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.
I’m so saddened to learn of Ernie’s plight, but so pleased that you offered up such a rich telling not only of your friendship but also of Ernie’s post-KC Times career.
I enjoyed working with Ernie in my brief and weird run as ME of the KC Times in 1983-84, and he and I figured out a Metropolitan Diary-type column that he wrote weekly for the Metro section front. I loved the result.
When I departed 1729 Grand — it was my third and last stint as a Star employee — I went to The Chicago Tribune as a national correspondent and then edited Tempo, The Trib’s daily feature section. By that time Ernie was based in Los Angeles as the San Jose Mercury News’s first national correspondent. His editors didn’t have much sense about how to deal with a national correspondent so he’d call me up from time to time to work through story ideas. This worked out beautifully for both of us — he got a lot of stories on Page One and I got fine features from LA that often led my section. I particularly recall one about road rage on LA’s freeways, which seriously cranked up Ernie’s penchant for colorful writing.
I was gone from The Trib by the time Ernie arrived there, but I was impressed when Ernie arrived in a high-status role as a foreign correspondent. That news provided me a wide grin, and I’m grinning again now as I remember and write this.
That said, I’m so sad for his wife, who I didn’t know, and for his twin sons, who I calculate to be in their early 20s. How terrible they’re losing Ernie when he’s still so young and vital. What a loss to all of us who knew him.
I’m glad to learn about your collaboration with Ernie, Tom. I don’t recall hium mentioning that in our periodic phone calls.
The boys will be turning 16 this month.
Wow. Sosorry to hear this, Jim. Thank you so much for sharing this with those of us who knew Ernie. Great human. Great journalist.
Well. Shit. Such a nice guy. Always a smile. A friend to everyone he met. Journalistically, he became a great storyteller. This is such terrible news. My thoughts will be with him and his family. Fuck this fucking disease and the murdering politicians who let it run wild. Thanks for letting us know, Jim.
You are 100 percent right in all respects.
Ernie is a great person, a real treasure! I remember how thrilled Mike Waller was to see Ernie’s abilities to speak improve. “Ernie’s healed!” Waller beamed.
I met Ernie when he came to Haiti around 1994. He was a fantastic guy, and I met him a few times in the US after that, most recently in 2014 when I visited DC. He really made me laugh. DIdn’t take himself too seriously but took his reporting seriously. He will be missed. :(
Iām so sorry š
So sorry for the loss of your friend. This is a nice tribute to him.
Say hi to the beach for me.
Jim, I would like to send this to the obit editor at The Post. Do you know what hospital Ernie is at and or a contact number or email for his family? Thanks.
Ernie died at 2:15 a.m. today.
Jimmy – Of course I did not know Ernie and only know you through our contacts at CCCC but I have tears in my eyes right now. What a great tribute you have written.
Thank you, Stan. You’re a sensitive soul.
Lovely tribute. I knew Ernie at The Tribune, and he was such a great reporter and such a serious correspondent and editor. What a tragic loss. Thanks for remembering him well.
Thanks for sharing your stories about Ernie. I worked with him at the Chicago Tribune. We started the same year in 2000 and I looked up to him. He was also so generous with his time, and he was a straight shooter. So tragic.
It is encouraging and comforting to read these tributes. I’m glad we, his friends, can gather here, online, to share our memories.
Beautiful piece about how your lives twined and braided together. Thank you for writing and sharing this.
Nice turn of phrase, Ann…
Thank you for your very nice remembrance of our friend Ernie
Do you know how we can read his article about how he conquered his stutter?
Thank you,
Anita Snow
Thanks, Anita. I might have to go to the Kansas City library to find that story. Antje said she doesn’t know where it is. Could be a tough find; I’ll try.
Wonderful tribute. I miss my buddy Ernie.
Thanks for the Tribute. My wife and I and Ernie have been like family for the last 50 years. We met as teens working in a neighborhood supermarket. As you seem to know once you enter Ernie’s Universe you never leave. I will miss our weekly calls that usually began with Ernie reading his latest medical reports asking for my