James A. Rousmaniere Jr.

James A. Rousmaniere Jr. of Roxbury, a longtime journalist who after retiring from newspaper management turned to writing about humans’ impact on inland waters, died on Dec. 11, 2022, at home in Roxbury surrounded by family. The cause was pulmonary fibrosis. He was 77.

A New Yorker, he was drawn to New Hampshire’s Monadnock Region twice for opportunities at The Keene Sentinel where between 1970 and 1972 he worked as a reporter and between 1981 and 2013 he served as editor and president.

His life was defined by grace, compassion and care for others. He was a mentor to many.

The son of James Ayer and Jessie (Pierce) Rousmaniere, he was born in New York March 25, 1945, with a twin brother; they were the second and third of eight children. In his early years the family lived in various parts of the United States before settling in Oyster Bay, N.Y.

As a young teenager he attended Le Rosey, an international school in Switzerland, and then Brooks School in North Andover, Mass. In 1967 he graduated from Harvard, after which he joined the Peace Corps, and for two years he worked in agriculture and irrigation development in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh.

On his return to the United States in 1969 he set out looking for a small newspaper to begin a journalism career that he hoped would eventually lead him to the New Delhi bureau of a major U.S. newspaper. He had studied modern South Asian history at college, he had taken a liking to journalism as editor of his high school newspaper, and he had spent a college summer working for the Durango (Colo.) Herald.

In 1970 he joined The Sentinel as a reporter, covering the full range of local subjects before moving to The Baltimore Sun in 1972. He gravitated to economics and business news. In 1978, at the height of a national slowdown that was marked by high inflation, he was appointed to The Sun’s Washington bureau to help explain what was going on in the economy.

While in Washington he reported on tax legislation, monetary policy and other economic and financial affairs. In addition to economics, he was drawn into other fields and events, including covering the aftermath of the assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan.

In 1981, as he was being considered for appointment to The Sun’s New Delhi bureau, he was asked by his then-father-in-law, James D. Ewing, to return to Keene to help run The Sentinel. Mr. Ewing and his wife, Ruth, had owned and published the newspaper since 1954.

Rousmaniere and his then-wife, Carolyn, decided to move to Keene, where the prospect of managing a news enterprise and living as a family unit with their three daughters had more appeal than scurrying around Asia reporting on international matters.

Two years later, the couple divorced, but Rousmaniere remained at The Sentinel in management with his former father-in-law, and continued in that line following the sale of the newspaper to the Ewings’ nephew, Thomas Ewing, in the 1990s.

In 1990 he married Sharon Ostow, also a New Yorker, whom he had met on a tennis court in Keene. They shared an interest in the news in that she was the publisher of The Weekly (originally Leisure Weekly), an alternative newspaper based in Keene.

In the early 1990s Rousmaniere began exploring new methods of information distribution. The Sentinel experimented with a telephone-based news service, and it launched the first daily newspaper website in northern New England. He pressed for expansion of digital news in the industry as president of the New England Newspaper Association, which for many years was the principal trade group for daily newspapers in the Northeast.

During the following decades, Rousmaniere took on consulting assignments in economically developing countries and emerging democracies for a variety of international media-development organizations in Asia, Africa, Central Europe and Russia. Many of these assignments were jointly conducted with his wife.

He retired from The Sentinel in 2013. He continued as an independent journalist, occasionally writing columns for The Sentinel, and for a couple of years he wrote about the socio-economic impacts of the shuttering of nuclear power plants generally, and the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant near Brattleboro in particular, for the Boston Globe and other outlets.

In 2019, after developing an interest in inland waters, he published a book, “Water Connections — What fresh water means to us, what we mean to water,” about the connections between human society and inland waters.

He subsequently maintained a blog about human interactions with fresh water that covered such topics as contamination, hydropower, watershed protection and flood control, and he spoke widely on the subject, often under the auspices of N.H. Humanities.

Over the years he was involved with a number of non-profit organizations that worked to improve the lives of people in the region. And, additionally, after leaving The Sentinel he served as selectman and planning board member in Roxbury and as president of the Historical Society of Cheshire County, where he undertook a variety of writing and public speaking projects.

Beyond those associations he was active with Monadnock United, a group of political moderates and progressives that kept its members informed about such causes as voting rights in New Hampshire.

His principal personal priority was family, including his wife and three daughters, a granddaughter and his seven siblings. For hobbies, he enjoyed sailing, skiing, beekeeping, racquet sports, writing short fiction, gardening and especially travel. He was a parishioner at St. James Episcopal Church in Keene, and he also maintained an eclectic spiritual interest in Hinduism, principally through Ganesh, the elephant-headed god for whom he and friends in the 1970s had built a stone shrine in the woods of Chesterfield.

He is survived by his wife, Sharon; his daughters: Nicole (and husband Howard Rosen) of Alexandria, Va.; Tonya (and husband John Bowers) of Gaithersburg, Md.; and Sophie of Austin, Texas; his granddaughter, Nova, of Austin, Texas; also, his brothers: John (and wife Leah) of New York, N.Y.; Peter of Woodstock, Vt.; David (and wife Marie) of Charlotte, N.C.; Joe (and wife Chia-Li) of New York; Ned of St. Paul, Minn.; Arthur (and wife Jennifer) of Andover, Mass.; and Kate (and husband John Bercaw) of Oxford, Ohio; his brother-in-law, Mark Ostow of Cambridge, Mass.; his mothers-in-law, Sylvia Garland of Tucson, Ariz., and Phyllis Barber of New York; and many nieces and nephews.

In a note to Rousmaniere before his death, his friend and fellow writer, Jack Davis (winner of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction), said he felt that his comments at the publication of Jim’s book were apt for his life: Rousmaniere was a “guide and companion, knowledgeable and engaging, and when you part company with him — a sad moment — you will be grateful for what you learned and hope he has left you with.”

He will be deeply missed.

A memorial service will be held in on Saturday, February 4, 2023 at 1:00pm in St. James Episcopal Church, 44 West Street, Keene. All are welcome.

In lieu of flowers, the family suggests that gifts in his name be made to the Historical Society of Cheshire County, 246 Main St., Keene NH 03431; or the “News for the Future” project at The Keene Sentinel, 60 West St., Keene NH 03431.