Miami Beach journalist and mountain climber
Sascha Rothchild is asked the same thing about once a month. The question has nothing to do with her book, her television series or anything else she’s done. It’s always about her dad.
“‘We’re trying to contact your father and we can’t find him,’’’ Sascha recalled, impersonating the messenger. “That always made me happy the past couple years, that his work has lived on.”
While some would classify Sascha’s experience as a byproduct of being the daughter of a writer, it’s not that simple. Not many can claim to have a mastery of as many subjects as John Rothchild once had.
An authority on subjects as varied as Florida, finance and 14ers — the mountains 14,000 feet or higher that he would climb later in life — Rothchild died Thursday.
He was 74 and a longtime resident of Miami Beach.
Born May 13, 1945, in Norfolk, Virginia, but raised in St. Petersburg, Rothchild attended Yale University, where he earned a reputation for being an independent thinker.
“He never saw the need to go down the same path that many of his classmates went down,” said Beth Dunlop, a Miami writer and architecture critic, who met Rothchild when she was a freshman at Vassar in 1966. Dunlop also was an architecture critic at the Herald.
Rothchild’s writing career began to flourish in college, and he eventually worked his way up to managing editor of the Yale Daily News.
He later broke barriers when he hired Dunlop to write a story for him, making her one of the first women to be published in the storied paper.
The year after he graduated in 1967, Rothchild again displayed his penchant for taking a different path: He enrolled in the
Peace Corps. He would spend two years in Ecuador before returning to the States in 1970 to begin his career in journalism.
Rothchild’s first job stateside was at the Washington Monthly, a political magazine.
There, he met longtime friend Taylor Branch, the author known for his books chronicling the life of the Rev. Martin Luther King
Jr. and the civil rights movement.
“I was the straight man and John was the humorist,” Branch recalled. “He had a gift for whimsy. He was very funny.”
Rothchild left the publication in 1972. He moved to Everglades City before settling in Miami Beach in 1980.
His friendship with Branch spawned all sorts of adventures.
Several people referred to Rothchild as daring but no story illustrated that quality more than getting captured with Branch in Venezuela while the two pursued a story on a Washington bomber.
“He brought out the best in me to want to write about at the end because once we survived, it was liberating to write how foolish we had been,” Branch said. “In a way, it was terrifying but it was also hilarious and John helped me see that.”
But Rothchild’s life wasn’t all international prisons and humor.
After spending time as a columnist for Time and Fortune, Rothchild eventually moved to investment writing, writing several books including, “A Fool and His Money” and “One Up on Wall Street: How to Use What You Already Know to Make Money in the Market” with investment guru Peter Lynch.
“He communicated to people what they really needed to know about how to deal with money,” Dunlop said.
“He was able to take complicated concepts and express them in a way that those who didn’t know the field of money or investing could truly understand.”
He’d also go on to help Marjory Stoneman Douglas craft her autobiography, “Voice of the River.”
He wrote what some consider his best work: “Up for Grabs: A Trip Through Time and Space in the Sunshine State,” which Rothchild’s friend, Cathy Leff, the former director of the Wolfsonian Museum, called “a masterpiece.”
“If you really want to try to understand [Florida], where it came from, its DNA — that would be a very pivotal book to read,” Leff said.
Rothchild surprised friends when he took up mountain climbing and cycling later in life.
He sarcastically boasted of scaling a 14,000-foot peak or, as he put it, “bagging a 14er” in a Herald piece, claiming that his years of inactivity were his own form of training.
“In six countries, I’ve stood atop 63 peaks at 14,000 feet and beyond, including Argentina’s Aconcagua, highest in the world outside the Himalayas,” Rothchild wrote.
Rothchild’s survivors include his wife, Susan, his sister, Melanie, his children, Chauncey, Berns and Sascha, and his grandchild Smith.
A memorial service will be in New York City sometime this summer.