Rob Hiaasen wrote about snow snorkeling.
He wrote about his bat house: “Bats can eat as many as 1,200 insects an hour. . . . And I want to meet the person who tallied some bat’s hourly chow.”
He wrote about a conversation with his dog, Earle.
Among those killed in the shooting Thursday at the Annapolis Capital Gazette newspaper was the veteran columnist, editor and journalism teacher, his family said.
Hiaasen, 59, the brother of best-selling author and journalist Carl Hiaasen, had been a feature writer at the Baltimore Sun for 15 years before moving to the Capital in 2010 as an assistant editor.
Lately, he had been the author of a regular Sunday column.
A native of Fort Lauderdale and a graduate of the University of Florida, he had been a reporter for the Palm Beach Post, and an anchor and reporter at news-talk radio stations in the South.
“I just want people to know what an incredibly gentle, generous and gifted guy my brother was,” Carl Hiaasen said in a telephone interview Thursday night.
“He was an unforgettably warm and uplifting presence as a father and brother,” he said.
“But he also had dedicated his whole life to journalism,” he said. “And he loved that paper. He loved that newsroom. And he loved the idea of hometown, old-fashioned journalism.”
Hiaasen was a Floridian and a Marylander, a 6-foot-5 cynic and a softy.
In one recent column he wrote about a lost cat:
“First, leveled at me have been longstanding accusations that I’m a romantic and sentimentalist (guilty, guilty). So what if I can’t pass a missing cat/but mainly missing dog poster and not blink? So what if I always stop in my tracks…
