Chuck Haga, newspaper giant and gifted storyteller, dies at 75

On Sept. 11, 2001, Tim McGuire had scores of journalists in the Star Tribune newsroom to choose from to tell the story of that day’s hell and heroism. The executive editor walked over to Chuck Haga’s desk with a sheaf of wire photos from Ground Zero.

“Here,” McGuire said to Haga, handing him the photos. “Write.”

Haga, a proud son of the North Dakota prairie whose graceful writing riveted Grand Forks Herald readers before a legendary 20-year career at the Star Tribune, died May 11 of cancer at Valley Senior Living in Grand Forks. He was 75.

Known to write long and make the most of every syllable, Haga prolonged the four months doctors gave him to live in 2021 into four years. He wanted more time with his students at the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks, where he returned to live in 2007, and more trips to the place he adored most, Itasca State Park.

“He invested his soul in just about everything he did,” McGuire said. “It was remarkable, and it’s what fueled the beautiful writing.”

Haga’s intellect, wit and emotion ran deep. He preferred talking to homeless people or World War II veterans rather than bigwigs with titles, his friends said.

He once worked as a bartender at Judy’s Tavern in Grand Forks and looked the part with his beard, burly build and tobacco pipe. He owned a lot of flannel shirts and only a couple of neckties.

“It’s almost like the writing was secondary to getting to know the people he was talking to, show that they had value. He loved writing about little folks,” said former Star Tribune colleague Bruce Benidt of Charlottesville, Va. “I think people could feel that this is an open, wounded, loving, not-judgmental person, and they would open to him.”

Pete Haga of Grand Forks said he remembers tagging along to the newsroom on Saturday mornings with his father to file a story. At the grocery store, he came to expect readers stopping his dad to talk about his latest column.

“I learned at an early age that I would have to share him with folks from all over, but he was just my dad,” Pete Haga said. “I was always very proud of him. I knew the impact he was having, and I knew how much he loved doing what he did.”

Chuck Haga’s Norwegian father immigrated to Valley City, N.D., where Haga was born and raised with a sister and two brothers. Their mother, ill from diabetes, died when he was 16. Three years later, crews recovered his father from the Sheyenne River.

In a column last year, Haga wrote that his father had apparently fallen into the river while walking home from a bartending shift. The news left him feeling numb and alone.

“I did not properly grieve the deaths of my mother and father, and I’ve learned in the decades since how much that has affected me,” he wrote.

He enrolled at UND in 1967, joining the staff of the Dakota Student newspaper and later serving as its editor. He worked as a reporter for the Herald from 1971 to 1976 before returning to UND to receive his bachelor’s and master’s degrees.

Haga studied at the University of Oslo on a yearlong Rotary Club fellowship in the late 1970s before becoming a columnist at the Herald, writing about planting the Norwegian flag in a friend’s farm field and a tiny island that occasionally emerged in the Red River that he proclaimed as Hagaland.

He shared in the joy of immigrants moving to Grand Forks, whom he welcomed through his work with local nonprofits.

Cheryl Olson, who babysat Haga’s son and worked with Haga at the Dakota Student, said he was active in anti-war demonstrations on campus and formed a union at the Herald. He was the first to make Olson feel welcome when she joined the Herald as its only young woman reporter.

Reporters followed Haga “like little ducklings,” she said, from the Herald newsroom through the alley and into the local bar to solve the world’s problems over pitchers of beer.

“He was sort of our ringleader,” said Olson, of Hermon, Maine.

In 1987, Haga joined the Star Tribune, where he pitched an ambitious story retracing John Steinbeck’s route from the book “Travels With Charley.” His new bosses trusted Haga, giving him two months to travel to 36 states and pen essays for the Sunday paper. At the time, Haga was newly divorced from his high school sweetheart, Marci Falstad, although they remained close.

He could relate to those with demons and debts, and close friends knew he was a tortured writer who was his own worst critic.

“Steinbeck had a lot of darkness in him, too,” said Benidt. “That notion of being alone, on your own and being OK even with darkness, because the next minute you might talk to somebody in the cafe ... and he’d tell a hell of a story.”

Haga was dispatched to Grand Forks to report on the 1997 Red River flood along with a crew of Star Tribune staffers. Mary Jane Smetanka, who had also worked at the Herald before moving to the Star Tribune, recalled evacuating their downtown hotel and following Haga to his brother Tom’s house for refuge.

“I won’t forget standing in the yard of Chuck’s brother’s home when the city started on fire. We could see the smoke,” said Smetanka, of Minneapolis. “Nobody knew Grand Forks better than Chuck.”

When the Star Tribune offered staff buyouts in 2007, Haga left the paper and returned to Grand Forks to watch his grandchildren grow up and be closer to Pete. He worked for the Herald for six years until he retired from full-time work and took up teaching newswriting at UND.

Writing a weekly column for the Herald in recent years, Haga shared with readers his cancer diagnosis, a 5,000-mile “Friendship Tour” to 19 states and his speech for UND’s summer commencement last August. In his remarks to the students, Haga said they gave him hope but that he wished they would read more, “especially the newspaper.”

He maintained his Herald column until last year’s presidential election, when he resigned after Forum Communications prohibited columnists from writing about national politics. Readers lamented the loss in letters to the editor.

Jim Durkin of Bemidji worked with Haga at the Herald and Star Tribune. He said Haga was “special from the get-go ... the best writer that’s come out of North Dakota. He showed he could keep up with the big boys when he was at the Star Trib, too.”

Haga didn’t own a vehicle, opting for the bus or a rental car for a camping trip with his dog-eared copy of “Common Plants of Itasca State Park.” He lived in pauper apartments rich in literature, the walls stacked with books.

He was a doting grandfather to Morgan, Mason and Emma, and happiest playing cribbage, sharing a slice of pie or immersed in the solitude of Itasca. Haga’s last essay from the Steinbeck assignment for the Star Tribune said his chief regret was “not having time to linger.”

When Pete Haga shared on Facebook that his father had died, more than 550 tributes and counting flooded in from students, journalists, friends and fans.

An open house to celebrate Haga’s life will be held at UND’s Gorecki Alumni Center from 4-6 p.m. on May 27, which would have been his 76th birthday.