ROTHENBURGER: There will never be another like Angelo Iacobucci

ANGELO IACOBUCCI was good column fodder. I once wrote about watching in amazement as he sat in City council chambers during a meeting and ate French fries and clipped his toe nails.

Describing his haircut, I said his barber must have used a Lawn-Boy (his hair was thicker and more plentiful back then).

‘Big Anj’ never tired of reminding me of that column over the years, always feigning indignation.

He started at NL nine years after I arrived in Kamloops to begin work at the Daily News and, while he was not exactly a snappy dresser even by Kamloops media standards, he had other strengths — his work ethic and his talent as a reporter quickly made him a force to be reckoned with.

There’s a legend, no doubt being recounted with great fondness today, that he had a habit of snacking from the lunches his fellow employees stored in the Radio NL fridge. As the story goes, one day one of his victims planted a cat-food sandwich in the fridge, which Angelo consumed without noticing.

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He was truly one of a kind, a big, brash bull in the China shop of local media, fearless, quick and incredibly productive. I’ve never known another journalist like him — feared but respected and liked all at the same time by the many politicians he wrote about. As the saying goes, when God made Angelo, she threw away the mold.

He didn’t suffer fools and phonies gladly and refused to suck up, but he never said anything about them he wouldn’t say to their faces.

“How does it feel to know you’re going to lose?” I once heard him ask an election candidate. I was flabbergasted to hear him say it and so was the normally talkative candidate, who was rendered speechless. As it happened, the candidate was my opponent, and did, indeed, lose.

That was Angelo, though, telling it like he saw it. When I was mayor, he was just as tough on me as he was any other politician, but I don’t remember him ever getting a story wrong, so how can you argue with that?

To Angelo, his news sources were just regular people who happened to be in jobs that put them in the headlines. He called everyone, whether it be unknowns, mayors or premiers, by their first names. One suspects that if he’d interviewed the Queen, he might have called her Liz.

And he was fiercely loyal to Radio NL. In Angelo’s mind, the other media weren’t even worth mentioning. When I signed on for a talk-show stint with CFJC back in the ‘90s, he shook his head sadly, as if I’d just done the stupidest thing in the world.

“Why the hell didn’t you talk to us?” he asked.

Angelo was the last of the Kamloops media legends still making a full-time living. Others have retired, died or moved away but Angelo remained, materializing at meetings, microphone in hand, and getting voice clips for a half dozen stories in 10 minutes.

But it wasn’t all about quick sound bites. His contacts here and throughout the province were part of the legend of Angelo Iacobucci. He got more scoops than any journalist I know.

Radio NL, once locally owned and hyper local, has changed the way it does things as new corporate owners have gone looking for efficiencies. 

Angelo was there to maintain the tradition of solid enterprise reporting, to backstop the jocks and young J-school grads.

His death on Friday leaves a big hole in NL’s news coverage and the entire Kamloops media scene. In this era of shrinking newsrooms, bottom-line journalism and diminishing respect for news media, Anj symbolized the way it used to be done, and should be done still.

The last time I mentioned Angelo Iacobucci in a column, I misspelled his name, which I discovered to my horror too late to correct. I could only hope he wouldn’t read it but, alas, such was not the case, and he took great pleasure in ribbing me about it. Payback from the Lawn-Boy.

But while people sometimes forgot how to spell his name, they certainly will never forget Angelo Iacobucci. At the next City council meeting, a red rose will be placed on the media table where Angelo sat for so many years. I suspect the chair he used will remain permanently vacant, because there’s no one capable of filling the spot left by this bigger-than-life media icon.

Mel Rothenburger is a former mayor of Kamloops and newspaper editor. He publishes the ArmchairMayor.ca opinion website, and is a director on the Thompson-Nicola Regional District board. He can be reached at mrothenburger@armchairmayor.ca.

Editors Note: This edited version of the column contains slight alterations for the sake of clarity.