You didn’t attend Mr. Button’s high school journalism classes. You tried out for them.

Like Grosse Pointe South’s varsity teams, South’s weekly newspaper, The Tower, had tryouts: Write a story that demonstrated you were ready for the paper, create your own mock newspaper, or write a letter to Mr. Button explaining why you thought you’d be ready after the summer.

Those who weren’t ready went to Mr. Button’s J.V. squad, The Grosse Pointe News, a fine community paper. It also came out weekly, at least back in 1978, when I was an eighth-grader and first heard of Mr. Button’s legend.

My junior high counselor, Mr. Lambka, spoke of this Mr. Button and The Tower, an award-winning paper Mr. Button assembled that was consistently among the top high school newspapers in the state. I’d later learn that, in 1966, Mr. Button was congratulated for helming The New York Times of high school papers. Personally, I think that’s a subtle dig at The Tower.

“You’re really going to like the paper at South,” Mr. Lambka promised. “It comes out every week!”

Indeed, Mr. Button was there every week, copy editing stories, advising headlines, showing kids how to physically lay a story onto a front page at the local print shop.

His classroom, too, was very much a newsroom. You could walk through the darkened, empty halls of South after hours and see the lights still on and bodies still bustling in Mr. Button’s class. 

None of us were there to be students. We were there to be reporters. I learned to type a story there.

Soft-spoken but never sheepish, Mr. Button was the kind of teacher you hoped to find in an editor. He wrote textbooks, taught workshops and would become the first high school teacher admitted into Michigan’s Journalism Hall of Fame. 

I never knew Mr. Button to nix a story or talk a student out of doing one. He gave us the editorial freedom of a newspaper, and he expected us to treat that latitude solemnly. We could challenge any authority, including the school administration. But the reporting had better be there.

I was one of the students not ready for The Tower. Mr. Button broke the news to me at the end of my freshman year. “Your writing is good, but it is too short,” he said. “Take more time reporting. Give me a little more.”

So I did. My junior year, I applied again to the paper, this time to be The Tower’s sports editor.

Mr. Button pulled me aside one afternoon and suggested I try for the editor position. “Push yourself,” he said through a smile that suggested the task wasn’t as daunting as it sounded.

So I did, and became editor. It remains the last journalism class I have ever taken. In my application to The University of Michigan, his was the only personal reference I included. I’m pretty sure it’s why I got in. I’m pretty sure it’s why I got anywhere.

When students ask where I went to journalism school, where I learned the only craft I know, the answer is always the same.

I went to Mr. Button.

Safest passage north, Mr. Button. The world became a little less yesterday.