Ken Fuson, Award-Winning Former Baltimore Sun Writer, Dies At 63

BALTIMORE, MD — Ken Fuson, considered a master of the narrative by his journalism peers, and who won national awards for his writing at The Baltimore Sun and The Des Moines Register, has died at age 63. Fuson died Friday from complications of liver disease while awaiting a transplant at the University of Nebraska Hospital in Omaha.

Funeral for Fuson will be at 11 a.m. Saturday, Jan. 11, at the Lutheran Church of Hope in West Des Moines, Iowa. Fuson was involved in the church's choir and recovery ministry, among other activities.

Fuson spent most of his life and career in Iowa, but worked for three years at the Sun, where he garnered national praise for his six-part series, "A Stage In Their Lives." Published in June 1997, it won the top award in 1998 for non-deadline writing from the American Society of Newspaper Editors.

The series focused on the students auditioning for roles in the production of "West Side Story" put on in the spring of 1997 at North County High School in Anne Arundel County. To capture the hopes and fears of students and their teacher as they prepared for the musical, Fuson followed the theater preparations for weeks. His prize-winning Sun story read like a play.

"You don't know them. Not yet. Find a seat — there, in the middle, close to the stage — and watch," he told Sun readers. "You will meet two girls. One will have her dream come true, the other won't, and the experience will change them both. ... Soon you will know them. And you will know this: The high school musical is a rite of passage that will shape — and reveal —the adults they will soon be. And nothing ever produced on stage can possibly match the drama of growing up."

But Fuson faced his own challenges, namely a gambling addiction. Friends and colleagues credited his success overcoming the problem to treatment and his involvement in the church. He was remembered as a generous mentor who often sent notes to other writers when he enjoyed their work.

Fuson, who grew up in Granger, Iowa, about 15 miles outside of Des Moines, was a lifelong fan of great story-telling and the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team. He attended, but didn't graduate from, the University of Missouri.

After a stint at a Columbia, Missouri, newspaper, Fuson became a reporter at the Register in 1981, then lauded as one of the 10 best papers in the country. He told the stories of Iowa until 1995, when he moved to Baltimore. In 1999 Fuson returned to the Register, where he was a columnist and writer until 2008.

He won more than 40 national and state writing awards during his newspaper days, including the American Society of Newspaper Editors Distinguished Writing Award, the Ernie Pyle feature writing award, the National Headliner Award, and five Best of Gannett Distinguished Writing Awards, according to his biography. He often spoke at newspaper conferences and in recent years taught at high school journalism workshops.

"He was one of the half-dozen or so best writers ever to go through the Register newsroom," Pulitzer Prize-winner and former Register Editor Michael Gartner wrote in a Cityview column Friday. "Maybe one of the best two or three. Maybe the best."

When Patch Deputy National Editor Beth Dalbey was developing her craft, she soaked up Fuson's work in the Des Moines Register like a sponge, studying his style to figure out the storytelling techniques he used to take readers on such marvelous journeys.

"I wonder if he knew how much all that meant to those of us he reached out to and encouraged," Dalbey said. "I’m not kidding when I say that to have a journalist the caliber of Ken Fuson tell you your work was good was to be anointed into a special, elite club."

A one-paragraph story about a surprising 70-degree day in Iowa — an unorthodox take on the traditional weather story that was Fuson's idea — is still used as a teaching tool for student journalists.

The story, "What A Day," begins: "Here’s how Iowa celebrates a 70-degree day in the middle of March: By washing the car and scooping the loop and taking a walk; by daydreaming in school and playing hooky at work and shutting off the furnace at home; by skate-boarding and flying kites and digging through closets for baseball gloves; by riding that new bike you got for Christmas and drawing hopscotch boxes in chalk on the sidewalk and not caring if the kids lost their mittens again..."

His obituary published in the Register, written by Fuson's friend Daniel Finney, ends with the famous weather story: "And with our friend Fuson gone, we exhale with grief, for his words won't fill our pages again, but we know how real the sweet memories of his too-short life were." Finney wrote.