AADL Talks To: John Woodford, Longtime Journalist and Editor of Michigan Today

Thu, 08/15/2024 - 8:44pm

When: May 20, 2024

In this episode AADL Talks To John Woodford. John is a veteran journalist whose work has been published nationally. Upon moving to Ann Arbor John found work with the Ann Arbor Observer and went on to become executive editor of Michigan Today for two decades. John talks about his career trajectory, the many changes he has experienced in the journalism industry, and the continuing curiosity that fueled his career.

Transcript

• [00:00:10] ELIZABETH SMITH: [MUSIC] Hi. This is Elizabeth.
• [00:00:11] KATRINA ANBENDER: And this is Katrina. In this episode, AADL talks to John Woodford. John is a veteran journalist whose work has been published nationally. Upon moving to Ann Arbor, John found work with the Ann Arbor Observer and went on to become executive editor of Michigan Today for two decades. John talks about his career trajectory, the many changes he has experienced in the journalism industry, and the continuing curiosity that has fueled his career.
• [00:00:33] ELIZABETH SMITH: Hi, John. Thank you for joining us today. Usually, we just start off by asking what brought you to Ann Arbor, and where did you grow up?
• [00:00:44] JOHN WOODFORD: Well, I grew up in Benton Harbor, Michigan on Lake Michigan, and let's see. Came to Ann Arbor because I was working at the New York Times when they brought in the computers, and I didn't like editing on the computers because it was irritating my eyes, so I thought, I don't want to have to keep staring at these computers after having the old fashioned paper to work on, and then I heard that--we were living in Montclair New Jersey then--I heard Ford Motor Company's Ford Times, which was an Americana magazine, was hiring. I thought, well, maybe I'll go back, live in Michigan. We came here with our three kids, my wife, and I. I worked at Ford for about 2-3 years. Some of it was interesting, and then they began to want to move me around into regular PR stuff, which I didn't like that much. Then came the crunch, as they call it. I had a chance to leave Ford, and I was going to join the University of Michigan's--I knew a person in development so he said, maybe you'd like to do some development work. I thought, Well, maybe I will. I came here in '77, so '80-ish like '80. I quit Ford because we had a certain way we could quit and get a very nice package to quit during the crunch. But the guy got fired at University of Michigan [LAUGHTER], who was going to hire me. He was a head of development, but something he and the president got into, I don't know what kind of differences of opinion. He couldn't hire me. At that point, I thought I have to do something, and then I had seen the Observer so I went down and I talked to Don and Mary Hunt, and so I started working with the Observer before returning, then I finally got a job in first the Medical Center publications, and then switched over when they started Michigan Today in paper, in about maybe they started in '81 or so. I worked for the Observer for maybe about a year. Then, every now and then, I'd do something for them after that, but not much. We and the Hunts became good friends, and so we still have a lot of friends from the Observer.
• [00:03:08] KATRINA ANBENDER: How did your writing career begin? I mean, how did you get to the New York Times after leaving Michigan?
• [00:03:14] JOHN WOODFORD: Well, after college I went-- Harvard class of 1963--but I took a semester off, I came out in '64. My wife was a classmate of mine, and after we got married in '65, right before that, I got a job after I left University of Chicago cause I didn't like--I was an English literature major, and I liked novels and books and poems and so forth. I thought, well, maybe I should learn something else. This is in 1964, the fall of '64 I thought, well, maybe I should learn about social sciences. I went to the University of Chicago for a few months. I couldn't stand reading that stuff compared with what I was used to reading. Then I heard that Johnson Publishing Company, which published Ebony and Jet Magazines, was going to expand its staff. I went down there, and I got a job on Jet Magazine as a writer and editor, and then after a while, then I moved to Ebony Magazine as a writer and editor. That's '65. Then I decided to go back to Harvard and go to law school. My wife and I, we got married in January of '65. We went back to Cambridge. No--I decided I would go to English literature. I went back, I was going to maybe get a PhD, and I went for the two years. I didn't like the notion of being in a library and being a professor as much as I had enjoyed journalism. That's when I decided to go to law school. [LAUGHTER] I went to Yale Law School for almost a semester. There again, the same thing as with Chicago, I couldn't stand reading stuff that was boring the daylights out of me, and it didn't really interest me. That's when I decided to go back to Chicago. We went back, and then I rejoined the staff of Johnson Publishing Company. That gets me up to '67, and so I was enjoying that, except that at Johnson Publishing then, the things that were motivating me, I wanted to do stuff more against the war in Vietnam, and I wanted to cover the Black Panthers and all the civil rights stuff. Well, Johnson Publishing Company, the owner and publisher, didn't want to ruffle too many feathers in Washington. We couldn't really cover, especially the Black Panthers and anti-war movements as much as I would like. I saw that the Black Muslim's newspaper, Muhammed Speaks could cover all those things. Then I heard that maybe I could switch over from Johnson Publishing Company and join Muhammed Speaks. That's what I did, and that was 1968. Then I got a chance to cover the Panthers, cover whatever pretty much I wanted the anti-war movement, and by eight or nine months after I was there, the Nation of Islam that owned the paper bought a publishing--printing factory, and instead of being in a little office, the staff had very few members of the Nation of Islam on it at that time because they'd gone through their Malcolm X schism in their movement, and I guess Elijah Muhammad didn't want another Muslim to maybe use the newspaper and rise up as a rival, that's what people think anyway. There we were, and we got switched from that office where those of us who were Muslims were fond of eating barbecued ribs and doing other stuff that was forbidden for us, food and drink, and smoking. We switched to the plant, and at the plant, the other people couldn't do any of those things, especially the smokers. After about seven months, all the rest of the staff decided to leave, not en masse, but one by one, they would leave and go off, and I was the only one left, and so then they said, well, maybe you should be the editor in chief. There I was in end of '68, maybe early '69. I became the editor-in-chief, and I did that for three years till I ran afoul of something that was going on. It was political because I think it had to do with Bangladesh and East Pakistan. The Muslims of Pakistan did support some of the, I think they gave some contributions, and I think they were angry when I began to say that Bangladesh ought to be allowed to break away from the Muslims of Pakistan. Anyway, it finally wound up that I was called, and they said, well, we no longer need your services. But I was there for four years. I had a very good time and wrote a lot of articles about things that I wanted to write about, and then I switched to Chicago Sun-Times and worked there for two years. Then I switched to New York Times. I was a copy editor at this point, mainly writing and copy editing, at New York Times I was on the National Copy desk, '74 to '77.
• [00:09:10] JOHN WOODFORD: That brings me up to the time that I didn't like when they switched to the computers and editing on computers--these early computers, I didn't even want to read when I went home. My eyes would be so worn out. We had actually, challenging the right to force us to use the computers with the newspaper guild and we didn't win the right to not use the computers. That's when I heard that they were hiring at Ford Times, and maybe I could go edit and write at--for Ford Times. You've probably never seen that publication. It was about that big and it was designed to fit in glove compartments and it had a huge circulation, and it had a lot of freelance, big deal, big name writers who worked for the Ford Times. There, one of the bosses, a top editor was Robert Hodesh, who was from Ann Arbor. Well, we lived in Ann Arbor too, but he became a good friend and his wife, Annette was on the Observer. Annette Churchill. She's got a lot of by-lines in the Observer. Her son Mark is back in town now. He used to own Hertler. You know Herler's?
• [00:10:24] ELIZABETH SMITH: We interviewed him earlier.
• [00:10:27] JOHN WOODFORD: I just saw him today. Mark, his mom was a good writer, wonderful writer, his dad was a great guy. We were very good friends. They're both dead. I worked on the Observer for a bit and then switched to the university, first on the medical campus, and when they started Michigan Today, they said, maybe you want to be the executive editor of Michigan Today. What was nice there is I only had a staff of one person, me. I just used freelancers or other people and did my own writing. I didn't have to go to any editorial meetings, whatever I wanted to put in it. Whoever I wanted to interview, whatever I wanted to do, I could do whatever I wanted, which I also could pretty much do when I was at Muhammad Speaks. I was pretty lucky as a journalist, usually not to have anyone who could tell me what I could or couldn't do. They could get rid of me, but they couldn't, as far as the content, I had probably a pretty dream situation. For a lot of years, since roughly '81 or '82 till 2004, I just roamed around the university and or I'd hear from different alumni or other people. Whatever stories, as long as it was connected with the University of Michigan and I could put it in, make the content, whatever I wanted. I had a very nice time.
• [00:11:56] ELIZABETH SMITH: I was curious. You mentioned that you had this politically motivated career early on. Did you maintain that interest throughout your later career? Were you doing that mostly in freelance articles of your own?
• [00:12:06] JOHN WOODFORD: Usually, I figured a way to make whatever my publication satisfy a lot of those things. But I did do other writing for you might say, left wing publications here and there. I did for several of them. Freedom Ways, the Black Scholar, Against the Current, book reviews and other things, so I had ways to express myself. If I couldn't do it directly in this publication, there were always other things that I could do.
• [00:12:41] KATRINA ANBENDER: What was your experience like working for the Observer then Michigan Today and all of these other publications? How did you think of them and your audience differently? How did you compare them?
• [00:12:55] JOHN WOODFORD: Well, I just thought people ought to learn things, and things ought to interest them. If it interested me, I would just try to make a confection, something that people would enjoy reading or even if it would agitate them. I didn't really go thinking deeply about having a plan to do something. It was just whatever came naturally. The Observer, I did profiles, I did businesses that were opening and closing. That was one of them, and Ann Arborites. That was the longer works.
• [00:13:38] ELIZABETH SMITH: Do you have any close friendships with any other collaborators?
• [00:13:41] JOHN WOODFORD: Well, Peter Yates--we've been friends, and Don and Mary. Anette's dead. Eve and Hilton, I see them. Those are the main ones. Because even when I left there, I played on their softball team for a lot of years. We had always had a softball group that used to gather regularly and play every summer that some of my kids played on and my wife played on it. A lot of Observer connection.
• [00:14:14] ELIZABETH SMITH: You frequently worked with Ann Arborites for the Observer. Were these topics assigned or did you have freedom to choose?
• [00:14:20] JOHN WOODFORD: I wish I could remember the name of it. Changes, maybe it was called. I don't know what that is. That was one department. Ann Arborites. Anyway, sometimes Don and Mary would think of something to do, but often, then I would just think of a person I wanted to profile for the longer pieces. Changes--if someone was opening a business, we would go and cover it. There were several Ann Arbor businesses where I would write the first story of the opening of the business or cover someone, PJ's Records, why did I do that one? Bookstore owners. I mean, I even see some people--when Shaman Drum, for example, when they opened, I can remember doing Karl Pohrt when he first opened, several of those little business vignettes that the Observer did. They did quite well. Really, they do the same sorts of things now.
• [00:15:22] ELIZABETH SMITH: It's a great record of things that come to go. Is there any article that you wrote for the Observer that stands out in your mind as being one of your favorites that you did?
• [00:15:33] JOHN WOODFORD: Well, I think one of my favorite Ann Arborites was profile of Ali Mazrui, who was a renowned professor from East Africa, who was a big deal scholar. I did a profile of him, Veltman, the Dutch physicist who later got a Nobel Prize, but Don wanted me to cover him. Don thought he was going to get a Nobel Prize in whatever year I did it and Veltman didn't want any connection of the Nobel Prize to be involved with the interview. But I think Don put it someplace around the headline and Veltman was pretty ticked off. But anyway, I had a pretty nice profile of him. That was one of them. When William Bolcom premiered his Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, I did a big long review of that big concert. It was the thing in Hill, it was very famous people. It was a tremendous work, is a masterpiece. Anyway, that one was too long to fit in and they never did get it in and it never got published, but that was one of the favorite ones I ever did.
• [00:16:57] KATRINA ANBENDER: In your work for Michigan Today, how was that similar to the Observer? Were you doing profiles and things like about the Michigan community maybe versus the Ann Arbor community?
• [00:17:08] JOHN WOODFORD: Yes, you might say a lot of similarity there could be authors, could be professors, and history.
• [00:17:16] JOHN WOODFORD: But I got to do things like go out to California to profile Tom Harmon. Do you know who Tom Harmon was? [LAUGHTER] Okay, Tom Harmon was, before Tom Brady, he was the most famous football person from University of Michigan and also became a sports announcer. His son is Mark Harmon the actor. Anyway, Tom Harmon had not had any contact with Michigan. He played right before World War II. Then, he had a famous--well, during the war, he was shot down over Japanese territory, had to make his way by himself through jungles. He'd done all sorts of stuff. The thing was, the university had never tried to highlight him in his career. Someone, Roy Muir in development said, we would like to mend fences with Tom Harmon. Maybe you can get him. Maybe he'll agree that you can go out and do a profile, and he did. Then it re-established the contact and he donated stuff. That was a big event, but was nice, I had a nice big story on Tom Harmon that I always will remember. He's a fine fellow. That was one. There's a Chinese artist, Wen-Ying Tsai, who worked in mobiles and other kinds of kinetic artworks from New York City. I did a big story on him, his life. I did tons of them, really, if I could ever think of them all. Then finding freelancers, who often were interesting young people. One, for example, Sam Walker, who now works for one of the LA football teams, but anyway, he wrote his first big story for me when he was just graduating, where he had the idea of driving all over the country to area code. Not area, what do you call it? Zip code areas. The least populated zip code areas that also had U of M Alumni living in them. He did this whole thing with a computer. He found out locations, all four corners of the country, hardly anyone lived. Then he got in his car and drove around, and he would go and he would do profiles of all these people. It was the first journalism he did. Well, then later on, he became a big deal, Wall Street Journal, editor and writer, and has written books on baseball they play through computers. I can't remember what they call it, they pick teams and all that. He did the first book on that, and then he did a book on leadership based on athletic team captains. From that, the way these people are, they look for stuff on the mythology of leadership. That's what got him this big job on the managerial side of the LA Rams or the other LA team. I think maybe it's the Rams. Anyway, he started. There were several young writers, Brett Forrest, who was a wonderful young writer now, got a book on a kid from Michigan who got into the Russian or Ukrainian Army. I can't remember which, and then later disappeared and must have been killed for rubbing someone the wrong way. I had kids who were seniors or just young kids at University of Michigan who wanted to write. There are several of them that had to write really wonderful stories, and some of them become fine writers. Other than that, a lot of faculty members that I met because really, I could just roam around the campus if someone was giving a brown bag lecture or that I thought, that sounds like an interesting topic. I just go off, go to the lecture, and then sometimes they turn into good stories about the university. Same with graduates, people who had interesting careers and many different kinds of fields. You do a profile or hire a freelancer to do them. It's a lot of fun.
• [00:22:08] ELIZABETH SMITH: Are there any topics that you're drawn to covering over and over again?
• [00:22:13] JOHN WOODFORD: I probably had more things about poets and poetry in there than a lot of similar publications. University of Michigan has spawned a lot of really fine poets. In fact, when we began to do stuff online, I would have a little special feature where I would have poets read their poems and people could click on that. This is when the computers were just starting to link up. The same with you've probably heard on Michigan Station, the Professor Curzan who does the words, the language. Well, that came from one of the features I started with Dick Bailey history of English. We would have this feature that he would discuss something having to do with English usage, and then when he couldn't do it, then he passed it along to her. That turned out into be a thing. Stuff like that, is fun to do, enjoyable, it's educational, it's entertaining. I always thought the main thing is people should be learning things, complicated things, but it should be clear and enjoyable as possible. Some things are controversial, controversial things. We had one, the young woman--she was the leader of the Jewish community in Detroit one who got murdered a few months ago, maybe six months ago. When she was a senior, she and David Enders, who was of Palestinian background. They were classmates. They went to Israel and occupied territories together. They did a story all about it, and some feathers were ruffled [LAUGHTER] because of that. But, this was probably the year 2000 maybe right around 2000 or 2001 or '02 or '03. Anyway, there weren't many stories like any place that I could do. That you would see in many other publications at that time.
• [00:24:35] JOHN WOODFORD: Anyway, I've met students, faculty, graduates. A lot of famous Nobel Prize-winning writers have come through here. Usually, some way or another, you wind up hanging out with them someplace or another, especially through the English department people I knew met several really big deal people who were fun to hear them talk in private.
• [00:25:07] KATRINA ANBENDER: So you have worked in editing and writing, did you always want to be an editor? Is that a role you always saw yourself in or it seem like you by happenstance, [LAUGHTER] ended up in it?
• [00:25:18] JOHN WOODFORD: Just fell into it.
• [00:25:20] KATRINA ANBENDER: Can you talk about your work as an editor then, I mean, it sounds like you offered the space for people who were freelance or young in their careers. How did you think about that or maybe what mentorship or advice you offered?
• [00:25:34] JOHN WOODFORD: I wouldn't usually say too much about what they should or shouldn't do. When I get the copy, I would just try to, for me, bring out what was best about them, and if they were leaning in ways--that if they say things that aren't supported or some writers want to put themselves into the story, which was, I never wanted if the story wasn't actual first person "I did this or that" kind of a story, which was rare. I don't like when the writers are intruding into the story in a way like, look at me, I'm writing the story in the story. Other than taking things like that, other than that, you just sharpen things up as best you can. With most times, people don't--I never had many conflicts with many writers once I got into the copy. But I'd say I'm fairly a stickler for certain things, but I don't know. I just never had any conflicts with them.
• [00:26:50] KATRINA ANBENDER: What types of things were you a stickler for?
• [00:26:53] JOHN WOODFORD: Things should be backed up, that's all. Not doing self-indulgent type writing.
• [00:27:02] KATRINA ANBENDER: And I assume you had a lot of experience having been a copy editor, maybe also with the grammar or other--
• [00:27:08] JOHN WOODFORD: Yeah. [LAUGHTER] We had a lot of rules. Well, that was one of the best things about New York Times the people were very much old-fashioned sticklers you can see the various books they've written about from the people at the New York Times on English usage, which words are to be used how and all that. Yeah, that was one of the by-rules.
• [00:27:40] ELIZABETH SMITH: I was curious about your process. You were not able to use a computer early on. Did you get around that? And if so, how do you use a computer now?
• [00:27:49] JOHN WOODFORD: Yeah. Well, I couldn't escape it. But the screens got a lot better. The early screens were really horrible. Yeah, I know that the computer--it was quite a battle. Quite a battle getting adjusted to it.
• [00:28:07] ELIZABETH SMITH: I'm sure you must have seen a lot of changes in technology over your years. What was that like?
• [00:28:12] JOHN WOODFORD: Well, the first computers we had at the Observer were, God, what was the name of that? Forget. It was one of the first word-processing computers. If you were to use italics or parenthesis or whatever, you had to put in a command for it type before I would go into italics, then you had to have another command after the italics. While you're writing, you're doing all this other stuff. It's pretty tedious. Kaypro. That was the name of it, Kaypro computers. Yeah. Everyone, we all had those and it would take forever. Then one problem is, I mean, I have a lot of things I wrote on Kaypro, and I don't know even how to read them now. I mean, I may have things that I would like to know what's on them, and I can't figure out what's going to communicate with this Kaypro. That even happens within Apple, where I had things from Apple before they made some changes. Microsoft, if I can't get the stuff to go from Microsoft into pages in Apple, it's annoying.
• [00:29:25] KATRINA ANBENDER: Journalism as an industry has changed immensely throughout the time of your career. Can you talk a little bit about that and how that affected you in your writing?
• [00:29:36] JOHN WOODFORD: Well, being the old guard, I would look at what's happening in the journalism today with a lot of dismay and disappointment that the rise of this entertainment journalism and journalism not backed up by evidence. Now, unfortunately, there's a drive to accuse everyone of disinformation and you're going to have a czar of disinformation coming out of the federal government and stuff. I'm not for any of that. I think a lot of this hype about disinformation is an excuse to censor people and to bar dissenting views from reaching lots of the public. I'm not for any of that. There's a mounting pressures to use these powerful corporations are going to decide who can say what, when, and where. That's the most discouraging or alarming thing to me. We can see it mainly, of course, a lot of it is being seen now in coverage of the Israeli-Hamas conflict, Ukraine-Russia conflict, other things, other conflicts. But who knows what will happen when I don't know, who's really worse? I think both of our political parties and a lot of our politicians are really at fault in trying to discourage dissenting views. I want everyone to be able to dissent. There have been corny misinformation, or false stuff since time immemorial. I don't think they're any more dangerous now than they've ever been, really. To squelch descending views under the notion that you're protecting people? I don't think people need protection from that. I'm just reading Huck Finn again, and a lot of Huck Finn, they're going from town to town, and they're bamboozling people by telling lies and the whole town comes out to hear these con men give their spiel, and then sometimes they succeed in conning them, and at other times they get run out of town. In other words, there have been con artists using misinformation, disinformation, whatever you're going to call it, forever. Something usually, the truth will come out in the wash some way or another, and people's eyes can be opened, so to say you have to protect people from it. I'm not quite sure. I don't care what anyone has to say about, let's say COVID--was it in--did the Chinese make it here? Is Fauci foisting it on the public--all of these crazy things. We've had crazy things said about every conflict and every controversy there's ever been. That's the way people are.
• [00:33:03] KATRINA ANBENDER: You talked about this need for journalism to also be entertainment in some way, and often that seems like that is based on the fact that they need to attract an audience. It seems like in your career, you haven't been as reliant on that as much. It seems like you have had this built-in audience with Michigan Today and the Observer. Was that a conscious choice on your part, or was that just kind of--?
• [00:33:31] JOHN WOODFORD: No, maybe those are the kind of places that would hire me. I don't know. [LAUGHTER] Yeah. I mean, I don't like to have to go to a lot of meetings. Maybe I have an inclination that would keep me from--I never wanted to go on network, radio, or TV and have to have a bunch of PR-type people and have a marketing objective and all that. If that suits people, but I just wouldn't sit well. Anything that required a lot of meeting and a lot of people second-guessing and saying that you didn't sell enough of this or that or didn't have enough people listening or looking. I just probably just my nature wouldn't be attracted to such a position.
• [00:34:29] ELIZABETH SMITH: Is the Michigan today, is it still being printed today?
• [00:34:32] JOHN WOODFORD: I see no evidence of it being in print anymore.
• [00:34:35] ELIZABETH SMITH: I was just curious if you had any thoughts on the Observer still being printed and how that impacts its consumption?
• [00:34:41] JOHN WOODFORD: I'm glad that is. I wish the Observer, or someone could turn the Observer--if they could somehow get an Ann Arbor newspaper and paper again. And it's pretty bad for a city that's always patting itself on the back that they can't even run a regular proper daily newspaper. I've been in a lot of towns across the, I always buy local newspapers wherever I go. There are cities half our size that have newspapers at least five days a week that are covering all their local politics. A lot of people in Ann Arbor don't even know what's going on in town anymore. It's very hard. You have to almost intentionally seek out some way to find out what's going on. You're not going to really get it too much through the news coverage. They have Thursdays and Sundays in paper. But the things they put out during the week usually have stuff they've scooped up from all over the country and dumped in. There's very little local. They have some pretty good reporters, but they just don't--and not even a letter to the editor column in their paper. How can you call yourself a community newspaper and not even have a letter to the editor? I've written that publisher a few times about that. Even said, I'd volunteer free to edit your letters to the editor column if you had one, so don't say you can't afford it. But because it's just that's usually the part of the paper that--most people read letters to the editor than any other department.
• [00:36:33] JOHN WOODFORD: You can do a lot with letters to the editor. My policy was that I think I would print every letter to the editor I would receive.
• [00:36:44] KATRINA ANBENDER: For which publication?
• [00:36:45] JOHN WOODFORD: Michigan Today. Usually, if they were ultra long, but usually they weren't. But they could they can say whatever they wanted. I had no problem, I welcome letters to the editor. Unfortunately, the time gap of that kind of paper, so sometimes if people were going to have arguments, it would take several months of differences of opinion. But, I love letters to the editor.
• [00:37:13] KATRINA ANBENDER: Do you have any that you remember as standing out?
• [00:37:16] JOHN WOODFORD: I guess my main freelancer was Linda Robinson Walker. She lives in Ann Arbor, and she had many, many superb stories. One of the stories that got the most response, she did a history of when they had a Dean of Women, I think they called her Dean Deborah Bacon. All the rules they had in the '50s and early '60s that finally, women rebelled against it and overturned a lot of them. But while Dean Deborah Bacon was ruling the roost, there were many things happening, often having to do with both women and racial matters and so forth on campus. She did a tremendous--using archives and interviews with students from that time, and boy, did that get a lot of response and people would talk about how it was back then and what they had to do to defeat it. Then, of course, the BAM movements on campus, that got a lot of play, anti-Vietnam War movement, also, we had various articles that would have these people, maybe they would be in their 70s or 60s or 70s or 80s and they would be reflecting on what they did back then. Students now could see similarities and so forth, or the divestment movement from South Africa. That was one on campus that got people writing.
• [00:39:01] ELIZABETH SMITH: Was there anything you covered over your career that really had an impact on you and changed the way you looked at things?
• [00:39:08] JOHN WOODFORD: I went to several high-profile type stories, incidents. For example, Muhammad Speaks, when Fred Hampton was killed in Chicago, my photographer and I were probably one of the first people to get to hear about it, and get to the house and cover and see the, almost all the bullet holes were going in. It was so obvious, and cover that story. That was one that was--also in Detroit when the Republic of New Afrika and the police got into shootouts in, maybe that may have been '71 or so, I can't remember, '70. I came over to Detroit and I did several stories there that I can remember very clearly, stories in North Carolina where kids were--kids in a school that was set a fire to had jumped out of the second floor, and I went there and met those kids and things. I can remember that very clearly. There are various dramatic events that are easy to remember. I can't say they changed me, but there's things that are memorable. I was glad to be able to try to get a kid from my hometown out of the military when he was injured during the Vietnam War. It was hard for people even with injuries to get out of the service. I did a story on that. Then the Army stopped bothering him. I was glad at least I had one thing. I could, at least I could say, well, it must have affected at least one event. But when I was there, there was the Nigerian Civil War back then, and I did a lot of stories that were opposing the prevailing view that the place that was called Biafra should be able to secede from Nigeria, and I wrote a lot of stories on that. That was my eye opener to importance of foreign news, international news. Our paper, Muhammad Speaks, we had a lot of foreign news because of the anti-colonial movement and others, and people always say that people in this country don't read about other countries, but we found that if they they will read about other countries and be interested in it as long as it's connected somehow to their lives and their interests. We had a lot of foreign news. At Michigan Today--some of them are--seem trivial. I can't remember her name. I can remember we had the name of our story was A Skeeter So Big. This was a woman who came in. She was an alumna, and she I can't remember what it was about with mosquitoes, but she did a story of her trip someplace. Just another woman had been for her degree was diving with Japanese women who dived down to get pearls or something, that stuff. She did it. She came back and wrote a story, like a really big story because she hung out with them, and she knew all about them. That's one also, I can always remember because no one else was interested in her story. I thought, this is amazing. This is the students diving down with these divers. A lot of faculty, and even adjunct type people I bumped into. You get to appreciate what an amazing environment this is. To be in, a fairly manageable sized town with a institution like that. It's just an awful lot going on, very rich.
• [00:43:29] KATRINA ANBENDER: What are you most proud of throughout your career?
• [00:43:32] JOHN WOODFORD: Only I guess that I stayed interested in things. Stayed interested in a lot of things. I don't know. I think I was lucky enough to be in a field where new kinds, whether it's--could be, art or music, literature, history, medicine, other science, that stuff on theories of matter, and try to understand what the heck they're talking about with their string theory and tell people, what is this string theory. It's just that, it's like a continuing education, and it's just enjoyable.
• [00:44:25] ELIZABETH SMITH: AADL talks to a is a production of the Ann Arbor District Library.