A speech I was supposed to give Friday for Mr. Button, my high school journalism instructor and personal hero.

First off, an apology to Mr. Button and my Blue Devil brethren: Mr. Button, I could no more call you “Bob” than I could call my father “Billy.” So please excuse excuse the New York Times formality.

It seems fitting that The Tower‘s 90th birthday falls during March Madness, when school frenzy is frothing.

I try to avoid too many alma mater boast-offs come this time — and not just because my college hasn’t mustered a respectable sports team in a quarter-century. It’s just impossible to quantify adoration.

Still, if there’s no way around a rabid school chest-thumper, I always have the nuclear option: The Mr. Button Button.

It goes something like this: Somewhere mid-bray, I’ll ask the alum if his school had a newspaper.

Why of course! tended the typical, immediate response. Why, they note, it even came out weekly, sometimes daily!

Then I push the button. “Did your paper have tryouts? How about cuts if you didn’t make the staff?”

Then the hesitation. That’s when I’d drop the story about Mr. Button, who was inducted into the Michigan Journalism Hall of Fame in the late-80’s. If you wanted to study journalism with Mr. Button, you took the introductory course — and, as a final, submitted a thesis-like paper; either with a story you generated yourself or an entire hand-designed paper to demonstrate news judgment.

If you passed, you made it on The Tower, the school’s national award-winning  paper (Mr. Button was once congratulated in 1966 for taking the helm of The New York Times of high school papers. Personally, that sounds like a bit of a dig (The Times doesn’t have tryouts and cuts). If you didn’t pass, you’d spend your next year writing for The Grosse Pointe News, the local weekly newspaper.

Imagine that. That’s a little like trying out for the varsity football team and, if you were cut, having to play for The Detroit Lions.

Yet, as kids, we never marveled at that. That was simply how Mr. Button ran shop: As a serious paper, covering  news that students, teachers, parents and even shop owners read religiously. The school had its own mini-staff to sell ads. We’d write editorials challenging the school administration. We’d pan lousy plays.

We were a newspaper, as dedicated as any of those that employed me.

And that, too, was Mr. Button. I’d be hard-pressed to recite a specific lesson I took from Mr. Button (the only journalism classes I have ever attended).

But I can tell you the theme that underpinned every lesson: Never fear the truth, no matter where it leads.

And now the truth leads us here.

I know you will be awash in hugs, handshakes and memories of halcyon days too many to count. But let me add one.

After college, I took a job at The Arkansas Gazette. One day, I received a call from Neal Shine at The Detroit Free Press, the pope of Detroit journalism. (And father of Dan, who preceded me at The Tower.) Neal told me that you were being inducted into the Journalism Hall of Fame, and he was collecting quotes for a column.

I’m sure I bored him with plaudits. But for years, the core of Neal’s question — What made Mr. Button such a good teacher? — gnawed at me. Until a week before this gathering, actually. I went through old Towers. I went through old memories. I went through 35 years as your psychological apprentice.

And finally, like an anvil about to brain Wile. E. Coyote, it dawned on me.

Schools aren’t to learn something. They’re not even meant to teach something, this event notwithstanding.

They’re meant to set something on fire. To light an internal hearth that burns well past school, well past adulthood, well past our brains and into our hearts. For what are we, other than than bundles of kindling and curiosity, waiting to be set ablaze?

As you look around you tonight, I hope your impact is diamond clear. The people who keep coming up aren’t former students. They’re not alums. They’re not even former Tower reporters.

They are embers, still burning from the lessons you taught, from the passion we absorbed. I can attest: You have spawned a legion of terrific writers. I can also attest: You have spawned the parents of terrific writers of their own.

Mr. Button, thank you for being a master arsonist. We are better for the glow.