Ewart Rouse, retired award-winning Inquirer reporter and editor, author, and journalism professor, has died at 85
He also played cricket, managed teams, and became one of the region’s greatest advocates for the sport and its immigrant players.
Ewart Rouse, 85, of Lawnside, retired award-winning reporter and editor for The Inquirer, author, journalism adjunct professor, mentor, immigrant advocate, and indomitable cricketer, died Thursday, July 2, of age-associated decline at the Samaritan Center at Voorhees.
Born in Trinidad, West Indies, Mr. Rouse immigrated to New York in 1969 and joined The Inquirer in 1974. For nearly 30 years, until he retired in 2002, Mr. Rouse was an award-winning business and news reporter, suburban editor, and mentor to hundreds of young journalists.
He won a 1980 Keystone Award for a news series on city taxi service and was recognized for another series on street gang homicides involving Black youth. Later, he wrote business columns and covered South Jersey news.
He opened a 1975 story about former President Ford’s first visit to Philadelphia with: “The old man sat alone and dejectedly with his flags against the wall of the Philadelphia National Bank building at 5th and Market Streets. ‘Not one,’ he muttered. ‘I haven’t sold not one flag today..’”
Before The Inquirer, Mr. Rouse was a news and political reporter for the Associated Press in Newark, Atlantic City, and Washington D.C. “He was a popular colleague who contributed importantly to the paper’s growth,” Gene Foreman, retired managing editor at The Inquirer, said on Facebook.
Other former Inquirer colleagues called Mr. Rouse “professional and gracious,” “careful and respectful,” and “kind and generous.” Retired Inquirer editor Lil Swanson said on Facebook: “Ewart was filled with wisdom and grace. When he was an editor, young writers flocked to him because he always made their stories better and helped them grow.”
He covered courts and politics for the Trinidad Guardian in Port-of-Spain before leaving for New York, and interviewed Trinidad Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul for the 1997 book Conversations with V.S. Naipaul. In Philadelphia and South Jersey, he taught news writing, business writing, and investigative journalism at Temple, Rutgers, and Arcadia Universities.
He mentored many students of color and edited books for other writers. He enjoyed fiction and detailed plots, and wrote a four-book series of cricket-themed novels he called the Sticky Wicket Collection.
Readers called his books “highly entertaining” and “a wonderful addition to cricket literature” in reviews. His daughter Karen said: “The clackety-clack (zing!) of his typewriter was a constant in our home.”
Mr. Rouse played cricket in Trinidad and later in South Jersey, and he cofounded the Philadelphia Cricket League, the New Jersey Cricket Association, and the Echelon Cricket Club. He played the game, managed teams, and became one of the region’s greatest advocates for cricket and its immigrant players.
In 2013, he earned a lifetime achievement award from the South Jersey Caribbean Cultural and Development Organization, and recognition from then-Camden Mayor Dana Redd for his contributions to the community as a journalist, teacher, and cricket activist. “It truly was an honor to be recognized by my own community,” he said on his website, ewartrouse.com.
In a 2016 online interview, Mr. Rouse was asked to advise young writers. “Read anything you get your hands on,” he said, “From books and newspapers … to labels on paint. Each contains nuggets of information that the mind will retrieve for just the right spot in your next project.”
Ewart Rigsby Rouse was born Sept. 16, 1940, in Tunapuna, Trinidad. He was an avid reader and creative writer as a boy, and noticed one day that several of his favorite writers — Charles Dickens, John Steinbeck, and Ernest Hemingway — started out as newspaper reporters.
“And now I wanted to be a journalist like them,” he said in a short self-published autobiography.
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He met his wife, Vanda, in Trinidad, and they married, and had daughters Joann, Karen, and Kristin. They lived in New York, Pleasantville, Washington D.C., and settled in Lawnside in the 1970s.
Mr. Rouse was active with the C.C. Morris Cricket Library Association, the South Jersey Writers’ Group, and the Rainy Tuesday Writers Group. He was an avid gardener and routinely gave away bags of home-grown tomatoes to friends and neighbors.
He collected records, listened to Nat King Cole and Frank Sinatra, followed the 76ers, and grilled outdoors as often as possible. He took his family on memorable trips to Trinidad that “opened up a world to us that was accessible, one that we could dare to explore,” said his daughter Karen.
In 2016, Mr. Rouse told aspiring writers: “Who knows, maybe you end up with a bestseller. Some might call you a dreamer. But, hey, as the saying goes, you can’t have a dream come [true] if you don’t have a dream.”
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In addition to his wife and daughters, Mr. Rouse is survived by three grandsons, two sisters, a brother, and other relatives.
A private celebration of his life is to be held later.
Donations in his name may be made to the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists, 30 S. 15th St., 15th Floor, Philadelphia, Pa. 19102.
