Everyone in the Twin Cities news business admired Jim Ragsdale for his gentle wit and seamless writing.
His award-winning coverage of Gov. Jesse Ventura and the Red Lake school shootings left a mark on the state’s political landscape, but Ragsdale’s fans also reveled in the mark he left on the theatrical front – from producing plays to making mockumentaries about pox-infected Peeps to writing poems about parking bans.
Ragsdale — a former Pioneer Press reporter and editorialist and Star Tribune reporter — died Tuesday morning at his home in Minneapolis, from complications related to pancreatic cancer. He was 64.
“Jim’s talent soared in so many realms,” said Aron Kahn, a longtime friend and former Pioneer Press reporter. “In reporting a story, Jim was fiercely reverent to facts and context, and unequaled in the gentleness of his words. His writing was smooth as silk.
“He managed to capture the color and humanity of a story — things that other reporters missed,” Kahn said.
Take, for example, Ragsdale’s description of Texas gubernatorial candidate Kinky Friedman: “Kinky Friedman, who is running for governor of Texas as an independent, is a 61-year-old storyteller, country singer and mystery novelist who smokes Cuban cigars, has one-liner platform planks and sings about how they don’t make Jews like Jesus anymore.”
Longtime Capitol reporter Bill Salisbury said Ragsdale was the “best pure writer” ever to work out of the Pioneer Press’ basement bureau.
“Today, we mourn the loss of a great reporter and a wonderful man,” Gov. Mark Dayton said in a statement released Tuesday afternoon. “I extend my deepest condolences to Jim’s family, friends, and colleagues at this very difficult time.”
Sen. Amy Klobuchar expressed her sadness on Twitter: “He loved his job covering politics. He did it in a positive way and never lost his good humor.”
Jesse Ventura
Ragsdale was the first reporter to realize that Ventura, elected in 1998, couldn’t be covered as other governors had been. “Everyone else tried to cover him as a normal governor, but Jim understood that it was ‘Jesse as entertainment,’ ” Salisbury said. “He covered it like theater.”
Ragsdale followed Ventura’s every move — from northern Minnesota, where he caught Ventura taking credit for catching a fish that a guide had placed on his line, to Cuba, where Ventura quizzed Fidel Castro about JFK conspiracy theories.
“Whether he was getting up at 2 a.m. to watch Jesse on a cable show in California, tagging along to an XFL football game or writing a massive summing up of Jesse’s one-term governorship, Rags never tired of the story,” said Lynda McDonnell, who was Ragsdale’s editor at the Pioneer Press during the Ventura administration. “He never took personally the darts Ventura threw at the ‘media jackals.'”
Early in 2002, Ragsdale wrote a series of seven stories, titled “AKA Jesse Ventura,” that took readers from the family dinner table where Ventura’s father railed against politicians to the years in the Navy’s Underwater Demolition Teams (which later became part of the SEALs) and through his years as governor.
Steven Schier, political science professor at Carleton College, called the AKA series “the definitive journalistic profile of his time in office.”
“Once he won, I embraced Ventura as a godsend,” Ragsdale wrote in a Pioneer Press essay at the end of Ventura’s term. “That’s something Ventura never understood. Grunt reporters like me want the story to blow up in their faces. We like a surprise. We really don’t care what the commentators think. We don’t value our own opinions. We vote the story.
“Jesse Ventura, God bless him, was something new and fresh, and every tempest, every honest opinion, every stalk-away from me and my ilk was a scene change that left us wondering what was next. … He yelled at me weekly, and I couldn’t wait for the next press conference.”
Ragsdale approached his Ventura stories the same way he approached life — with skepticism and humor, said Tom Hauser, longtime political reporter for KSTP-TV.
“He had such a great sense of humor, he could even disarm Ventura during our many battles with him in press conferences or media scrums,” Hauser said. “He wasn’t offended when Ventura tagged us all as ‘media jackals’; Rags embraced the idea.”
Ragsdale had an acute sense of the absurd — a great skill for a political reporter, said Pat Kessler, a longtime friend and Capitol reporter for WCCO-TV.
“He was always amazed and amused by the level of political theater that comes with the job,” Kessler said.
Kessler said Ragsdale’s impression of Ventura was so “spot on” that it often fooled gawkers and reporters waiting for the governor to appear.
“Heads would suddenly turn, hoping for a glimpse of the celebrity governor,” he said. “Rags, of course, would collapse in laughter. That was his M.O., and the way he approached his craft: always the impish grin, the wry comment, the funny observation. Ragsdale took his job seriously, but never himself.”
During an interview on Twin Cities Public Television’s “Almanac” in January, Ragsdale, one of the show’s regular monologists, joked that he got his news by “grabbing people around the neck and squeezing them until they tell me what I want to know. I ask incessant questions.”
“You have to find people interesting, and you have to like to listen to them, and you have to like to chat them up,” he said. “I like to listen to people. I like to hear their stories. Reporting is about other’s people lives. It’s not about you.”
Early career
Ragsdale grew up in Los Angeles and graduated from the University of California — Santa Barbara. He worked as a newsman for UPI in Los Angeles and San Francisco, associate editor of Louisville Today magazine and reporter for the Charleston, W.Va., Gazette, before moving with his family to Minneapolis in 1981 when he was hired by the Minneapolis Star and Tribune as a government reporter and St. Paul correspondent.
By the end of his first year in Minnesota, “he had been laid off, rehired and laid off again, as the Tribune and Star merged and went through rounds of layoffs,” said Nick Coleman, a longtime colleague and friend. “It was an awful, stressful time for him, but Rags took it with his usual aplomb, and self-deprecating wit.”
Ragsdale, who had a slightly nasal voice, then went to work for Minnesota Public Radio as a Capitol correspondent.
“He hadn’t done radio before,” said Chuck Laszewski, a former Pioneer Press reporter who is spokesman for the Hennepin County Attorney’s office. “After a piece had aired, his bosses would come up to him and say, ‘Jim, that was a good piece, but … you got a cold or something?’ He didn’t really have the voice for radio.”
Poetry, Peeps and tricky clues
He was hired by the Pioneer Press in 1984 and covered a variety of beats, including energy and the environment and St. Paul City Hall, before moving to the Capitol bureau. He later moved to the Opinion page, where he launched the popular Friday Opinuendo column and served as the official FOP (Friday Opinuendo Poet).
One piece of doggerel concerned the winter parking ban:
“Snow emergency rules simplified:
Until the weather gets nice and hot,
Please move your car to the impound lot.”
A few years ago, Ragsdale and Pioneer Press photojournalist Ben Garvin teamed up to create a number of mockumentaries about Peeps, the squishy chick- and bunny-shaped Easter candy, to coincide with the newspaper’s annual Peeps diorama contest.