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Quite the World, Isn't It?

On crossed paths, nearly 30 years later

An old friend and one-time editor, J. Ford Huffman, sent me a message the other day pointing out an interesting bit of timing. My Detroit: A Biography, as you all know by now, is just hitting bookstores. As is a book J.Ford co-edited, The End of Don't Ask, Don't Tell: The Impact in Studies and Personal Essays by Service Members and Veterans. And our mutual friend and former colleague Julia Heaberlin's debut novel, Playing Dead come out in a few weeks.

We all worked together at the Rochester Times-Union newspaper in New York in the mid-1980s, and as J. Ford pointed out in his message, there's a nice synchronicity to all three of us having books out this Spring. But that also got me thinking about some of the other people who worked at that great, and late (it closed in 1997) newspaper that another former editor of mine once described as less a daily newspaper than a daily magazine.

It was an interesting array of journalists who cycled through the paper during the three years I was there, including Kate Philips and two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner David Barstow, both now with the New York Times; former Washington Post White House reporter and current Politico editor John F. Harris (also the author of The Survivor: Bill Clinton in the White House and co-author of The Way to Win: Taking the White House in 2008; and Jim McCommons, author of Waiting on a Train, about his year of travel aboard Amtrak trains.

Two other colleagues from that era, Marla Dickerson and Reed Johnson, work for the Los Angeles Times (we also worked together, with new novelist Julia at The Detroit News, and Steve Dollar is a prolific freelance critic and author of Jazz Guide: New York City. And the list goes on.

Quite the springboard, the Times-Union was, quite the springboard...
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