Background helps define Rossi

Published 9:00 pm Saturday, October 9, 2004

LACEY – Just call him a natural-born salesman.

As a boy, he earned money by fishing golf balls out of a lake and selling them back to the duffers. By 12, he had a candle-making business. Later, he bought cars, fixed them up and sold them. And after college, starting with $200 and a used Ford Fairlane, he bought and sold property until he got rich.

Now, Republican Dino Rossi is doing his biggest sales job ever. He wants Washington to elect him governor.

The scars of a rough childhood – physical and emotional – remain, but Rossi projects a sunny serenity and a ready laugh that disarms even his political adversaries.

‘He’s just so darn charming,” said House Majority Leader Lynn Kessler, D-Hoquiam, who often sparred with Rossi during his years in the state Senate.

Rossi, 44, says his legislative successes, including a no-new-tax budget he negotiated with the Democratic House and governor, reflects the art of the deal he learned over a lifetime in business.

“I’ve never been afraid of hard work, and I’ve always been a businessman, a salesman,” Rossi said. “I love it. I love putting people together, finding out what each side wants. If they’re happy, we have a deal; I get paid.”

He’s using his own family’s struggles to illustrate his pitch that hard work and fair play usually pay off.

His Italian immigrant grandfather worked the coal mines at Black Diamond, then moved the family to Seattle and built roads. His father, John Rossi, was a golf caddy and worked in a foundry until World War II broke out and he enlisted in the Navy. Later, he went to Seattle University on the GI Bill and became a schoolteacher.

Rossi’s mother, whose parents were a Tlingit Indian and an Irish immigrant, fled Alaska with five children to escape an abusive husband. After a second ill-fated marriage, she met and married John Rossi, who had one son of his own from an unhappy marriage. Dino was their only child together.

His eldest half-brother, Dick Kogo, says John Rossi gave the entire family a sense of warmth and stability, recalling the day he cut apart the leather strap their mother’s second husband had used to beat them.

“Dino reminds me so much of him,” Kogo says.

But his childhood brought hard knocks both physical and emotional. At 3, an attack by a German shepherd left him with the jagged scar that runs down the right side of his face today.

“He grabbed me by the face and shook me like a rag doll. I remember being in the back of the police car and my mom holding my face together,” Rossi said. “A little bit further and it would have hit my temple.”

Rossi’s mother developed a drinking problem and would come home roaring drunk, either mean or sloppily sentimental.

“It was tough. I remember Mom and Dad arguing because Mom would be drunk,” Rossi says. “That was unnerving when you’re 6 or 7.”

When he was 7, his mother discovered Alcoholics Anonymous and got sober. The house grew peaceful, although at least one brother later had to fight alcoholism and Rossi himself felt the pull. At 18, he and a buddy got drunk and he smacked his car into a house. Rossi quit drinking more than 20 years ago.

“If I hadn’t seen all this and had all these negative experience, I’m not sure I would have quit drinking later,” he says.

John Rossi almost died of a heart attack when Dino was 12.

“That was the day my childhood ended,” Rossi said.

Rossi says he was an average student, loved playing baseball and “found cars and girls when I was a senior in high school.”

He also found a gift for turning a dime.

Besides fishing golf balls out of Lake Ballinger, he started Dino’s Candles when he was 12. He took a $25 loan from his father, bought a kit, started a route and eventually made a good profit.

In high school, he became a janitor, working up to team boss and eventually finding his own clients.

While attending Shoreline Community College and Seattle University, he polished the floors at the Space Needle and lived in a room above his mother’s beauty parlor.

“I had a hotplate. The bathtub was a hose in the sink.”

Today, Rossi, his wife Terry, 42, and their four children, ages 3 to 13, live in a $650,000 trophy house on the Sammamish Plateau near Issaquah.

After graduating with a business degree, he spent nine months bumming around Asia before coming home and spotting an ad for a commercial real estate company.

“It’s a real learning curve, and you get no salary or benefits, so it’s up to you to produce,” he recalled. “There’s no security in it.”

He started by cold-calling apartment building owners to see if they wanted to sell.

Besides selling, he became a landlord. He bought his first building, a lime green fourplex on Eastlake Avenue in Seattle, then a triplex on Magnolia bluff, a 32-unit apartment in Lake Stevens and a 63-unit complex in Federal Way. He still owns the Seattle and Lake Stevens properties.

While Rossi grew up in a Democratic family, he decided in 1980 that he liked the free-market conservatism of Ronald Reagan. He lost a bid for the state Senate in 1992, then came back four years later and beat the same opponent, Democrat Kathleen Drew.

Then-Majority Leader Dan McDonald spotted him as a comer and gave him a plum assignment to the Budget Committee. Rossi quickly, but quietly, made his mark, first with the construction budget and then writing the main $23 billion budget.

Billing himself as a “fiscal conservative with a social conscience,” Rossi drew widespread notice for collaborating with the Democratic governor to fill a yawning $2.6 billion budget chasm without raising taxes. He deftly won over enough moderate Democrats in the Senate to pass the budget, and waited out liberals in the House who hoped to push through a tax increase.

While Rossi’s style wins over many, it grates on some, who see it as masking a harshly conservative political philosophy.

David Groves, a spokesman for the Washington State Labor Council, calls Rossi a “a salesman who puts profits over people.”

“His TV ads are filled with warm, fuzzy images of him carrying his kids around on his shoulders and the like,” Groves said.

“In fact, he may really be the nice guy he portrays. But working people aren’t buying his campaign pitch that he’s an outsider who will bring change to Olympia.”