The Write Stuff

On this, likely my last day in my chosen profession, allow me to share some reflections on 27 years at the Ann Arbor News, and 29 years in this storied business. I wasn't going to do it -- I'm not a fan of public naval-gazing -- but this stuff just doesn't happen anymore, and its extinction should not pass without notice.

 I have been privileged to work with and meet both extraordinary people and ordinary people who behave extraordinarily, all of them enriching my life inestimably.

I worked early on with the woman who figuratively kicked in the mens' room door at The Ann Arbor News, to become the first female editor on the news desk.

I followed in the footsteps of the grizzled, right-wing, fedora-wearing, flashbulb-popping journalist who led a trail of national reporters around town like ducklings after their mother, as he ran down the Michigan Murders.

I learned at the knee of the best damned cops reporter who ever has stalked the trail of cops and criminals, and who in the Army was one of the first 25 helicopter door-gunners in Vietnam, a big man who can can recount war stories from the jungles of southeast Asia to the south side of Ypsilanti.

The air in the newsroom was blue with smoke in my first years in the biz, and my first "computer" was a manual typewriter older than I. We typed on plain newsprint, and literally "cut" and "pasted" paragraphs into different places in the text when we edited our copy, using scissors to cut, and sticky gluepots with little brushes to paste the paragraphs back together, and the pages to each other, so none would be lost or typeset out of order.

When I graduated to an electronic word processor at The News, it had a green screen, and we had to SHARE with other reporters, so deadlines could be ugly. There was no such thing as a FAX machine, let alone the Internet, so if we needed a piece of paper, we had to go and get it.

I slid into third on my, er, backside, and caught a right-field fly ball that should have been a home run with our 1980s newsroom softball team, which was led by a graying, hippie-era editor whom we called “Train,” who led us to victory both in and out of the newsroom.

I jumped out of a perfectly good plane with no parachute, hooked to the chest of a guy with a parachute. He had walked into the newsroom and thrown down the challenge -- leading every editor who heard it to slowly swivel in his or her seat and turn, forebodingly, to me. Train's warning on my departure: "You come back dead, and I'll kill you."

Working a story about firefighter training methods, I had to crawl backwards out of a burning building, in 50 pounds of gear, when a chair exploded next to me in the 1,200-degree heat.

I worked the senseless murder of a woman married to one of our editors, and the horrifying kidnapping, rape and murder of the child of another News co-worker. We all worked these stories in tears -- but we DID work them.

I found, with a News photographer, the wing of the plane that flipped Northwest flight 255 over when it clipped the Avis building at Metro Airport. And I watched big, tough, 200-pound cops cry after they found a baby’s foot, still in its shoe, in the wreckage. I saw them recover, a little, when one small girl was found alive amid the bodies of more than 150 other victims.

I’ve flown in a helicopter chase of a car thief, participated in high-speed police chases on the ground, and walked into notorious crack houses behind cops who had bullet-proof vests, when I did not.    
 

                 

 
I went undercover with a female cop to make a crack buy, thus winning a bet a sheriff's deputy made with other cops who predicted I'd chicken out. Suckers!

I witnessed the death of a teenager who died on the last day of school, after his friend ran a light in his dad’s Corvette. They hit a teacher's car so hard it flipped her four times. I shot the photos of a paramedic who sprawled on the hood of the car to hold the boy's head upright, while another administered CPR, forcing the blood to gush from the boy's head with each push on his chest.

My first murder found me inside the yellow police lines, shooting photos of the victims and the bullet casings, when police couldn’t find their photographer. "C'mere," growled a big cop with a bigger, deeper, voice. He crooked his finger and stared at my chest -- where my camera hung from its strap. We were using black-and-white film then – a fact for which the News photographer who developed the film was later grateful.

When paramedics busy with a dying patient needed someone to drive the ambulance  while I was on a ridealong, I did that, too.

I’ve interviewed the chief justice of the Michigan Supreme Court, U.S. Poet Emeritus Maya Angelou, accidentally caught actor Vincent Price in his underwear (boxers, thank heaven), and battled with local judges, police chiefs, lawyers and governmental functionaries for the public’s right to know.

I’ve interviewed rape victims, the families of dead and murdered children and, in general, done work I considered then and now to be crucial to the appropriate governance of a democracy.

Heck, I even got drunk in the name of science, when I was "volunteered" to undergo what were then new drunken-driving field sobriety tests.

Now THOSE were the days.

Thank you, everyone, friends, co-workers, professional contacts, for helping me do the thing I really wanted to do – learn and inform, with, I hope, honesty and integrity.

- Oppat

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