Mike Kaszuba, tenacious reporter for the Star Tribune, dies at 71

Mike Kaszuba, a tenacious Minnesota Star Tribune reporter who put dozens of public officials and sports executives under a microscope over the course of 35 years with the newspaper, died June 17 of acute pancreatitis at the Halifax Health Medical Center in Daytona Beach, Fla. He was 71.

Hired by the Minneapolis Star in 1980 after working at a small Tennessee daily, Kaszuba for years was at the forefront of the Star Tribune’s biggest stories involving Hennepin County and state government.

“He went out there looking for the unvarnished truth, and he was the master at finding it,” said Matt Ehling, a TV producer and documentary filmmaker who founded Public Record Media (PRM), a St. Paul nonprofit that uses freedom of information laws to obtain government documents.

Mark Brunswick, a longtime Star Tribune colleague and friend, said Kaszuba wore the personality trait “disruptive” like a badge, owing to a desire to hold the powerful accountable. He held several leadership positions within the Newspaper Guild, the union representing the paper’s journalists.

He had “a quiet ego that never sought the spotlight,” Brunswick said. “The work always was supposed to speak for itself. And the work spoke.”

After Kaszuba retired from the Star Tribune in 2015, he approached Ehling about doing the same kind of work for PRM, but this time for free. He wrote numerous online articles for PRM, becoming its principal editorial voice.

Said Ehling of Kaszuba: “I think he was looking for a way to continue his work. He said, ‘I’m not done,’ and he continued to say that all the way up until the week before he died.”

Kaszuba was born in Hammond, Ind., and grew up in Calumet City, Ill., cementing him as a Chicago South Sider and a lifelong White Sox fan. After graduating from the University of South Florida in Tampa, he took his first newspaper job with the Bristol Herald Courier, on the Virginia-Tennessee line, in 1976.

Longtime friend Mike McKee, a retired legal journalist in San Francisco, was hired by the Bristol paper shortly after Kaszuba. The two often explored the mountains of eastern Tennessee in Kaszuba’s battered Jeep.

“I learned how to be a reporter by watching Mike,” McKee said. “He was so good at what he did, and I tried to emulate him. You realized this guy was something special.”

According to family members, the Bristol city editor liked Kaszuba’s work but not his long hair, and told him to cut it. Kaszuba went to the barber and then mailed the clippings to his boss with a note: “Since my hair is so important to you, I thought you would like this.” He was fired.

But he was quickly snapped up by the rival Kingsport (Tenn.) Times-News, where he won a public service award for his investigation of a local police department. From there, he was hired by the Star in the summer of 1980 — just in time for a newspaper strike.

At the Star Tribune, Kaszuba wrote about the impact of federal budget policies on local communities, covered Jesse Ventura when he was mayor of Brooklyn Park as well as governor, investigated the plane crash that killed U.S. Sen. Paul Wellstone in 2002, and probed the design flaws that caused the collapse of the Interstate 35W bridge in 2007. He was a member of the reporting team that for months covered the vote recount and appeals following the Franken-Coleman U.S. Senate race in 2008-09.

Kaszuba’s final beat assignment at the Star Tribune was sports business, reporting on the behind-the-scenes deals of publicly financed stadiums for the Twins, Vikings and Gophers. His last big story was an inside look at a struggling junior college football team on the Iron Range.

Kaszuba married Pat Bible, a fellow Times-News reporter, in 1979. Following a divorce, he married musician Sharone LeMieux in 1993. They moved in 2019 from St. Paul to Ponce Inlet, Fla., where Kaszuba walked the beach daily and served on the local planning commission.

He was fascinated by the World War II-era combat aircraft maintained by the Confederate Air Force, now called the Commemorative Air Force. And he never lost his love for baseball. In recent weeks, he speculated that as a kid he might have played against a boy in a neighboring town who is now Pope Leo XIV.

Kaszuba’s boyhood hero was Dave Nicholson, a journeyman White Sox outfielder who never lived up to his early promise as a power hitter. Newly retired and intent on “finding out what happens to heroes,” Kaszuba called Nicholson, then 76, every few weeks until the former player invited Kaszuba to his modest home in southern Illinois. His moving story about Nicholson was published in the Baseball Research Journal.

Besides his wife, Kaszuba is survived by his daughters, Lianna Colestock of White Bear Lake, Michael Anne Kaszuba of St. Paul, and Grace Kaszuba of Raleigh, N.C.; sons, Sam Kaszuba of St. Paul, and Colin and Mattison LeMieux, both of Minneapolis; a sister, Marianne Swanner, of Geneva, Fla.; and five grandchildren.

Kaszuba will be remembered from 2 to 4 p.m. July 26 at the Harriet Brasserie, 2724 W. 43rd St., Minneapolis. Family members said that Hawaiian shirts, his favorite attire, were welcome. Memorials are preferred to Public Record Media, 1539 Grand Av., St. Paul.

Sharone LeMieux said she took her husband to lunch on the day he retired in 2015. They ran into a politician, who congratulated Kaszuba and asked him: “Now that you’re retired, what are you — a Republican or a Democrat?"

Said Kaszuba, smiling: “You’ll never know.”

“To me, that was his finest compliment,” LeMieux said. “That was how unbiased his reporting was.”