Vince Robertiello (2018)

Vince Robertiello (Jamie Roberts), a former Sports Editor of The Ridgewood News, is being inducted as a Special Contributor to Ridgewood High School athletics.Robertiello began his sports writing career in 1944 when he was a sophomore at long-defunct Paterson Central High School. He covered their football, baseball and basketball teams as a stringer for the also now defunct Paterson Morning Call. He graduated high school in 1946 and spent a semester at the Columbia School of Journalism, landing a job with the Call full time as a general assignment reporter. The late Bob Whiting rescued him from the politics of the city by offering a place on the sports department staff. Robertiello served in the Korean War for three years as an Army staff sergeant and, in 1954, went to work at The Ridgewood News as a general assignment reporter and later as sports editor. Robertiello covered Ridgewood High School football for 30 years and also worked for a succession of corporations. He then covered baseball, basketball and track at RHS, as well as coach Otis Grendler's marvelous 100-match regular season tennis unbeaten streak, the Ridgewood YMCA swim team and the highlight, following Carin Cone Vanderbush's championship swimming career during his five-year stay as The Ridgewood News sports editor and, subsequently, as a reporter and Sports Editor of the Paterson Evening News and beyond. Jamie Roberts, his alter ego, was born in 1962 when United Merchants, a New York Textile company, had him under contract as its editor of publications and refused to allow him to write elsewhere under his own name. The "Jamie" was from his son, James, and the "Roberts" a contraction of his last name. He used that pen name covering Ridgewood High School sports from then on. Robertiello's prized two sports writing awards highly, both were for columns. He earned first place in the New Jersey Press Association's sports writing division for a column on Ridgewood High School's late football coaching legend, Frank Mozeleski, published in The Ridgewood News and repeated in 1972 competition's in the weekly sports writing category for a column featuring RHS head football coach Roger Sweeney and Paramus High School head football coach John DeGasperis.