NOTE: Repost – original story is here.
If you ever walked with Richard de Uriarte through a downtown Phoenix convention hall filled with all the big names — the newsmakers, the businesspeople, the celebrities — you knew to set aside a good hour or so.
Because he knew everyone.
If you were with him, you saw eyes and teeth brighten at his approach, then came hearty handshakes and hugs and long, loud exuberant laughter.
The important people of this city knew Richard, and they loved him.
Perhaps it was because Richard knew something true about them — that they really weren’t any more important than the rest of the people in Arizona.
Even hostile crowds adored Richard
This Irish-Catholic-Latino boy who grew up in Philadelphia and relished good conversation and the game of basketball would eventually wend his way through newspapers to politics and back again to the Phoenix Gazette and Arizona Republic.
He was for a season The Republic ombudsman, its ambassador to the community and fielder of questions and complaints. What a perfect job for a man who adored people — all people — even the cranks.
He would go on to serve nearly two decades as an editorial writer and member of The Republic editorial board.
We knew him as “the conscience” of the board. He was that fist that pounded the table — not in anger, but with passion — when the important concerns of real people in this Valley were being ignored in our debate.
You could put this man with Latin blood lines in a room filled with white-European Arizonans angry about the border and hostile to Mexican immigrants, then watch him work the room.
He would use humor to walk the crowd through the history of their own ancestors — describing an earlier America when newcomer Germans or Italians or Swedes were the ones who were “gonna ruin the country.”
By the end of his talk, his audience would be laughing with him, utterly charmed by his good nature.
There was a clever little devil within
This good man could also play the imp.
If one of our opinion writers said something off the wall or highly controversial in our ninth-floor conference room, Richard would playfully cup his hands around his mouth and shout upwards to our newspaper masters on the executive 10th floor, “THAT WAS JONES WHO SAID THAT! J-O-N-E-S!”
If you didn’t know his background, he would remind you, often in a single, declarative sentence, that he was both Irish and Catholic.
When an Arizona lawmaker did something stupid, it was “Jesus, Joseph and Mary!”
When our Phoenix heat hit 120 degrees, it was “Jesus, Joseph and Mary!”
When the Temple Owls beat his St. Joe’s Hawks, it was “Jesus, Joseph and Mary!”
And when he said it, he said it with a whisp of brogue that told you his people rode the steamboat from that bonnie little isle.
He had an eye for social justice
Nobody gets through life scot-free, not even an Irishman. And life could treat Richard as roughly as it does everyone else. But he chose to love it in return.
He believed in social justice, not the politically correct kind, but the Catholic kind that told him we are on this earth to serve our fellow man, and — in particular — those who suffer.
He wrote about the marginalized and the forgotten. The poor people in South Phoenix and the Native Americans on Arizona’s northern plain.
He lived what he preached most exquisitely when he coached inner-city children for 22 years at the Boys & Girls Clubs of Metro Phoenix.
He taught those kids to play basketball the right way, the old way, with movement and passing and defense. It’s no surprise that many of those children, now adults, are emerging on social media this week to recall his kindness.
de Uriarte saw life as something to cherish
To know Richard was to know his family. His wife, Frieda, was every bit his equal at putting out positive energy, and you could not be in their presence or leave it without a smile.
As colleagues boasted of the scholastic and sports achievements of their own kids, Richard spoke with affection about the delightful ordinariness of his brood.
He said it with such love you knew his kids could be anything but ordinary.
Perhaps because his own family was a fusion of Irish Philadelphia and Latin America, he marveled at the fusion in Chinese restaurants across metro Phoenix, where the people manning the counter are Asian, and the people manning the wok are Mexican.
Little things like that charmed him.
They were part of a larger ethos he created for himself, that life is a wonder to behold, a blaze of color and personality that is to be relished, not ignored, and certainly never to lament.
Richard died on Sept. 23 at home, surrounded by family and friends in hospice care. He was 77.
If he were here to counsel us upon his death, he would say something hopeful, something accented with his self-effacing humor. Something like this:
“Go ahead and mourn me — just enough to make me respectable — then get on with your life.