Farewell to a great storyteller, St. Paul native Harley Sorensen

I never met Harley Sorensen, which is my loss. He died Feb. 15 of heart failure in San Francisco. He was 79 and had been declining for a year, said his longtime partner, Betty Wyren. His life was sometimes messy, but always fascinating and instructive, even if you'd never want to duplicate some of his experiences.

California was his adopted state. Sorensen, who developed legions of fans as a columnist and self-professed "iconoclast," grew up in St. Paul's Frogtown neighborhood. Many of my colleagues remember Sorensen from his days in this newsroom in the 1970s, when his renegade reporting -- including quelling a potentially disastrous kidnapping -- raised eyebrows.

That occurred after he served 15 years in prison for armed burglary, and before he gracefully and firmly turned his life around, finding his best storytelling fodder for SFGate.com while driving a taxi for 22 years along San Francisco's Castro and Market Streets. A Sorensen joke:

"People used to ask whether they could smoke in my cab. Sure, I'd tell them, but please roll down a window, unless you're smoking weed. In that case, roll up the window."

His fares included an expert on the O.J. Simpson trial, giddy tourists and gay men seeking sex "or plain companionship with like-minded souls." He was robbed only once -- at knifepoint.

He stood 6 feet 2, walked with a loping stride and liked to keep his white hair shaggy. He didn't mind being called Captain Kangaroo. He sold a joke to Jay Leno, but was proudest of his stepson who, Wyren said, "was the highlight of his life." He was the original you-can't-make-this-stuff-up guy.

"I lost a friend," said Brent Andrews, 38, a fan and fellow writer, who bounced ideas off Sorensen for years before meeting him in person in 2002 in San Francisco.

"I'm reading along and gradually realize I'm no longer reading an exciting book," wrote Sorensen, who later crafted an eloquent and funny foreword for Andrews' much-improved effort.

"I'm from Minnesota, where the word 'passion' generally is frowned upon," Sorensen wrote, in part, " ... so, if I were still a dyed-in-the-lefse Minnesotan, I likely would not use the word 'passion' to describe anything. But I escaped the frozen tundra nearly 25 years ago and ... can now refer to passion without blushing. And nobody ever drank with more determination and passion than Brent Andrews."

Andrews is sober now. "Harley was proof that you could change your life and live a different way," Andrews said. "You could even become a hero after being a scoundrel."

Sorensen was a Depression-era baby whose father died when Harley was 3. At 4, he used chalk to copy four-letter words on the side of a concrete building. His mother told him to never write such words again. He once set a newspaper page on fire in the crawl space of a friend's porch. At 12, he hitchhiked to Chicago. His mother and stepfather, he said, "were more lax than most."

"He was so intelligent, but he just kind of squandered it," said Wryen, 61, the love of his life for 18 years. "He was the brightest kid in school, but you would never know it."

He joined the old Minneapolis Tribune in the 1970s, when "lots of institutions, including newspapers, were open to taking wild chances on folks like Harley," recalled Lynda McDonnell, then a rookie reporter. While some were uneasy to have an ex-con in the newsroom, he won awards and fans.

"He was a very imaginative and interesting person," recalled Wallace Allen, 91, managing editor from 1951 to 1982, and now living in Hawaii. "He did some things that other people didn't want to do. That made him a good reporter."

When a double murderer escaped from jail and took a family of six hostage in a Wadena farmhouse, Sorensen headed there. Turns out he knew the guy. He called the man, told him to not do anything foolish, then went inside and bargained for the family's lives. The gunman eventually fell asleep and the family escaped. Sorensen won a big award, but that's not what drove him. Insatiable curiosity did, and boundless compassion.

Sorensen moved to California decades ago, but never fully left home. On Sunday mornings, he and Betty would take long drives, listening to Garrison Keillor. "He taught me to be a better driver, not by letting me drive," she said, "but by watching and observing the 'master' driver."

Andrews will remember him as a "really big fellow, but very gentle."