Longtime Baltimore Sun obituaries writer Frederick N. Rasmussen resigns after more than 51 years

Baltimore Sun obituaries writer Frederick N. Rasmussen, who chronicled the lives of Marylanders ranging from mayors to actors to locksmiths, has resigned after 51 years and two months. His last day was Friday.

“As my late mother used to say, every dog has his day, and I’ve had mine,” Rasmussen told Baltimore Fishbowl.

Rasmussen, 77, plans to keep writing but he said he no longer felt he had editorial freedom since Sinclair Broadcast Group executive chairman David Smith purchased the newspaper in 2024. 

Sinclair operates several conservative-leaning television news stations across the country, including Baltimore’s Fox45. The Baltimore Sun now regularly publishes articles from Fox45, as well as opinion pieces by conservative commentator Armstrong Williams.

“The ideological drift of the paper with the new owners is not my way of thinking,” Rasmussen said.

Rasmussen is the latest of many journalists to leave the Sun since Smith took over, including longtime columnist Dan Rodricks, who now writes for Baltimore Fishbowl.

Still, Rasmussen reflects fondly on his time with the newspaper.

“I never regretted going to work,” he said. “I never was one of these guys who couldn’t wait for it to be Friday and had the dreads on Sunday, because every day was different, every story was different, and I was blessed in the majority of my career.”

After college, Rasmussen worked in advertising and freelanced for Boston magazine. It was also in Boston where Rasmussen met his first wife. When she got a job in Baltimore, he moved with her and worked part time in a school library here.

Rasmussen had his first story published in The Evening Sun as a freelancer in 1974, and he went on to work as a photo librarian at the Sun for 19 years. He wrote articles about food, travel, sports, and history; reviewed books; and even covered governments in northern Carroll County.

Then, in the early ‘90s, when staff from The Evening Sun merged with The Baltimore Sun, Rasmussen took on a new role writing obituaries. He was tasked with writing the “mort du jour,” or “death of the day.” Over the past nearly 30 years, he estimates he’s written thousands of obituaries.

Sometimes funeral homes send in bare-bones sketches of obituaries. Other times, Rasmussen hears about the departed from their families or from fellow reporters who know someone on their beat who died. However the news gets to him, Rasmussen scours the Sun’s archives to research any articles that have been published about them. He also interviews family members and others who knew the person to help piece together their story.

Rasmussen has interviewed celebrities, like Baltimore-born filmmakers John Waters and Barry Levinson (both of whom are still very much alive), and politicians, like the late U.S. Reps. John Lewis and John McCain.

But for Rasmussen, his favorite pieces have been about the everyday person, “normal people raised in extraordinary circumstances.”

People like his friend Hugh Hicks, a Mount Vernon Place eye doctor who accumulated an enormous and eclectic collection of lightbulbs before his death. Another man had a basement full of soil samples from around the world.

Rasmussen wrote about a 60-year-old who went back to college to earn their degree, and an 80-year-old who hiked the Appalachian Trail.

Then, there was the woman who swept drug dealers off her block.

“She would not allow those drug dealers in her neighborhood, in that street,” Rasmussen recalled. “She took her broom out there and beat them with her broom. She kept that block clean.”

In Rasmussen’s line of work, he has become all too familiar – though never desensitized – to tragedy. He has covered large-scale death events, including the AIDS crisis, 9/11 attacks, and the COVID-19 pandemic, among others. In each, he seeks to center the people whose lives were touched by losses. 

Rasmussen wrote about an AIDS activist, whose mother was initially adamantly opposed to her son’s obituary mentioning his work with AIDS care and prevention.

Rasmussen told the man’s brother, “Well, that’s a shame because this is a person who is so visible in this movement. To have him go unremarked to the great reward is really not right.”

The brother persuaded his mother. After the obituary was published, she wrote a letter to Rasmussen, thanking him for honoring her son.

Other times, Rasmussen has written about close calls with death. As part of the Sun’s team reporting on 9/11, Rasmussen got a call about a Roland Park Little League coach who had been in the World Trade Center during the attacks.

“I called and I got the guy. He was alive,” Rasmussen said. “He got out of the first tower. They came down inside the staircase, aviation gasoline dripping in. They’re all trying to shuffle down and carry some old woman who couldn’t walk. And he was on his cell phone to his two kids in Park School saying goodbye to them.”

“He got out and he was so jacked up with adrenaline that he started running. Then the building fell.”

Rasmussen appreciates learning the stories of people who lived into their 80s, 90s and even 100s; it’s the younger folks, people “dying out of their time,” that are hard to write.

“It’s not that they haven’t accomplished anything,” he said. “It’s just not the right time to let them go.”

The Baltimore Sun regularly hosts interns, many of whom Rasmussen has helped mentor. Most have trepidation about calling up the family of someone who has died, he said.

“They were terrified of calling a family because they thought they were going to be greeted with sobs and screams and all that,” Rasmussen said. “I said that sometimes happens, especially in the young deaths. But I will tell you, 99% of families are so touched that The Baltimore Sun has decided to write about their loved one.”

“I guess in some ways it’s maybe early grief therapy,” he added.

Obituaries are an opportunity to celebrate a person’s life, Rasmussen said.

“[Life is] an incredibly valuable thing,” he said. “The time goes by real fast, and no matter how long or short it is, people do something, they accomplish something, and my job is to find out what that is.”

Rasmussen said he has been honored to work alongside “incredibly talented” reporters, artists, photographers, and editors for more than five decades, including The Baltimore Sun’s other primary obituaries writer Jacques Kelly.

When the day comes that Rasmussen meets his final deadline, he knows exactly how his obituary will read.

“Easy. Six words: ‘He came. He saw. He went.’ Dash 30 dash, over and out,” he said.