You can’t teach what Rob had in a writing class or journalism school. He was born with it and worked passionately to perfect it. In the process, Iowans learned a lot about themselves. Rob in turn learned to love Iowa life almost as much as he did his sons, Raj and Romen, and Rekha Basu, his wife and partner in a shared devotion to their profession.
I met Rob in the mid-1970s at a radio station where we worked together in Kingston, New York. After leaving town for a few years, I returned to work with him again in the early 1980s. He had become editor at the Daily Freeman and hired me as his assistant city editor. I met Rekha there as well. We eventually went separate ways, but kept in touch over the years and both wound up landing in the Midwest; two guys from the Bronx, one in Des Moines, the other in Milwaukee.