A warm spring Monday just after Easter was one of those days, as he sits on the deck of the West Towson Center Hall home he shared with Nall.
“I pulled out a cookbook and a note from her fell out,” he says. “What I’ve learned about grief is that it’s endless. When you lose a child or a spouse, they are irreplaceable.”
Given that he asks others to be candid, Rasmussen is willing to be open about his own love and loss, and he never takes the stories people share for granted.
“You get to meet a lot of great people at the worst moment of their life, after they’ve lost a loved one,” he says. “It’s an honor to have that privilege.”
Ask Rasmussen to name a favorite obit and he’s quick to say, “I like them all in some way,” pointing out that it’s not always someone’s profession that makes them interesting, as was highlighted in the May 2002 obit he wrote on Mt. Vernon dentist Hugh Hicks.
“He collected lightbulbs from all over the world, including lightbulbs from the Empire State Building,” Rasmussen recalls. “The obit hadn’t cooled off before the Smithsonian was at the door wanting to acquire the collection.”
His November 2019 reflections on The Prime Rib owner “Buzz” Beler, for example, are just one example of his pithy prose. “C. Peter ‘Buzz’ Beler, whose out-of-the-way East Chase Street restaurant, The Prime Rib, came to define a certain 1930s sophistication and was known for generous slabs of its namesake dish, signature fried Greenberg potato skins, steak au poivre prepared ‘bleu,’ as the French say, and precisely chilled bluepoints so large they ought to be renamed Titanics, died Oct. 23 in Charlottesville, Virginia,” Rasmussen wrote. “He was 90.”
When asked about his own trajectory from suburban Plainfield, New Jersey, to the hallowed halls of a Pulitzer Prize-winning paper, it’s clear that Rasmussen, an avid reader and history buff at an early age, was destined for a life in journalism. As a teenager, he subbed for his friend Jimmy Maude on his newspaper route, delivering The Plainfield Courier-News on foot.
“That bag was like carrying an 800-pound baby on your side,” he recalls. “And then it was raining or snowing, and people would bitch about the paper because it went in a bush or on the roof. I gave the route back to Jimmy.”
Despite his first failed newspaper job, “printer’s ink was in my blood,” says Rasmussen, whose father worked in production on Fortune magazine, and whose grandfather, Frederick M. Rasmussen, was superintendent of the Jersey City Printing Co. and a close confidante of Time founder Henry Luce.
Rasmussen also grew up in a household where the written word was revered. “My father came home with 18 newspapers because he commuted on the train,” he says, “so we always had piles of newspapers. The New York Herald Tribune, The New York Daily News, with its great pictures of a railroad wreck or a car upside down on the highway. The World Telegram and Sun. All the papers were there, and we’d go on the floor and pore through them—that’s how I was raised.”
After high school, in 1966, Rasmussen attended Boston’s Emerson College in hopes of pursuing an acting career.
“I wanted to be a character actor, but in those days, you had to sing, dance, do comedy, and the straight stuff,” he says. “By my junior year, I thought, ‘Well, I have nothing to give to the American theater, and I really like eating three meals a day, so I know what I’ll do. I’ll do the next best thing. I’ll be a writer!’”
Along the way, he entertained the idea of other careers. “I was interviewed for a job selling insurance at John Hancock in Boston, but I didn’t get the job,” he muses. “One night, I was out drinking with friends at the Copley Plaza, and the man who interviewed me appeared. I went over to him and said, ‘I’m Fred Rasmussen. I’d like to ask a question. Why didn’t I get the job?’ And he said, ‘You wore a bowtie…people who wear bowties are independent—you can’t control them.’”
Ever since, he wears them as a reminder. “The bowtie saved me from a miserable life as an insurance man,” he says with a laugh.
Instead, Rasmussen pursued journalism, working as a freelancer for Boston magazine before setting his sights on the Sun. His then-mother-in-law had worked at the paper and knew legendary columnist H.L. Mencken.
“I always loved the Sun and was a Mencken nut,” he says. Having worked in his college library, he was first hired as a photo librarian in 1973, a position he held for 19 years, overseeing the vast collection’s seven million photographs, while also writing on the side.
“I clawed my way onto the paper and wrote features, book reviews, food and travel stories, and stories about Maryland history,” says Rasmussen, who also wrote the Sun’s long-running “Back Story” column, which looked at historical events and their link to Baltimore.
In the early ’90s, when the paper expanded its coverage and started producing local sections, he was made an editorial assistant for the county editions.
“I covered the boilerplate government stuff and did features,” he says. “They made me a Charles Kuralt-type. I’d go all over the county and write about the people.”
On weekends, he penned the occasional obituary. One day, he wrote an obituary on a businessman who had done a stint in jail for tax evasion. He mentioned the subject’s jail time in the obit—“this is news, not a love letter,” he says—but focused on the fact that the man had redeemed himself.
Shortly after the piece went to press, Rasmussen, who’d received threatening calls from the subject’s friends and acquaintances, was summoned to the Sun offices on Calvert Street by his then-editor Gil Watson. “I got a message, ‘Please come to Baltimore immediately,’” he recalls. He was told to go to the conference room.
“I’m thinking, ‘I must have really done something wrong. This is the end of my life.’ Then [editor] John Carroll and Bill Marimow walked in. Carroll said, ‘We’re going to redo the obit page. We want to open it up to all kinds of people, not just people from Guilford, not just society swells and doctors and lawyers and bankers. We want people from all walks of life, because Baltimore is a city with all kinds of people who live here.’”
Marimow recalls thinking that Rasmussen was the perfect person to put on the obit beat. “I thought, ‘This is a guy who is intelligent, steeped in history and culture, very likeable, and a good writer,” Marimow says.
“The quality, the variety, and the depth of his obituaries really were A-plus journalism,” he continues. “I thought Fred was doing Pulitzer Prize-caliber work. I gave him one mandate, and that was to bring [his subjects] to life. I’d say, ‘Bring ’em back alive’—we joked about that for years to come.”
