Carrying On in Iowa, Despite a Struggle With Lou Gehrig's Disease

By: Gloria Williams Minutes before the live radio broadcast began, Rob Borsellino motioned for his wife to help him remove his black leather jacket. Rekha Basu gently pulled the sleeves down, freeing her husband's slim arms, which appeared to hang, weak and fragile inside the black jacket he wore beneath the leather. She placed the leather jacket on a chair behind him while he sat down, leaned forward and wrapped his long fingers around a paper cup filled with coffee.

"Live from Prairie Lights" host Julie Englander welcomed listeners to the program and introduced the popular Des Moines Register columnists. With effort, Borsellino lifted himself from the chair and walked to the podium. Reaching for the microphone he said, "This Lou Gehrig's disease has destroyed my voice. I thank you all for coming, but I want to know why, 55 years I'm alive and no one ever asked me to speak on the radio. I lose my voice... ."

The crowd laughed and listened as he spoke slowly, his words slightly slurred. Basu stepped forward as Borsellino explained that his wife would read from his newly released book, "So I'm Talk'n to This Guy."

Rob Borsellino used to speak crisply and move quickly. He made a career out of getting the story behind the news. If he saw a report on TV of a shooting, he would run to the scene. He followed ambulances and fire trucks and asked questions wherever he went. He sought out people in run-down buildings, at bars, and at meetings in community centers and wrote three columns a week telling stories of folks generally overlooked in the urban landscape. Published by The Des Moines Register, his book is a collection of some of the columns he wrote for the paper from 1998 to 2005.

As Basu stood beside him, her long auburn hair glowed beneath the light, she smiled as she looked first at her husband and then at the audience. Her voice was warm and clear as she began reading the last entry in the book, the column he wrote announcing to readers that he has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

Borsellino suffers from fatigue, muscle weakness, and paralysis that make it difficult for him to speak or use a computer. He does fewer interviews and works at home now, yet still manages to write a column each week, typing with one finger. At times he writes to bring public awareness to the 5,000 Americans who are diagnosed annually with this incurable disease.

Last May, Borsellino went to Washington, D.C., to testify before a Senate subcommittee on the importance of funding research into ALS, which afflicts as many as 30,000 Americans. Addressing the lack of treatment available, Borsellino spoke about Iowans he knows who traveled to China for stem-cell therapy.

"It's a complete mystery to them, and to me, why this illness remains a death sentence," he said, as he urged Congress to fund stem-cell research and therapy. Borsellino told the Senate subcommittee that he probably will not be around for his sons' weddings or to see any grandchildren.

"It's Little League season right now and I can't play catch with my 15-year-old," he said.

The quintessential New Yorker, Borsellino grew up in the Bronx and described in one of his columns the pride he felt as a kid, living in the borough that was home to the New York Yankees: "During the first 16 years of my life, the Yankees won the pennant 14 times. So I grew up expecting to win. ..."

Borsellino graduated from Bronx Community College and the State University of New York at New Paltz. In 1974, he began reporting for a radio station in upstate New York for $90 a week. Two years later he started his first newspaper job in Woodstock, and became editor of the Kingston Daily Freeman in the early '80s.

In 1982 he met Rekha Basu when she came to apply for a job as a reporter. Basu had just graduated from journalism school at Columbia University in New York City. She knew entry-level wages were so low she needed to live some place cheap. Her parents had a place in Woodstock, so she looked at their local paper, the Daily Freeman. She drove up to meet the editor, expecting to find a man in a suit and tie, but was surprised at what she found.

"He had hair down to his shoulder at that time, with silver bracelets all the way up to his elbow on his right arm and he was wearing cowboy boots," Basu said. "He looked like Mick Jagger."

Borsellino hired her to cover City Hall and the local school district.

Married in 1985, Borsellino and Basu live in Des Moines with their youngest son, Romen, a high school student. Their oldest son, Raj, is
studying at Amherst College in Massachusetts.

It was Basu who first moved to Iowa to accept a job as an editorial writer in 1991. Her husband describes in the preface to his book how he eventually joined her one year later. This excerpt appears on the cover: "How I came to be living in Iowa is not a particularly interesting story. Suffice it to say I did it for love. My wife got a job with The Des Moine Register, packed up the kids, put the house on the market and turned to me on the way out and asked: 'You coming, or what?' I hesitated. 'Uh, sure, babe. You know I'd love to move to Iowa,' I said, trying not to act as if my entire world had come crashing... ."

A native of India, Basu is a New Yorker, too -- though she also lived in various countries where her parents had postings with the United Nations -- including Libya, Egypt, and Thailand. Basu taught political economy and worked in documentary film and TV production before becoming a journalist. Today she writes three columns a week for the Register.

Prairie Lights bookstore has hosted writers to read from their works for 15 years. Many of these are broadcast on WSUI, the local University of Iowa radio station. Shelves of books are pushed back and folding chairs fill the section of the second floor set up for the readings.

After the readings, a student in the back of the room stood up and asked if either of them had advice for young journalists. Borsellino answered, "Go into marketing."

The audience laughed and he then recommended finding an internship to experience the daily workings of a newsroom and see what being a reporter is like.

Basu added that reading widely (including the foreign press) and keeping up with events are important. She encouraged those who might want to become editorial columnists to think about what they believe and develop strong opinions -- and start by writing letters to the editor.

"I think people are a bit fearful of voicing unpopular views out loud and having their names attached to it," Basu said.

Julie Englander asked about the role of a journalist vs. that of a columnist.

Basu said columnists also do a lot of reporting. "There is seldom a column I write that doesn't have a lot of reporting going into it, to get the facts," she said. "I think that when your job is to write an article you have to be careful about not injecting your opinion into it, but that doesn't mean that you can't be developing opinions about things."

Borsellino said that as much as he loved being a reporter, he prefers being a columnist because of the wider range of things he can write about. He has been writing more reflective pieces lately, including topics such as the state of TV news, the impact of Bob Dylan's music on an entire generation, and the actions of antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan. Both columnists cited having a deadline as one of the things they like most about their work.

"Your body, your internal rhythms, tend to adjust to this adrenaline rush that you have right before deadline," Basu explained. "You just sit down and get really, really focused and somehow it has to happen and it does."

She said that in the beginning the tight deadlines were a bit nerve-wracking and she had visions of a blank page as she worried she wouldn't finish in time. "But that has yet to happen," she said, adding: "I love the instant gratification of writing something and seeing it in print the next day."

"It is a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week job if you allow it to be," Borsellino added.

"And you're always obsessing about what you are going to be writing about next," Basu said. "You literally get up at 2:00 in the morning agonizing about your lead and thinking, 'Oh my God, did I put that right, should I have used a different word?'"

"Yeah, well you are out there," Borsellino added, "and people around here read the Register and they take it very personally."

Basu agreed. "Readers want to write back and forth and engage you in
some way," she said, before describing the differences in her and her husband's approaches to writing.

"Rob often writes in his head as he comes back from an event and by
the time he gets into the newsroom, he has already written most of the piece in his head," Basu said. "That's something I can't do. I have to write it down on a computer screen."

Though she likes the excitement of being in the newsroom and goes into her office every day, Basu has also been working more at home lately. She and her husband read a lot of papers and keep up with things on the Internet. Basu said she especially enjoys reading columnists who give her greater depth, such as Barbara Ehrenreich, Anna Quindlen, and Frank Rich.

Borsellino -- who also worked for New York newspapers such as Newsday and the Albany Times Union -- was hired by the Register as a metro reporter in 1993 and became a columnist in 1998. Mary Stier, publisher and president of the Register, said: "His columns had grit, yet were laced with grace and compassion. I say compassion because while Rob Borsellino often deals with the most difficult topics, he understands that the people he writes about are his neighbors, his friends, and his readers."

During a phone interview, Borsellino said it's important to present information to people that's unbiased to give one's writing credibility. He looks for stories of underrepresented people that simply in the telling become a social commentary that can say a lot of things about poverty, injustice, and race.

"I think you bring those issues to life, not by editorializing, but by finding those people who illustrate those themes," he said.

Some of those Borsellino has written about include parents whose son was killed at a Des Moines nightclub, a 76-year-old Austrian Holocaust
survivor, and a man who was cleared of a crime after spending 10 years in prison. He also writes with humor about politics, himself, and differences between New York and Iowa.

After six years of living in Iowa, he wrote in his book, he was afraid he was losing his edge. When he found himself in 1998 writing fondly of coaching his son's soccer team and visiting the Iowa State Fair, he tells the reader he's tempted to erase the comment about the fair as he worries about the impact Iowa has had on him: "I think about a recent incident on the freeway when a guy cut me off and I chased him for about five miles -- well past my exit -- just to give him what my Uncle Domenick refers to as 'the Italian salute.' And I feel better. I feel secure enough to live with that stuff about the State Fair and the ballgame. I feel like myself: a New Yorker living somewhere else."

As Basu read at Prairie Lights, Borsellino sat, glancing at times at the audience. A slight smile appeared on his tired face as people laughed and clapped in appreciation. After his wife read a few more entries, he stepped again up to the microphone.

"When I first started writing a column, I was a little uncomfortable revealing much about myself," he said, as he described how overwhelmed he was by the reactions from readers. "It was very powerful. It has helped me to be less guarded about my family and who I am."

With that, he picked out a story for Basu to read about his Uncle Danny, who had fought in the Korean War, but never talked about it.
Borsellino described his uncle as a gentle, soft-spoken man who "never married, couldn't hold a job for more than a few months, couldn't stay sober for more than a few days, and never had his own place."

During the summer of 1968, Borsellino received notice from the draft
board that he was to come down for a physical. He was just out of high school and he knew four guys from the neighborhood who had been killed in Vietnam and, though he didn't want to go himself, he struggled with the guilt and the sense that it was his duty. He went over to where his uncle lived and got him to talk "about charging up snow-covered hills and watching guys in front of him, beside him, and behind him get cut down by gunfire -- some running a few steps even after they had their heads severed from their bodies or after they were virtually cut in half by a blast. He talked about having to pull dog tags off dead kids -- the same kids he had been sharing a smoke and a laugh with an hour earlier -- and then having to stack those bodies like a cord of wood."

Borsellino ends the story with the news that he got number 360 in the draft lottery, ending any chance he would be sent to Vietnam. When he called his uncle to tell him the news, Danny told him it was about time one of them caught a break.

Asked how they draw strength to endure the challenges of ALS, Basu said, "I'm getting my strength from Rob. He's just extraordinary about this and he has an amazing sense of humor, which has not let up for one day since his diagnosis. I figure I can't be down if he isn't."

"I go around and meet people with ALS and MS," Borsellino said. "They don't have health care, they don't have families. In that regard, I'm blessed."