Tag Archives: Mr. Button

An Ode To Robert Button


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.

Mr. Button

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.