42 years ago: Gene Weingarten in
Lansing
December 10, 2019
From
Wikipedia:
| |
Gene Weingarten (born
October 2, 1951) is an American syndicated humor columnist
at The Washington Post. He is a Pulitzer Prize-winning
journalist, and is the only person to win the Pulitzer Prize for
Feature Writing twice. Weingarten is known for both his serious
and humorous work. Weingarten's column, "Below the Beltway," is
published weekly in The Washington Post magazine and syndicated
nationally by The Washington Post Writers Group, which also
syndicates Barney & Clyde, a comic strip he co-authors with his
son, Dan Weingarten, with illustrations by David Clark. |
 |
|
His latest book, published in October, is One Day: The
Extraordinary Story of an Ordinary 24 Hours in America.
In 1977, he was working for the Detroit
Free Press at their downtown Lansing office on the
8th floor of the Washington Square Building. I was working for
what was then called the Michigan Department of Social Services
in what was then the Commerce Center
and is now WMU Thomas Cooley Law School at 300 S. Capitol. I
managed to get my hands on some sensitive documents that needed
to be made |
public. One was a unfavorable federal audit of Michigan's food stamp
program. I delivered copies to Gene at the Free Press. He wrote a couple of stories about it. This one appeared April
16, 1977:
This one appeared June 19, 1977:
I gave Gene a lot of material besides the audit. I
made a list of the documents I gave him in 1977-78, and the total was
27. The purpose of the list, I think, was to keep from giving him
multiple copies of the same material. He was already getting more stuff
than he cared to read. I loaded him up because the Free Press’ Lansing
offices were only 3 blocks from the Commerce Center. One item that
really did get his attention was in a June 17, 1977 weekly report Bureau
of Assistance Payments head Jerry Brockmyre prepared for his boss:
Free Press
(Detroit type) writing article on Food Stamps. Using as basic
information material from Washington sent to Chicago; copy was left
here for our information by Chicago staff. Someone in Central Office
must have sent to Free Press. Am ordering files which would lock for
all divisions.
At that time, the Free Press had an occasional
feature called tipoff: inside the news with the people who make it.
Gene contributed an item that appeared June 29, 1997. It foreshadowed
his inclination toward the humorous side of the news:
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