The Legend of Deputy Dick.

From left, Jim Donaldson of the Providence Journal, Dick Cerasuolo of the Worcester Telegram & Gazette and Howard Ulman of the Associated Press at a meeting of the Patriots Hall of Fame Nominating Committee.

When I heard the news yesterday that a former colleague on the Patriots' beat, Dick Cerasuolo of the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, had passed away early in the morning at the age of 80, I was saddened. I had worked alongside Dick for 23 years, from the time I first started on the beat in 1977 until his retirement in 2000, at the very start of the Bill Belichick Era. And we continued the association through our memberships on the Patriots Hall of Fame Nominating Committee.

But I was also reminded of happier times -- the sort that could only be experienced as part of the wild ride all of us took as the Patriots transformed themselves from the standing joke of the National Football League to its most enduring dynasty.

I could tell stories of road-trip hi-jinks, of poker games and evenings spent in hotel bars listening to famous people prattle on while we watched them down a few too many libations, and other tales of the sort. But there's something that will always stick in my memory as something that captured the good-natured essence of Dick Cerasuolo.

At some point, we started calling him "Deputy Dick." There was a good reason for it.


Dick was one of the true veterans of the beat, there from almost the very beginning. He was a gruff sort of guy at first glance, a bear of a man, but once he got to know and trust you, there was no more loyal individual on the beat in terms of friendship. He could also poke fun at himself along with the rest of us, and eventually laugh along with those that might tease him for some of his eccentricities -- such as the time he spent almost an entire game grumbling about getting a third-row seat in the Giants Stadium press box despite his lengthy tenure on the beat, which should have warranted front-row accommodations.

The writers of the so-called "Suburban Alliance" (the non-Boston papers) basically valued friendship and trust over competitiveness. Since few of our newspapers overlapped in our coverage-area spheres, we would share transcripts of interviews with each other as long as it was accepted that no one would steal stories verbatim out of print. The philosophy was to send along the quotes from group interviews and craft your own stories, and to respect exclusives, and it worked.

For a while, about three decades ago, the Patriots media corps was not allowed to work within the administration building inside Schaefer/Sullivan/Foxboro Stadium. The team's front office had outgrown the available space within the building, and we were no longer trusted to work inside the Stadium Club overlooking the north end zone seats, so the team set up a three-room house trailer in the parking lot, perched precariously at the crest of a hill overlooking the parking lots for the harness racing track next door. The Globe and Herald and the Associated Press occupied one room to the left of the trailer, the center section was a communal area with access to the tiny bathroom, and the third room was where the rest of us ink-stained wretches worked. If you were from Providence, Hartford, Quincy, Brockton, Worcester, or Attleboro, you were pretty-much assured regular seating. Anyone else from the many other newspapers that wanted to cover the Patriots had to hope there were enough cubicles left after the regulars claimed their work stations.

WBZ's Rex Trailer

After a while, we started calling the media trailer "Boomtown," an homage to the long-running, weekend-morning children's show on Boston's WBZ-TV, Channel 4. The show had a cowboy motif and was hosted by an actor named Rex Trailer who looked good in Western attire sitting atop his trusty horse Goldrush, hence the connection to our trailer.

The trailer was cramped and not very climate-controlled. The electricity was sketchy, ventilation was bad, and the small bathroom (not connected to any sewer or water lines) was often rendered uninhabitable -- and no, the Patriots would not let us go to the bathroom inside the stadium. And on days when high winds blew through the parking lot, it often felt inside Boomtown as if the whole thing would be sent cascading over the precipice and down into the gravel pit below.

Another quirky thing is that the trailer was often mistaken by fans to be the ticket office, which was actually a few thousand feet further down U.S. 1. So they'd just storm right into Boomtown and wander into our working areas, expecting to buy tickets. Often when that happened, they'd run headlong into Dick Cerasuolo at his work station -- and, annoyed as he was at being interrupted while on deadline, he'd respond to them in his distinctive growl that tickets were not to be found here.

It became a source of great amusement to the rest of us to see fear in the eyes of the ticket-seeking fans upon their meetings with Dick. I'm not sure who came up with the moniker of "Deputy Dick" -- maybe Carlo Imelio of the Springfield Union-News or Jim Donaldson of the Providence Journal -- but as Dick was the one laying down the law in Boomtown, he became "Deputy Dick" for all time thereafter.

Deputy Dick … the man that cleaned up Boomtown. Rest in peace, my friend.