Courtesy of Robert Hiaasen Twitter
Robert Hiaasen, a columnist and assistant editor at The Capital in Annapolis, was killed during a shooting on Thursday, June 28, the The Capital's newsroom. Hiaasen was known to be an inspiring writer with a sense of humor.
On June 28, five individuals were killed in a shooting at the Capital Gazette office in Annapolis, Maryland. Among them was Rob Hiassen, who began his lengthy career in journalism as a news anchor for WPTF network in Raleigh and is remembered fondly by his former colleagues.
Hiassen was hired as a reporter and anchor for Total Radio Network for WPTF and spent 14 months in the newsroom. His co-worker at the time, Tony Ritsgbe, a news and sports anchor at WPTF network, said that Hiassen left a lasting mark at the network.
“He was a very, very good street reporter, a very good writer,” Ritsgbe said. “The thing that struck you about him, first of all, was the fact that he was very tall. He was 6’3, 6’4, 6’5 somewhere along there and a very imposing person, but extremely nice person. He was one of those guys who smiled all the time and had a great sense of humor.”
In addition to his reporting achievements during his time at WPTF, Hiassen also met his wife Maria Mills, a news anchor at sister station, WQDR-FM.
“The other thing that I remember vividly, was the fact that a young woman named Maria Mills was working in our newsroom as well at that time and Rob and Maria went out to a movie together, I believe it was Ghostbusters, and they quickly developed a romance, they got married less than a year later and they [had] been married for 33 years,” Ritsgbe said.
Mike Reley, a news anchor for North Carolina News Network and former co-worker of Hiassen, said that Hiassen’s involvement with the 1984 campaign race for Senate jump-started his career in news.
“I do remember he was involved in, as many were in 1984, with some campaigns that were going on including the Hunt-Helms campaign for Senate,” Reley said. “He followed Governor Jim Hunt who was running against the incumbent senator Jesse Helms and that was a barn burner of a race and he covered that well. Rob, even then, was a really good writer.”
Reley remembered that Hiassen, even at the beginning of his career, was driven by a passion for news.
“I remember him saying at one point, and I’m not sure why this sticks out, he always said to write short and he sounded like a news director, he was that good,” Reley said. “But, that’s the way you do it in broadcast news, you write short and clear sentences that the first sentence grabs you and you get all the information into a short sentence and make it clear to the listener. So he did that really well and he always talked about things like that.”
Reley said that Hiassen also delved into another, more uncanny form of writing to engage his readers.
“His impact was that he was kind of quirky,” Reley said. “He liked to write about weird stuff. Now I read this later about Rob, I read this last week that he wrote a poem in the newspaper, I guess it was either The Baltimore Sun or The Capital Gazette, about bats in his house. So many people can relate to things like that and that is an interesting thing to write about. But, everything was offbeat with him. He just had such an imagination, so I would say that he could really grip a listener or someone who read their newspaper in the beginning, in the first sentence.”
Hiassen’s time in Raleigh, though short-lived, left a lasting impression on those around him, even 33 years later.
“Well, I would hope that they remember that he was a good journalist who did his job, did it in an excellent manner, and a guy who made a lot of friends while he was here too,” Ritsgbe said. “He had an infectious personality and I know that everyone who worked in the newsroom at that point, and there are only two of us still left here now, but there are many who worked with them then that became long-term friends not only with him, but of his wife Maria who was working with us at the same time.”