Farewell to Randy Peterson, a legend
After 52 years at The Des Moines Register & Tribune, Pete has retired
Randy Peterson is retiring from one of the greatest careers of any Iowa sportswriter.
And when you put his name alongside legends like Maury White, Buck Turnbull and Marc Hansen, that’s really saying something.
Peterson filed his last column after 52 years at The Des Moines Register (including a spell at the former evening paper, The Des Moines Tribune).
Envision the career stability of a newspaper employee working at the same company — willingly — without getting laid off or keeling over at his desk while pursuing another ferocious deadline.
Congrats, Pete!
Randy Peterson was a familiar figure at Iowa college and high school events for The Des Moines Register. (Photo courtesy Nirmalendu Majumdar/Ames Tribune.)
Put his time in perspective. I grew up in Des Moines and first read Peterson’s stories in the Tribune when I was a kid. I was hired at the Register in 1988, worked 31 years there before retiring, and now… five years later… he filed his last story.
Peterson could be cynical, gruff and off the cuff. Unfiltered.
He’s the last of an era when the R&T staff’s stories could get a coach in hot water or help an Iowa high school athlete land a college scholarship.
I grew up reading these legends of sportswriting, the reporters (and photographers and let’s not forget editors) that worked at one of America’s greatest Sunday sports sections, The Big Peach.
There was Maury White, a nationally known columnist who had retired, but still showed up in the office to write a weekly column. Buck Turnbull was an outstanding reporter who was credited with writing the phrase “Hilton Magic,” and had a folksy charm to him. Marc Hansen was a thoughtful and talented columnist who could crank out a story on deadline (or following an earthquake, when he was in the Bay Area in 1989).
Tom Witosky, one of the nation’s top sports investigative reporters, was dreaded as the guy who didn’t want pursuing you in the course of writing. He was known as the Shovel for his ability to dig up a story.
“If I had a reporter who wanted to interview me, I’d run,” Witosky said once.
There was Jane Burns, Dave Stockdale, Rick Brown, Ron Maly. Lots of characters that could fill a book: Dan McCool, Dan Johnson, Wayne Grett.
It was an outstanding team, and we’ll never see it again.
I can recall sitting alongside Pete at state basketball tournaments at Veterans Memorial Auditorium in Des Moines. I got the chance to work next to someone I looked up to on the press row overhang that stretched out from the upper level.
On one deadline-filled night, he took out a pack of cigarettes and light up on press row (against the rules, but only the custodians were there to complain).
“Don’t tell anybody,” he said, puffing away.
Peterson had the deepest list of sources, more than anyone I knew. He was the insider’s insider, getting coaches and administrators to consent to interviews when most reporters couldn’t even get a “no comment.”
He also knew his stuff better than most.
Early in my Register career, Des Moines North had a good football team and West Des Moines Valley was on its schedule. Pete anticipated that the Polar Bears could pull off the upset and break a long losing streak, so he went through years of scorebooks to prepare a list to accompany the Register story — for a game he wasn’t assigned to cover.
Sportswriting is a tough job. Stressful. It can be a real blur to file a story on deadline.
There’s a “fog of war” that can accompany filing a story to make the paper. In one blur, Pete misspelled his own name in a byline. If you’ve experienced that pressure, you can understand how intelligent and experienced reporters can get their own name wrong. Or the day of the week. Or even the city where they’re writing.
Peterson moved after a successful run covering Iowa high schools to the college beat. I can’t imagine the mountains of hate mail (most emails) that come with writing about Iowa and Iowa State.
In the spring, Peterson would change hats. He was a great baseball writer, as well as covering the rest of his beats. When The Register sent him and a photographer to Arizona for spring training, he’d return to Des Moines with an incredibly bronzed tan.
Good job, Randy. Congratulations on your retirement. You deserve it.
(Note to readers: I’d like to offer my thanks for The Register and The Ames Tribune for allowing me to use Randy’s photo.)
Lovely tribute.
You are such a mensch.