to Ernie’s 91-year-old mother, who, coincidentally, lives near where we are in southwest Florida, and his brother and sister.Ernie was at The Star (actually The Kansas City Times, the morning paper) for only four years, from 1981 to 1985, but he made a distinctive mark. He had come from the Miami Herald, and like many of us in the newsroom, he had a compulsive personality and was a hard charger. But he also had a big heart, was extremely gregarious and made friends easily.

It was pretty clear that Ernie would not be at The Star very long: He had exceptional talent and ambition, and he wanted to move up the journalistic ladder. Early on, I’m happy, to say, he cultivated my friendship. We would frequently go to lunch together and we hung out after working hours.

Before we became good friends, however, we had a mild dust-up over a reporting matter. The Rolling Stones were coming out of retirement not long after Ernie arrived, and the tour included a performance at Kemper Arena. The city editor at the time, a guy named Bob Samsot, went crazy on the coverage. He dispatched at least six reporters to the arena and the immediate area, and he had a couple of people, including me, in the office doing rewrite.

At one point, Ernie called in, was rung through to me and began giving me quotes from people he had spoken to at the concert. Very quickly, it struck me that some of the quotes were exaggerated. They just didn’t sound like words and sentences that most people would say off the cuff.

I stopped him in mid-sentence and said, “Hey, buddy, we don’t put up with cowboy quote artists here in Kansas City…Give me what they’re saying word for word.”

At the time, Ernie had a bad stutter, and he began stuttering. But he also went back and got some authentic-sounding quotes.

Far from holding the scolding against me, Ernie admired the fact that I had insisted on accuracy and adherence to high journalistic standards.

After that, we began spending a lot of time together. One of the times we went to lunch was particularly memorable. One night in early August of 1983, I had met an engaging and good-looking young woman at the New Stanely Bar in Westport. I didn’t ask for her phone number, but she told me she worked at Cy Rudnick’s Fabrics in Crown Center.

A day or two later, Ernie asked if I wanted to go to lunch, and I said, “Yeah, how about going to Crown Center? I met a girl at the New Stanley the other night who works down there, and I’d like to see if she’s there.”

Ernie, of course, was game. When we got to the fabric store, I looked around eagerly, over and around bolts of fabric and counters where clerks were precisely cutting fabric with large scissors. Across the room, I spotted the girl I had met at the bar. She spotted me and broke into a big smile…That “girl” was Patty Corteville, to whom, on Feb. 23, I will have been married for 37 years…Ernie was in the wedding.

A year later, in August 1984, came another seminal occasion involving Ernie. My best friend in Kansas City, a guy named Dick Arnett, who had been married to a Star editor, committed suicide. I got the news on a Friday night, immediately upon arriving with Patty at the home of friends in St. Louis. I was shattered. I barely slept that night, and we headed back to Kansas City early Saturday. When we I pulled up to my house on Grand Avenue at 51st Street, Ernie was there, waiting in the front yard. I collapsed into his arms, and the grieving was officially underway.

**

About the same time I met Patty, Ernie had one of the most outstanding feature stories that has ever run in The Star. As I said, he had a stutter. It was a really bad, achingly bad, stutter. But he also had an indomitable personality, and he wanted to get rid of it.

The editor at the time, Mike Waller, offered to pay for speech therapy for him. After weeks of therapy — at KU Med Center, as I recall — all that remained was an occasional, mild stutter. Waller also had a secondary motive in extending a helping hand to Ernie: he wanted him to write about his experience with stuttering and the treatment. Waller, a genius of an editor, knew it would be a compelling story.

So, Ernie proceeded to write a two- or three-part series. The headline on Day One was, “I Just Want to be Normal.”

It was a blockbuster. I think just about everyone who subscribed to the paper read it. Inside the newsroom, Ernie was roundly congratulated. Often, one story can take a reporter or editor to a new level, and that’s the way it was for Ernie with “I Just Want to be Normal.”

In 1984 or 1985, when Ernie went looking for a bigger job, editors at The Washington Post almost hired him based on that story. It wasn’t quite enough to push him over the top, though, and he took a job at the San Jose Mercury-News. From there he went to The Sun-Sentinel in Ft. Lauderdale, where he was a foreign and national correspondent from 1994 to 2000.

His upward trajectory continued when he got hired by The Chicago Tribune in 2000. He was a senior reporter there for eight years, during which time I had the privilege of accompanying him to the newsroom in the fabled Tribune Tower, which, sadly, is no longer home to the Tribune.

Like many papers, the Tribune was in sharp decline in the late 2000s, and Ernie quit. For a little more than a year, he worked as an editor for a fledgling online publication. I talked to him fairly often during that time, and it was very difficult. By then he was married to Antje, who was not working, and they had young, twin sons. Ernie had no benefits, was working his ass off and not making very much money.

As I said, though, he had an indomitable spirit, and in 2010 he landed a destination job with Voice of America in D.C. He has held several important posts at V.O.A., including his current job, in which he supervised creation and production of digital content distributed to Africa.

…I had not spoken with Ernie for several months, and I’m sick that I didn’t call. I had determined to call him in early March, when both of us celebrate our birthdays. Unfortunately, Ernie Torriero, one great journalist and a loyal, loving friend, will not make it to his 68th birthday.