Ex-Grosse Pointe high school journalism teacher Bob Button dies at 81
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Robert “Bob” Lockwood Button, a high school teacher who shaped lives and trained generations of print and broadcast journalists, died Dec. 23.
Button, 81, died of pneumonia at Martha Jefferson Hospital in Charlottesville, Virginia, with his wife and two adult children by his side. He had a lung infection related to steroid treatment for a skin condition that was only later diagnosed as lymphoma, which compromised his immune system, the family said.
Word of his death spread quickly as journalists across the country mourned the loss of a mentor, friend and father figure they met as students at Grosse Pointe South High School between 1966 and 1994.
The lucky ones worked at The Tower student newspaper, an award-winning weekly publication that earned readers all over the city.
It was regarded as a professional newsroom that sometimes even scooped the Detroit dailies. Many students went on to become reporters and editors in radio, TV, magazines and newspapers all over the country.
Button was like a Pied Piper who saw untapped potential in his students and worked to inspire them to succeed beyond anything they could have imagined.
“I would not have won a Pulitzer. I would not be at The New York Times. I swear to you,” said author and food culture writer Kim Severson, 60, whose reporting on the #MeToo movement involving Chef Mario Batali helped win the top prize in public service in 2018.
“I remember clear as day him sitting me down in his office,” said Severson, who now lives in Atlanta. “I was smoking dope and teetering on the edge of going one way or the other. He said, ‘Look, you’re really talented. You could be the editor of the paper. You have to get it together.'”
On Christmas Eve, Severson tweeted a photo of Button to her 104,000 Twitter followers and wrote, “This man is the reason I’m a journalist … RIP Mr. Button.”
Coast-to-coast, journalists still talk, not just of their memories of debating news stories and working around the clock on deadline in a high school classroom to the sound of typewriters, but of how Button changed their perception of the world and their role in it.
Journalists who learned their craft in Button’s classroom remembered him as a mentor who turned words into a varsity sport.
“You didn’t attend Mr. Button’s high school journalism classes. You applied for them,” said Scott Bowles, 56, of Los Angeles, who went on to work at The Detroit News, The Washington Post and USA Today.
“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,” Bowles said. “None of us were there to be students. We were there to be reporters.”
Button’ students remembered him as soft-spoken teacher who never discouraged his students from writing about sensitive topics but insisted on rigorous reporting.
“He let his students do some controversial stories and refused to be bullied by administrators who didn’t want them published,” said Dan Shine, 58, of Grosse Pointe Park, now a senior editor at Automotive News in Detroit. “My sister (Peggy) and another reporter did a story about how easy it was to buy beer as an underage high school student. The principal was incensed, but Mr. Button published it anyway.”
“I was one of the students not ready for The Tower,” Bowles said.”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.’ “
The coveted oil can award
Button had worked for a short time as a reporter and copy editor at the Detroit Free Press, but the classroom is where he thrived. He wrote textbooks, taught workshops and became the first high school teacher admitted into Michigan’s Journalism Hall of Fame in 1988.
He taught his charges not just how to tell a story, but how to read, watch and listen to the news with sensitivity and attention to detail, said Sam Fuqua, 58, of Boulder, Colorado, a former station manager of the award-winning KGNU public radio station in Denver.
And working as a team was a core value.
It’s why Button handed out oil cans to honor people who helped the newsroom run more smoothly, said Tom Shine, 63, of Wichita, Kansas, a longtime reporter and editor at the Wichita Eagle who now works as a news director at KMUW, the NPR affiliate in Wichita.
Shine and other reporters, decades later, still keep an oil can on their desks.
Button also taught English and speech classes and worked with high school graduation speakers every year.
But his first love atGrosse Pointe High School, which became Grosse Pointe South during his tenure, was Nancy Poff, another English teacher who would become his wife.
“My dad went home to Iowa for Christmas in 1967 single, and his parents in Iowa were badgering him about when he would get married and why he didn’t have a girlfriend, their daughter Kristin Button Wright said. “He said, ‘In January, I have tickets to a play and I’m taking my friend Nancy.’ “
Button later confided he had made up the story to placate his parents. But when he got back to school, he asked her to go to the play. They married five months later, in June 1968. The ceremony was held at Martha-Mary Chapel at Greenfield Village in Dearborn.
In a draft obituary he wrote for himself, Bob Button referred to Nancy as his best friend.
Kristin Button Wright, now 50, didn’t take her dad’s classes, but credits him with teaching her how to write. Wright, now a local government lawyer in Virginia is also a published author who specializes in legal thrillers.
“He read all my books and marked them up with a red pen before they went to the editors. He raised us in a house with books,” she said. “And he was always so interested in hearing everything we had to say.”
Unretiring in retirement
Button graduated from what is now the University of Northern Iowa with a bachelor’s degree in English and speech education and went on to earn a master’s degree in journalism. He was named the Dow Jones Newspaper Fund National High School Journalism Teacher of the Year in 1988 and inducted into the National Scholastic Journalism Hall of Fame the following year.
After he retired, he worked for the Virginia High School League coordinating theater, forensics, debate, student publications, creative writing and scholastic bowl.
Last April, Button walked miles with his grandson for a campus tour at the University of Virginia. Before he died, he put a University of Virginia sweatshirt under the tree for his grandson, who was accepted Dec.10, after Button was on a ventilator.
“He was so worried that his illness would cause us not to have Christmas,” Wright said. “And that was so typical, always thinking of everyone else.”
Kaitlin Edgerton, the Grosse Pointe South journalism adviser who often invited Button back to talk to aspiring journalists, said: “His memory will live on through the tradition of The Tower newspaper and the students who will continue to write in Room 144.”
Button is survived by his wife, Nancy Button, his daughter, Kristin, and her husband, Frank Wright; his son, Geoff Button, and his wife, Kari Sorenson, of Chicago; and three grandchildren.
In lieu of flowers, the family asked that gifts be made to the Robert Button Scholarships for Excellence in Journalism at Grosse Pointe South High School. Checks should be made to the Grosse Pointe Foundation for Public Education with “The Tower Fund” in the memo field and sent to Tower Scholarship, GPSHS, 11 Grosse Pointe Boulevard, Grosse Pointe Farms, Michigan, 48236. Button donated to this fund previously.
He asked to be cremated and have his ashes scattered in Iowa, Virginia and on the front lawn of Grosse Pointe South High School, to forever be with the students he loved and who loved him right back.
A memorial service will be held Jan. 2 at 3 p.m. at The Gibson Theater at Live Arts in Charlottesville, Virginia. The family hopes to arrange a memorial at Grosse Pointe South in the spring. Livestream information will be posted in his Teague Funeral Home obituary. Karen Wright plans to share details on her Twitter account @kbuttonw as they unfold.
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Editor’s Note: Bob Button launched the career of reporter Phoebe Wall Howard in 1984 when he edited her investigative story about questionable practices involving the adopt-an-animal program at The Detroit Zoo. The story, originally written for The Tower newspaper, was picked up by radio, TV and print media outlets, including the Free Press.
Contact Phoebe Wall Howard at [email protected] or 313-618-1034. Follow her on Twitter@phoebesaid.
