Sunday will be the 40th anniversary of my father's death. Richard was fulfilling his Sunday obligation by attending Mass on late Saturday afternoon at St. Olaf Catholic Church. He was there with my sainted Aunt Peggy (in contrast to my other sainted aunt, Helen), and left her to take care of Communion, while he went to get the car so they could beat the crowd.
Aunt Peggy found Richard dead from a heart attack in the driver's seat. He was illegally parked, of course, near the church's entrance.
A few years earlier, Richard had prepared a pot of his famous rabbit stew to share with his best pal, Joe Miller. And then Joe went home to Chaska and suffered a fatal heart attack.
Joe was a beauty, and my brother Michael and I allowed a respectable amount of time to pass before we started needling my father about having killed his best friend with a large serving of rabbit stew.
Lo and behold, when we entered Richard's apartment on the day after his death, we found another pot of rabbit stew growing cold on the stove. We shared a laugh and agreed: "Richard not only killed Joe with his rabbit stew; he killed himself."
Richard was a character of the first magnitude (as was Joe), and he's the reason that as a sportswriter, I've had incredible fondness for people such as Jerry Burns, Glen Sonmor, Billy Gardner and Calvin Griffith.
On occasion, I've been accused of having an over-the-top appreciation for irreverence, and my excuse for that is, "I grew up with Richard Reusse."
He also gets credit for steering me into the newspaper business, even if he did so by accident. We had lived in Fulda, the heavenly burg of 1,100 in Murray County, until my mother Cecile's death in 1962 after a hideous battle with breast cancer. Richard sold his mortuary business in Fulda and we moved to Prior Lake, where Richard could be closer to ballgames at Met Stadium, and to relatives who also had moved from the farm fields of southwest Minnesota to the Twin Cities area.
