Cassandra Spratling, left, and Patricia Montemurri.
Cassandra Spratling and Patrica Montemurri, admired Free Press reporters who have been there for decades, are among a group who just took buyouts from the paper.
Both write fondly about journalism in farewells published recent days by the Freep.
My late mother, ever social and chatty with an Italian accent, brought it up with embarrassing frequency. We’d be out together shopping, and at the check-out counter, she’d find a way to inform the cashier that the item was for her daughter and “she’s a reporter for the Detroit Free Press.”
So, that gives you an inkling of how proud my immigrant parents were to see my byline. It gives you no idea of how proud I have been to call myself a Detroit Free Press Staff Writer for nearly 37 years.
I had a summer job filling out delinquent tax bills for Wayne County when I saw a fellow with a notebook leaning on a lamp post outside the City-County Building. “Hello, are you a reporter?” I asked him. He was Bill Mitchell, a Free Press reporter waiting for a mayoral press conference. When I told him I was studying journalism at the University of Michigan, he invited me to check out the Free Press newsroom and told me I needed to work for the college newspaper The Michigan Daily.
Good advice. I did both. Two summers later, I was a Detroit Free Press intern. A year later, after a stint at Detroit’s Associated Press, I was hired by the Free Press full time. With every subsequent hello and a few preliminary questions, thousands of stories followed.
I’ve written about a far-flung array of topics. I’ve covered education and teacher strikes, campaign finance, women’s issues, workplace issues, and even a few early Detroit Grand Prix races because I could speak Italian with Ferrari drivers and mechanics.
I’ve covered political campaigns, from Wayne County Commissioner races to bruising Detroit mayoral races to presidential campaigns -- on campaign buses, planes and on the floor at national presidential conventions. Once, Al Gore took his shoes off and rubbed his tired feet in front of me as he answered my questions in a small plane over Iowa.
The first time I heard the word journalism I didn’t know what it was. I thought it was a proper word for creative writing because the only time I heard the word was in connection with poems and short stories I wrote in elementary and middle schools. Teachers who read my writing told me to be sure to study journalism when I got to high school. So I signed up at Mackenzie High School and much to my dismay learned journalism was about newspaper writing.
Yikes!
I needed to drop this class. I didn’t even read newspapers at the time.
But there was a waiting period for dropping a class. In that two-week period I got to know and like the teacher. Mrs. Maxine Perry told me that we wouldn’t be writing poems and short stories in her class. She said we’d be writing true stories, nothing made up. But she said there were opportunities to be creative, even in newspaper writing. I stayed in the class, not because of that. I stayed because of her. She was a stylish woman who exuded confidence and caring. By the end of the first semester, I knew I wanted to become a newspaper woman.
And, for the most part, I have loved it since.
I have had the opportunity to talk with men and women I admire and I’ve been able to tell important stories about people whose lives might otherwise not make the pages of a major newspaper. One of the stories I’m proudest of is writing about a classroom of honors students at a Detroit high school that for weeks had no teacher. The students—identified as some of the brightest in that east side school—had no teacher in the classroom—not even a sub-- for the hour of honors English when they should have been learning skills that would help them succeed in college. A student in the classroom called me, and told me exactly how to sneak into the building to see for myself. I did. The day that the story appeared in the paper, a teacher was assigned to that classroom. Coincidence? I think not!
