We had this page of fake notes at the Progress-Index, and prospective reporters had to write a story from the notes. So the first time I saw Rob Hiaasen, he was hunched over a manual typewriter in the corner of the newsroom, bending six and a half feet into a desk and chair made for somebody in the five-foot-ten range.
“The Great Petersburg Fire?” I asked him as I walked by. He looked up and grunted, and went back to writing, always a good sign in a reporter.
Months later, after he’d been hired to cover Petersburg’s government, he confided that as he left after the job interview he was tempted to walk over to my desk and say something along the lines of, “Don’t worry. I put the thing out.” But he wanted the job and wasn’t sure how important I was.
Smart man. Great sense of humor too, usually at his own expense. I won’t forget the column about the morning he came in needing coffee in the way a reporter can’t even describe until he’s had a cup. He filled the pot with water and dumped it into the Mr. Coffee, and watched in sore amazement at what could happen if somebody else had already filled it with water.
He bought a bad Pontiac from a dealer in Richmond, and didn’t name the dealership in the column about it. The Pontiac dealer in Petersburg pulled his ads. Rob was almost fired and warned to be careful about his columns. So he wrote one saying why Robert Bork should be rejected as a SCOTUS nominee. The conservative publisher sent it back to the newsroom with a big red X through it.
Rob cranked them out every day, and nobody remembers a city council story from thirty years ago. But a lot of folks probably remember the Memorial Day weekend, Friday afternoon, already in the 90s, when the guy started shooting at the cops down near the library. Rob got there just in time to get a photo of a wounded cop being sped out of the area. The cop’s legs were still dangling out the door of the police car, and Rob had sense enough to know that it might not be safe for an unarmed journalist either. But he got the picture before he ran, like a bat out of hell, slowing down just long enough to grab a kid off a tricycle and carry him to safety.
The Times-Dispatch reported that he “swooped down” and grabbed the kid. Look up in the sky, another sweaty P-I reporter dodging Petersburg gunfire.*
We had words the next morning. He’d written about 12 inches about the incident, arguing that the tv stations and the T-D had already covered it to death. I reminded him that he’d been in the middle of it, and that I wanted more copy. It may have been one of the first times I told a reporter that if he couldn’t write about anything else to tell me what it smelled like.
He wrote thirty or forty inches, on deadline. We pulled a house ad to make room.
He said getting away from the shadow of his famous brother wasn’t a factor in leaving Florida for a while, but it didn’t hurt to have a chance to make his own rep. Carl hadn’t penned the first novels yet, but his columns for the Miami Herald were already making an impression. Just Rob’s luck that one of the other reporters had family in Florida and dimed him out within a week as the other Hiaasen. But to a lot of us, Carl the novelist was the other one.
Rob was murdered in a mass shooting at the Capital Gazette in Annapolis, June 28, 2018. He was 59.
*”Swooped” was based on someone’s misreading in the P-I newsroom at the time. The Richmond paper reported that he “scooped up” the child. The misreading made a better story, worth preserving - I did, after all, misremember it for three decades - but also worth correcting.