Roger Moroney interviewing 96-year-old 1931 Hawke's Bay Earthquake survivors Joan Murray and Audrey Robinson. Photo / NZME
Roger Kim Moroney
September 5, 1954 – October 1, 2021
If Roger Moroney was writing his own life story he'd probably be making light of how he started out in journalism – how he rode into the job on a bike and just kept riding, and writing.
When he started at Napier newspaper the Daily Telegraph in November 1984, the credentials he had for the job were that he liked motorbikes, and writing about them. Otherwise, he was a wool store worker who was a bit of a lad who'd done the Big OE.
As it happened, newspaper staff, in particular their editorial departments, tended to keep CBD hotels and their licensees afloat, and conveniently, two were close at hand – the Cri more or less across the road, and the Masonic just up the road.
Conveniently, going to the pub, even in company time and in long lunch breaks, was acceptable to the point of if you didn't go to the pub you weren't doing your job. It was where you met your sources, where amid the conviviality many news stories started to emerge.
He was in his element, writing about bikes, and the relationships developed meeting new people through the job and at the pub, many of which would become lifelong and close friends, and getting paid for it
One is Dave Turnbull who was doing the odd piece for Napier's community papers when he met Moroney, and for the last 10 years at least he was one of a small group who would meet at Turnbull's home every Friday, have a few beers, and take part in Moroney's quiz.
It was a sign of the full immersion Moroney would derive.
"He loved it," says Turnbull.
Another was Colin Stone, the former boss at Napier City Rovers football club, later chief executive of Sport Hawke's Bay and now with Sport New Zealand in Wellington.
He was with the football club when Moroney branched out into covering the heydays of the football club, becoming more or less one of the boys but also selling raffles for the club at work and around town.
"He was full-on," Stone says.
"Everyone enjoyed his company very much."
Moroney had been working for Napier newspaper the Daily Telegraph for about 15 years when the newspaper and the Hastings-based Hawke's Bay Herald Tribune, by then in the same company ownership, merged to become the Hawke's Bay Today in May 1999.
The story of how his career started - and becoming a type of public property, a part of the lives of people who never met him - was told by himself in a special publication in 2007, as Hawke's Bay Today marked 150 years of newsprint in Hawke's Bay.
An old boy of Napier Boys High School (1968-1971), he'd started writing about motorcycling on a freelance basis for "a small NZ bike mag" in 1974, the year he turned 20.
In the late 70s, concerned about the dearth of bike news on the motoring pages at the Daily Telegraph, he approached the editor, who agreed to run a fortnightly bike road-test column – testing the bikes and doing the yarns alongside his day-job of pushing the bales around the woolstore.
By late 2007, close to 40 years since those first steps, he calculated he'd road-tested about 350 motorbikes – some of which, perhaps most notably a red Ducati, attracted some envy among workmates as it sat parked in the Daily Telegraph car park most days for a week.
"[I] crashed a couple and pretty near wrote one, and myself for that matter, off," he wrote, acknowledging the upside was riding motorbikes and getting paid a little to do it.
"Eventually the editor offered me a job as a reporter in 1984 – reckoning I had some skill with words," he continued.
"I didn't think so. I just wrote how I spoke basically, as I had no formal training in journalism … and had left school at 16."
Sports writer Russell Williamson had met Moroney as the guy coming in once a fortnight with the bike column which was "so well written" – by typewriter, he recalls – that it needed little editing.
When editor Ken Hawker asked Williamson if he knew of anyone who might be interested in a reporting job, Moroney was first to mind.
"He came in, and I think he was more or less hired on the spot," Williamson says.
Within weeks Moroney was easing into news stories and features, but "hard news was not my forte", he wrote.
Within a few months he was also doing a weekly TV review, and video reviews.
The Teleview by Roger Moroney becoming an extremely popular read, and effectively launching him as a columnist, leading ultimately to the Roger Moroney At Large column, which started in the Daily Telegraph in the mid-1990s.
Taking a short break after finishing in 2020, he was hired to continue that column, the last appearing just days before he died.
Arriving in journalism at a time when the September 1983 disappearance of a Napier schoolgirl was still daily news, Moroney developed a niche in reporting police news, and the progress of the Napier City Rovers as they became national league champions and a Chatham Cup-winning outfit.
His rapport with the police staff was such that in 2002 when police were about to head out of town to arrest Jules Mikus for the 1987 murder of Teresa Cormack it was Moroney alone who they tipped-off the night beforehand.
His involvement with football, or soccer as it was known at the time, was branching-out, for he had not played the game.
He had indeed played rugby at school, with some aspiration to become a Hawke's Bay Magpie, like those in the programmes he sold in the great 1966-69 Ranfurly Shield era at McLean Park.
Like the Magpies for whom he kept the trophy in safe-keeping under the bed during the week, because his dad was the Hawke's Bay Rugby Football Union's "custodian and fix-it chap" and was entrusted with looking after the shield between games.
Moroney would later write about how he'd charged schoolmates 10 cents for a peak at the shield, just as he would write the experiences of being a Kiwi on his OE and somehow relate them to times and events about which he was actually writing.
The football also spawned a relationship with 1981-2002 Napier MP Geoff Braybrooke. The Labour man mades weekly visits to the "DT" office to settle their English football wagers – Braybrooke backing Chelsea and Moroney backing Southampton, because that's where he landed on his first arrival in the UK.
He would become well known for feature writing, with particular focuses on people's memories of the Hawke's Bay Earthquake, and events of World War II, during which his dad drove tanks in Italy.
One of five children of Bill and Iris Moroney, he grew-up in the family home on Marine Parade, and started school at nearby Te Awa.
He is survived by his wife of 43 years Glenda, who worked in the office at the woolstore when they met and has for most of the time since worked in nursing.
He is also survived by daughters Carly and Marisa and son Dean, brothers Douglas and Peter, and seven grandchildren.
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