AADL Talks To: Geoff Larcom, Former Sports Editor and Columnist for the Ann Arbor News, and Media Relations Director for Eastern Michigan University

Tue, 11/05/2024 - 3:25pm

When: October 7, 2024

Geoff Larcom was born and raised in Ann Arbor. He followed in his parents’ footsteps to pursue a career in journalism, working for his high school yearbook, then the Michigan Daily while a student at the University of Michigan. He then spent 25 years working for The Ann Arbor News, initially as a copy editor, then, after three years in sports at The Detroit News, he served for 12 years as Ann Arbor News sports editor.  He spent his last 10 years with the News as a metro reporter and columnist. After the News closed in 2009, he became  Executive Director of Media Relations at Eastern Michigan University. Geoff talks with us about his career; his memories of The Ann Arbor News during many changes within the industry; and about the life and career of his father, Guy C. Larcom, who holds the distinction of serving as Ann Arbor’s first City Administrator, and his mother, Taffy Larcom, who was a professor of journalism at EMU. 

Transcript

• [00:00:09] ELIZABETH SMITH: Hi, this is Elizabeth.
• [00:00:11] AMY CANTU: And this is Amy. In this episode, AADL talks to Geoff Larcom. Geoff was born and raised in Ann Arbor and is the son of the city's first city administrator, Guy Larcom. Geoff followed both his father and mother to pursue a career in journalism, working as a sports editor on his high school newspaper, then for the Michigan Daily while a student at the University of Michigan, and later for the Ann Arbor News. Geoff talks about his long career in journalism, about his father's legacy, and about the many changes he's witnessed in Ann Arbor over the years. Welcome, Geoff. Thanks so much for coming.
• [00:00:46] GEOFF LARCOM: Fabulous to be here.
• [00:00:47] AMY CANTU: We'd like to start with little background. I know you were born and raised in Ann Arbor. Can you talk a little bit about what it was like to grow up here?
• [00:00:57] GEOFF LARCOM: Well, it was a very connected city. As you know, it's extremely walkable. It seemed a lot of us kids knew each other, and it had that vintage, go-out-and-play-and-I'll-call-you-at-dinner mentality at that point. One of the interesting things growing up -- and a friend of mine, Stephen Postema who did a reading here the other day, can attest to this is -- we all knew a lot of the kids we grew up with. In fact, even today, I can name the kids on other baseball teams that we played. I could list them off bing, bing, bing, bing, and that's just a sign of the connectedness. It's just the right size of a city -- and it still is to a degree, although sports are different -- for you to know a lot of people, but for there to be an extremely stimulating array of careers and narratives playing out within that city. Growing up here was really stimulating, full of opportunities, safe. I marveled at how smart my peers were. Only later, it occurred to me that many of their parents were professors at the University of Michigan or Eastern Michigan University, or doctors. I was like, Oh, ok, this all computes now. But it made college not that different from Pioneer High School.
• [00:02:16] ELIZABETH SMITH: You mentioned you went to Pioneer High School. Where did you go to elementary and middle school?
• [00:02:20] GEOFF LARCOM: I went to Burns Park, which is now quite the lovely bougie neighborhood. [LAUGHTER] But I went to Burns Park Elementary, then Tappan Junior High, and then Pioneer, and then University of Michigan for an undergrad Degree in Political Science and a Master's in Journalism. I worked four years for the Michigan Daily. Very connected and lucky to have stayed in Ann Arbor and know a great deal of kids, now adults, who I grew up with.
• [00:02:49] AMY CANTU: Let's talk a little bit about your journalism experience. I know your mother had inspired you to pursue that career. Can you talk a little bit about her and about when you knew that you wanted to study journalism, and what your experience was like at the Michigan Daily -- that sort of thing?
• [00:03:09] GEOFF LARCOM: My mother had a fascinating career. Back in the late '30s, she was women's editor for the Hartford Courant, which at the time was an extremely noteworthy newspaper, and she was, I would guess, one of the first section editors in the country at that point in the late 30s. It was there that she fell in love with my father, who was an editorial writer. I was gratified that newspaper people could also have a torrid romance. Then watched the war and my father became involved in housing, and my mom was at home with their two daughters at the time. She put her journalism career for a while in abeyance, in her words. But then she started to teach at Eastern Michigan University where she founded the journalism curriculum that still exists today. She was a faculty advisor for the Eastern Echo, Eastern's student paper. Her deep commitment to journalism was one influencing factor, but so was my father's. He was an editorial writer, went to Harvard -- class poet -- and then got involved in housing. He was the housing administrator during World War II, the Bomber Village at Willow Run. Then he got into city management. Of course, he was Ann Arbor City manager from 1956-1973. But he retained that journalism essence and actually taught a graduate-level course at U of M in reporting public affairs. If you can imagine a sitting city manager teaching graduate students how to report with insight and purpose on the government. Both of them influenced me, and then the crystallization was, of course, in 1973, '72, watching the Watergate hearings with my mother, sitting beside her and watching her treat it almost like a fascinating pennant race, with all the figures, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Sam Ervin, and all that. I still remember her furiously scribbling down vice presidential candidates when Spiro Agnew had to resign and coming up with Gerald Ford. "I got it, Gerald Ford!" This was the genesis of my interest in journalism. I was a sports editor for the Pioneer High yearbook and walked into the Michigan Daily September of my freshman year and walked out of it -- having served four years, and then as sports editor -- my senior year walked out in the winter of 1980, four years of what, really, for all of us Daily people, defined our undergraduate existence.
• [00:05:47] AMY CANTU: That's what we've heard. We've talked to several people who've worked at the Daily, and they all say pretty much the same thing that it was transformative. Sports was an early interest of yours?
• [00:05:58] GEOFF LARCOM: I got into sports, and I was fortunate enough at the Daily to cover Bo Schembechler. There's a hilarious story where I actually was born the same day that Bo's son, Geoff, his stepson Geoff spelled the same way as mine, who went to Tappan with me was born. Same spelling. I told Bo in the fall of 1979 as a way to break the ice with Daily reporters and editors and myself who were covering the football team. "Bo, I was born on the same day as your son, Geoff. In junior high, we acted in a play together. He had the starring role, and I was his understudy." Bo looked at me, my normal build and senior in college. He says, "Well, I'll tell you one thing. As football players, you and my son were damn fine actors." Because we both played, football in junior high. The Daily was a wonderful experience, and from that grew a job at the Ann Arbor News after I got my Master's at U of M. Initially, I was like, I got to get out of here. I grew up in this town. Geez, I'm just running on inertia. But it turned out that that was the best decision career-wise I could have made. I had a little stint at the Detroit News from '85-'88, but then I came back to the Ann Arbor News to be Sports Editor. Because I knew the people in this town who my parents knew, 17 years as city manager, great friends. I was born when my parents were 46. I had very mature parents, very actualized professionally-based parents. I had all those friends, and then I had the friends I knew from school growing up, and then I had the ones you make by virtue of your professional path. It became a great decision to stay here professionally and personally, one that made for a distinct and interesting life. But initially, you had that post-college post-degree restlessness, which of course also arises from your desperation to get a job. But I did get a job and worked 25 years for the Ann Arbor News, 15 years as a Sports Editor, or assistant sports editor, and then the last 10 as a Metro reporter and columnist. It's the perfect sports exposure and city university exposure, where you get the greatest constellation of people. I was very fortunate in that sense.
• [00:08:34] ELIZABETH SMITH: You actually worked at WCC for a minute after graduating, is that correct, for their paper Focus?
• [00:08:40] GEOFF LARCOM: That was great fun. That was the first job I got coming right out of my Master's program. I had internships at the Sarasota Herald-Tribune and Tampa Tribune, where we were annually warmed about hurricanes. But, I was able to work at WCC for a year, which was fabulous. Got familiar with the educational reach of that college with the fabulous faculty there. I always had that piece of it in my career universe. Then I was lucky enough when the Ann Arbor News folded. We were all let go in a very humane way -- sorry, but it was the reality that they had to do what they did, in my view. I was lucky enough to get a job as Media Relations Director at Eastern Michigan University, where I served as spokesperson, talking points writer, news release writer, content creator. There was only one of me there. I worked under Vice President Communications, Walter Kraft, an exceptional professional, he's still there. But being there was only one of me, there were literally hundreds of me at U of M. But there was only one of me, one Media Relations Director. I got to deal with everybody at EMU. I got to deal with faculty, students, police, finance, the president, the provost. I literally could not have gotten a better job out of the Ann Arbor News folding than I did. It made for a great career, one that was very crisis-based. I don't wake up in the morning at 5:00 AM wishing Channel 7 was calling me for the crisis of the day, but it perfectly aligned with who I was and my episodic way of approaching life.
• [00:10:32] AMY CANTU: Going back to when you were on the news, working for the Ann Arbor News. What was the newsroom like? What was it like to be there? Give us the atmosphere of the place or maybe a story or two about...
• [00:10:43] GEOFF LARCOM: Well, it was fabulous. Imagine an interactive place that is extremely responsive to the event of the day, be it a good event or a crisis. Pfizer is closing. The twin towers have been attacked by planes. It was a wonderful, vibrant place full of people who were happy to be there. Who were A) well versed in the news, who B), were intent on doing what I see as the goal of a good newspaper, which is covering the gap between what is said publicly and what is reality. You function in that gap. It was a place of wonderful conversations of men and women, both on the sports and the news side, all of whom were very nimble. The Ann Arbor News hit the sweet spot of you could make enough money. I worked at the halcyon days of the Arbor News News. The late '80s and '90s, and up to 2006 when the Internet began to take over. You can make a decent living there. They had good programs for employees, fun stuff to do. They had insurance. I actually earned a pension from the Ann Arbor News, which is wonderful for a newspaper, it was perfect. Then add to it the key ingredient, which is that there are fabulous stories, literally a walk away. Either at City Hall, on the tech side, with this enormous health center, with the wonderful universities, both Eastern Michigan and the university, that were literally -- were just a couple blocks away. Just by virtue of covering the U of M, I got to talk to people like Vaclav Havel, the Czech President, secretaries of state for the United States. I got to write the obituary material for Gerald Ford. It was a wonderful place that each day did what we call the daily miracle, which is produce a newspaper every day, which is the ultimate teamwork effort from the business side, selling the ads to the production side, printing the newspaper, as well as producing the photos and all the other mechanical aspects of going into producing a paper back in the day, as well as, of course, the reporting and the editing side. The collaboration of that resulted in the paper rolling off the press, either at night on Friday night or Saturday night for the weekend editions or at 10:30 AM on a weekday was every day a rush. Then you throw in the vitality and creativity of the people there, the artists, the writers, the reporters, the editors, and the strong personalities that are generally associated with someone who's committed to getting the news and the energy that they would normally display, and it made for an environment that we all crave and feel nostalgic about and feel lucky to have been a part of. I worked for many years under a remarkable editor Ed Petykiewicz who really was a strong editor, tough editor, of many aspects, but also one heck of a journalist. I worked under other editors too who were special people. I was lucky to have those two stints at the Ann Arbor News from 1982-1985, and then '85 with the Detroit News came back to be the Ann Arbor News Sports Editor. It got a wonderful spread of people who were intellectually and emotionally intelligent and with whom you had amazing conversations, not always happy ones. This is not a passive environment. This is an environment where you say, no, we're not going to do that story, we're going to do this story, and we're going to deploy this amount of resources to that, and you got to deal with it. But on the other hand, the vitality and memories of such energetic and robust discussions that form the grist of your professional life made us all feel very fortunate that we could live in a place that, by the way, has good schools, by the way, has good recreation and parks, or by the way, where I can make a little money, and I don't have a mega commute. For many of us, the best of all possible worlds for a while.
• [00:15:24] ELIZABETH SMITH: I was wondering about what your position was at the Ann Arbor News when you first started. What did you write about when you first got there?
• [00:15:32] GEOFF LARCOM: Well, my first position was as a copy editor interestingly enough. I wrote headlines and laid out pages. Then sports snapped me up. For the first couple of years of my career, from '82-'85, I laid out the sports section. I would get in there at 5:00 AM in the morning, and I would have 5, 6, however many open pages, I would decide, what goes where, what photos to use, what headlines to write, sometimes having great fun with puns and the like -- you can do that in sports. I got a real feel for the production and editing side of the paper. Then later on, when I was Sports Editor and helped with my assistant Dave McVety supervise the staff, I got a feel for that. I was lucky to break in on the editing side and get a real feel for the precision that's required in writing a good headline and in making a story that much better without detracting from it. That served me well in building my professional arsenal. Also, I met tons of people that I wouldn't have otherwise met at the paper. That was my first role and it was a very stimulating one. There's nothing quite as intense as coming in on a Saturday afternoon and knowing you have all these pages to fill. You cannot do it without your copy editors.
• [00:17:04] AMY CANTU: You saw the transition. You saw it, as you say, in its glory days, and you saw what happened when the Internet came in. Can you talk a little bit about what happened and how it felt in the newsroom when things started going south for the paper?
• [00:17:21] GEOFF LARCOM: Well, one of the reasons Ann Arbor in my view, was so robust, was in terms of its classified advertising. It punched way above its weight. You can view newspaper revenue as a three-legged table, classified retail advertising, now digital and circulation. Once Craigslist took over and that Internet variable was possible, it was like kicking one leg out of the table and the thing started to collapse. This happened around 2007. Then we started doing what you would call managing decline. I believe that what all newspapers should have done is the moment that Craigslist came in, they should have had paywall Tuesday. Everybody should have started charging for content. But instead, we started putting all this material on the web for free. That even hastened the decline, in my view, where you were having professional journalists doing this stuff. It's not like you'd walk up the street and do it, and we were putting it all out for free. There was this sense of decline and yet still a tremendous devotion to putting out the paper on a daily basis. I was lucky enough, in my final year, 2008, 2009 to be selected for a Knight-Wallace Fellowship, which is that wonderful fellowship that is at U of M, where journalists from around the world spend an academic year at U of M studying the topics of their choices, taking classes, traveling. We got to go to Moscow, where we met Gorbachev, got to go to Argentina, where we examined the history there. I got to go to Israel, got to go to Ramallah. That was a fabulous thing. But what that did for me was from September through April, I was out of the newsroom. I didn't have to experience the pulverizing limbo when we really were in decline and everybody knew that it was a history with either a very diminished product or no history at all. Then on March 23rd, 2009, I was in the undergrad library studying Spanish, one of my classes for the fellowship, when I got a call from managing editor Jim Knight, he said, there's going to be a meeting today at 10:00 AM and you're going to want to be there. I said, Okay, this is probably another announcement of further whittling away at the staff and offering buyouts, and we're going to be a little intrepid rowboat surviving amid the rough seas of the Internet. No, this was the announcement that the News was going to close July 23rd of that year, 2009, four months hence. That was devastating to everybody, including those who had to announce it. Although knowing all the people at the paper as I did, I made it a point to meet the business staff and everybody. I probably knew as many people as anybody there. I understood it. Then I came back to the paper a month and a half later, and I had the great benefit of writing most of the final edition. During this summer, May, June, July, we close July 23, 2009 -- "Farewell, Ann Arbor." I got to write most of that final paper, the eras of the paper from its founding on, then the early 1900s, then the '50s, then the activism years, and then the latest era. Then I got to write the main story plus a column. While other people were doing a last school board, a last police beat, churning out the day-to-day, sometimes mundane, activities of putting out the paper, I got to write that last sucker, which is a collector's item. I still remember the lead, which is something to the effect of, "In 1873, a creative printer named Arthur P Gardner, (whatever his name was) decided to print a newspaper, and now years later, the Ann Arbor News has announced its closing. Today is our final day, this is our final edition. A corporate decision announced exactly four months ago has ticked down to its final moment. Farewell Ann Arbor, hugs all around." I got to write that, which was a true privilege, and so I got as good a deal as anybody. Those final months, weeks, were full of romance, and we all knew we were part of something remarkable and historic in Ann Arbor's history. We were grateful for that. We were melancholy for closing. We were worried about getting new careers, although it turned out well for so many. I can think of so many people who went on to forge fairly interesting paths, myself included, but those were special days. I'm sure everybody who was there at the very end cherishes those moments and weeks.
• [00:22:41] AMY CANTU: How do you feel about it now? Now that several years have passed, what is Ann Arbor missing, and how do you feel about not having a really robust newspaper in town?
• [00:22:52] GEOFF LARCOM: Well, I see it on two levels. First of all, the Ann Arbor News as it stands as present, has some fabulous reporters. It's a much much much much much -- did I say "much" -- leaner staff. But some of the people just do yeoman work. An interesting example is a fellow named Ryan Stanton, who is the best, -- and it's no contest -- local government reporter that the paper's ever had. He made the decision -- there's Bo Schembechler motto: "Those who stay will be champions." Well, Ryan made that decision, and so he does remarkable work. I defend the work of a lot of these reporters who really work hard and have to continually post stuff and maintain social media. The thing I think is really lost from the fact that it's published as a newspaper twice a week, Thursday and Sunday, and then a website, is: I wish we had columnists and an editorial page, an editorial page where you would write letters, and we would call you up and say, "Did you write this letter, Mr. Prescott?" "Yes, I did." "We're going to print it. Thank you very much for reading the Ann Arbor News" etc., and there was accountability in this. What that editorial page did was, it served to help us define ourselves going forward. It served as a learning spot for the continually evolving identity of the paper and more important the town. We lack that now. We have a vague sense of who we are. We know we're pro-density. We know we have a lot more student housing high rises downtown. We know we have a very robust university. We know we love our football team. But you lose a little of that real Ann Arbor identity that is continually reinforced day to day by having locally based editorials, locally based letters that are responsibly written, and I differentiate them from anonymous comments, some of which are good, others of which are garbage. That's what I really miss. If I could waive one magic wand, I would say, somehow, some way, come up with the money -- raise it through a foundation or something -- but come up with the money where you have an editorial page that establishes who Ann Arbor is. That said, I always defend the work of the reporters there. When people say, Well, this paper is a shadow of its former self and on and on, I say, Okay, but I want you to understand a few things. These people do great work, and they should be credited. Of course, being a media relations director of EMU, you want to defend the people who you hope will publicize your institutions. There's a self-serving component of that, but I believed what I said and still do.
• [00:25:46] AMY CANTU: How long was it before you started working at EMU, and what was your initial job description there?
• [00:25:53] GEOFF LARCOM: I was lucky, I started working at EMU in September of 2009, the paper having closed in July of 2009. I was off effectively two months where I wrote some columns for Ann Arbor.com, which was great fun. I went on vacation. I received a severance from the Ann Arbor News, which not everybody might believe this, but I believe behaved as humanely as could be expected within the strategy. It worked out wonderful, and then I started Eastern Michigan University, and my purpose, as I defined it there was to create content and represent the university in a way that enhances the reputation of the university and minimizes damage during a crisis all the while telling the truth. One thing that needs to be remembered about universities is that they are not passive environment. They're going to be crises, and a crisis sounds like something terrible, but a crisis can be something like a student protest, a faculty disagreement, a power outage, these happens, these are active complex environments. You got to expect problems like that and eat them for breakfast. The description of the job was to create positive content news releases for the university, get the media interested in telling those stories, then be responding to the inevitable increases from the media during a crisis. This is particularly true of TV stations. They see something and they're on it, but I like that. It dovetailed really well with the episodic nature of a newspaper, where what's going on today? We got to respond to it. Nothing's going on, well, shoot. Let's find something that's going on. Well, so when crises, student protests -- and 2016 was a huge year for student protests. There was a fella named Donald Trump running for the presidency, and it was sparking a lot of concerns all around as well as activity. But none of that came as a surprise to me because I was used to it. Other people would go, "My God, we got to deal with this." I said, "What do you expect? Let's just deal with it. These reporters are not going to go away." It's not like you'd say, Don't do this story. Well ok, I'm going to do something else, shucks. No, they're there, so you have to respond to the crisis, and so long as your intentions as an institution or an organization are good, and you're aiming to do the right thing, an interesting psychological variable kicks in. We all wake up in the morning, worried that we're going to do something mean to someone, or something stupid, or counterproductive. Once you acknowledge that what you have done or your outcome or your situation is not ideal, people start to empathize with you a little. There but for the grace of God, go I. They become, in a funny sense, they don't forgive you, but they become your allies in conveying the information, solving the problem. It was an understanding of these psychological dynamics that helped me a lot in that EMU job, and also added to the stimulation and challenge that it offered and made it an extremely satisfying 11-plus years there before I retired in May 2021.
• [00:29:32] AMY CANTU: Geoff, I want to ask you a little bit more about your dad. The first city administrator. There's a building named after him. You mentioned that he started out in the Willow Village. Can you talk a little bit about his history since he's not here to talk about it?
• [00:29:48] GEOFF LARCOM: He graduated from Harvard in 1933, and he was an English major, an English scholar, in high school. He was a class poet, and he was a writer at heart with a sweet, poetic soul. He started out at the Hartford Courent, and with a real a writing / literary bent. But then he got into housing in Washington, DC. Of course, there was a need for housing understanding in World War II. As that started, he was in the Navy in the early '40s, and so he went to Willow Run, and he was part of the administration there that established that enormous bomber village and he was vital in the housing apparatus of that where tons and tons of people are coming to staff this bomber plants, and how are you going to house them? What are you going to do? Well, that experience bubbled over to his next assignment in World War II, where he was on the island of Truk, T-R-U-K, in the Pacific, where he was also responsible for the various housing aspects associated with the way the war was playing out there, Japanese soldiers, American soldiers, etc. After that, I think was in housing in DC for some, and then he got a wonderful job with the Citizens League in Cleveland, where that's a good government organization that promotes voting, activism, and a variety of other causes. Cleveland is a pretty robust city in terms of its local politics and administration. From that, he got a creative job offer. The Ann Arbor Mayor and council evidently decided that they wanted to go to a strong city manager government. In 1956, he was offered that job to be Ann Arbor's first city manager, a position in which he served for 17 years until 1973, a fabulous time, a time of change, a time of growth, a time of political turbulence, a time of economic development, a time of Huron River development. He had a wonderful career, which given the way the government was structured, he had exposure to all these wonderful departments, police, he oversaw, public works, he oversaw. Counsel was his boss. He worked with the mayor. All these great -- urban planning -- he worked with all these people, and the result of that career was a fabulous array of interesting friends, both on the U of M academic side and in Ann Arbor government and business, and just a wonderful professional life. He would tell you if he was here today that he had the best job in the world at the best time to have that job. I watched this. Some kids listened to Tiger games. I listened to Tiger games, but I also listened to council meetings at night. I watched this and I got to know a lot of his friends, but it was a wonderfully satisfying career that was honored...bless Ingrid Sheldon and the rest of the people at the time when they named City Hall in his honor and I believe it was 1995, two years before he passed in '97 at age 85. Again, I was born when they were 46. It was a wonderful career. I thank forever people who mounted the ability or the initiative to name City Hall after him. Universities named buildings after a lot of people. Cities don't name much after anybody. I'm very grateful for that, and even when they renamed or they redid City Hall and expanded it so greatly, they kept the essential label of City Hall as Guy C. Larcom, which I hope they still do. It's a piece of Ann Arbor's history that I hope is told within the bicentennial celebration. That's why I'm so glad to talk to you, among other things, is to tell of Dad's role in that history. One time, Robben Fleming wrote a book, I believe, called Tempest and Rainbows. He described my father as golden. That is, he was so collaborative. It was at that time that the university and the city really worked pretty well together, much smaller collegial group that got together and said, Well, what's the history and what are challenges we mutually face? But Robben Fleming was a great admirer my father, and they had to solve crises like the occupation of a building. There was a time when I think a sheriff may have wanted to be way more aggressive than President Fleming or my father would have preferred. But I remember that President Fleming and my father came out with a statement, No kid's life -- no building is worth a kid's life. It was out of these moments that helped define the texture and richness of his job, along with of course, the very key financial challenges of building the budget. Of rebuilding the dams in the Huron River after the '68 floods, and all the associated variety of stuff that goes into the City Manager's job. Think about from 1956-1973... Here's an interesting little nugget from then is, one of the best purchases the city ever made came in 1956, and this was the purchase of the dams from Detroit Edison. You have the Argo Dam, you have the Geddes Dam. You have the Barton Dam and the Superior Dam up I think near Ypsilanti. The city was able to purchase those, I think, for about maybe under $500,000. As a result of purchasing those dams, that knit together the riverfront. That meant that almost all that riverfront property was the city's. This has played out with the development of Gallup Park and the border-to-border trail and all this property. That could have been all developed. That could have been other stuff. But as a result, you had this massive potential of using that property, and you've seen nifty developments down by Argo Pond, you've seen the cascades and the like. That will continue. But for my father to be part of that kind of history and the development of that park system. Then you blend that with the increasing, dramatic increase in population, the campus activism associated with the radicalization of the Vietnam War, the draft. You want to see the country radicalized fast? Institute a draft.
• [00:36:37] AMY CANTU: Yeah.
• [00:36:38] GEOFF LARCOM: It will change everything instantly. He played a very meaningful role and that in the end, probably influenced me staying around Ann Arbor and being as interested and engaged in it as I have been. But he was very fortunate, and my mother was a great ally. He used to call her the critical layman. She was a great ally in all of his challenges and successes. That made for a really, really interesting childhood that was much more externally engaged than most, I would wager.
• [00:37:16] AMY CANTU: When your dad would come home, was he occasionally stressed? What did you experience as a child watching your father develop in his job?
• [00:37:29] GEOFF LARCOM: Well, I think he knew it was such a good job, and he'd been through a lot before. He got that job at age 44. He was pretty well along the way. Very rarely did he manifest stress. I think what he did was he enjoyed having this little dude at an advanced age, who he could go to my hockey games and wander around Vet's arena at six in the morning and have a cup of coffee or catch my slow fastball as I was a butting little leaguer or any of the things associated with being a dad to a son. My sisters were older. I'm 66. My one sister is 77, and the other is 82, both very robustly healthy. But it was a great joy and a surprise to have a son at age 46. He enjoyed it, and I really noticed very little stress. In fact, I could count on only one finger a time when I really saw him mad and incredibly irritated, and that was probably because a guy said something about my mom. But he definitely had time to be a dandy father. I think I was a source of relief for him and a nice counterpoint to that. I still remember him taking me out on the sheet of ice at Barton Pond, if you can imagine, Barton Pond frozen over in the winter, all the snow having blown off, and we'd be skating together, and he'd tell me to cut, cut, cut, and you got to stop being so slow and you got to move your feet, if you're go to play hockey. That kind of stuff, I think, was a wonderful offset for him and even help him confront the challenges of his job. I can still remember watching him compile the budget and doing all those things and being pretty interested in all those activities, and then being really impressed that he taught a college class. Similarly, I used to watch my mom grade papers in journalism. My history in being engaged in local affairs and then in journalism was pretty set in stone from the start.
• [00:39:42] AMY CANTU: Was he happy that you were working for the News? How do he feel about that?
• [00:39:45] GEOFF LARCOM: Well, one of the funny things is that I was still Sports editor when dad passed in 1997, and mom passed only eight months later, in 1998. They never knew that I became a reporter for the Ann Arbor News. They never knew I was a columnist. They never knew that I worked 11 plus years for the University where my mom taught. They never knew that I had the Knight-Wallace Fellowship. They never knew any of this. All they knew of me was as a stressed-out Sports Editor, who had to deal with the dynamics of carving Michigan football and the associated stresses of not being scooped, of being competitive, and putting out a daily sports section with a staff. They would have just gotten a huge kick out of the way the next 20 years played out subsequent to their passing. But they got a great deal of satisfaction out of me being a Sports Editor and working with the Ann Arbor News. But man, would they have gotten a kick out of the future.
• [00:40:50] ELIZABETH SMITH: You're also on the Washtenaw County Historical Society Board. Can you talk about your interest in local history, and how you got involved in that?
• [00:40:58] GEOFF LARCOM: Actually, I was on that board. I had another thing every Wednesday that I couldn't reconcile the two because I wanted to attend it. I'm actually probably looking to get back on it. But I do have an interest in serving locally in retirement on boards like that. They do great work, and they really care about it. It's so vital to have these people. The house on Main Street is a special location. One of my heroes locally is Susan Weinberg, who has produced such great works, and I can picture where her book right now is in our living room that talks about all the neat structures of Ann Arbor. I'm currently not on that board because I couldn't attend Wednesday meetings for half the year. We'll see.
• [00:41:53] ELIZABETH SMITH: Any other boards you're currently involved with or have been in the past?
• [00:41:57] GEOFF LARCOM: I'm an active supporter of the Eastern Echo. I'm on their Faculty Advisory Committee. I'm active with the Michigan Daily. I think I'm going to start attending council meetings regularly just to see the grist of what's going on there and see what's next. The council is a very good group and getting a lot done. One of the things about my and my wife's career -- she was assistant city attorney, a senior assistant city attorney for 30 years -- we both led very crisis-based careers. It's a wonderful thing to have done, but it's not like we crave to be in that work routine again. Again, I don't miss Channel 7 calling me up at 5:00 A.M. and saying, "Mr. Larcom, we noticed that there's X and Y going out to the university. Can you have a statement for us or appear on camera?" This is 5:00 A.M. Mind you. I said, "Well, when do you need to talk to me? Well, 7:00 A.M. would be good." It made for a very interesting and we never turned down a reporter's request. I always got that misstatement. I always did that. But it's not the kind of thing you crave in retirement. I'd love to write a book about the Ann Arbor News along the lines...and it would be very much a personal memoir, not a recreation of history. Jeff Mortimer is doing a wonderful package on that, produced with the cooperation of the library and I'm excited about that. I've given him a little editing help on that. But this would be a personal memory. It would be To Absent Friends, a Love Letter to the Ann Arbor News of Geoff Larcom. That's something I may do. I've done a good deal of freelance writing, particularly for the U of M School of Dentistry, interestingly enough. Retirement is great fun, but I don't wish to rejoin the work world.
• [00:43:56] AMY CANTU: You've seen a ton of changes in this town over the years, for good and bad. What stands out to you?
• [00:44:04] GEOFF LARCOM: I think the economic pop of the town. One thing that we need to realize about Ann Arbor is it's probably the most quietly affluent town you're going to see. If you were to talk to some high-end portfolio managers here, they would say, Hooo dog. You have to remember that A), you have a world-class medical center right down the road. Then, oh by the way, you have another world-class medical center out in Superior Township, the St. Joe Trinity. Then you have arguably the most eminent public university in the country here that's growing in size, 51,000 plus students, and then you have Eastern Michigan University, and then you have a vibrant, high-tech growing community, as well as a legal community. You have a lot of good jobs here, for my money, the most healthcare jobs per capita of any city in the country. Maybe Boston would give it a run for its money. Then you throw in the increased density in the student housing and the affluence of the U of M students, and the preponderance of out-of-state students. And you have a town that embraces its Bohemian past but is very much an economic powerhouse, and thus the challenge becomes, how are we going to build housing that can adequately help the people who do the service economy? Because the in-commute to Ann Arbor is stunning now. Go out, check out Geddes, check out I-94 heading west, check out any of these tributaries that flow into town, and it's a big commute. It's a big difference. Much different than when I was growing up, and we would cherish memories of places like Joe Star Lounge and Leo Ping's and all these cute little places, which we like to embrace, but are just not part of the new town. I can remember when the Blue Front on the corner of Packard and State was the big bookstore in town. Well, we're long past that. It's the affluence, the need for housing, the traffic. One of the interesting things about Ann Arbor that you may not--it's a very dense packed city. If you look at the highways, it forms a heart shape. The boundaries are very finite and within those boundaries, it's maybe 120,000 people now. But that's a deceptive number. The townships are enormous. Ypsi Township has what 70,000 people. Pittsfield Township is growing. All the townships. When you factor in the whole Ann Arbor Metro area, it's much, much bigger. Dexter has grown into a vibrant community. Chelsea has grown into an extremely vibrant community. Saline. These were once smaller schools that now lo and behold are academic and athletic powerhouses. So much change, but a lot of it positive and good. The city still retains a little bit of its character from those days and has been able to embrace some of that while trying to cope with the inevitability of economic change that's been forced upon it. But, man, there are a lot of amazing jobs here.
• [00:47:39] ELIZABETH SMITH: What are you most proud of?
• [00:47:43] GEOFF LARCOM: What I'm most proud of in my path is that I was able to do a job that, both as a reporter for the Ann Arbor News and at Eastern Michigan University, that enabled me to throw my personality out there, to associate with people, to show my enthusiasm for telling their story. Even though public relations is all positive, you're still telling stories. It's not all positive when you have to explain what went wrong. It's more varied than you think. Being able to tell people's stories with enthusiasm, with a sense of empathy and engagement, and all the way making them feel good about themselves or at least making them feel comfortable with the difficulties they're experiencing. I was extremely fortunate in the U of M job and that you could throw your personality out there like that. I guess the best example I can give you is there were student protests at EMU as a result of graffiti that was put on the walls. Later on, they found out the perp was actually putting stuff on the walls and calling police and trying to solve the crime, saying, I think I know who did this. It's a guy named Eddie Lindale Curlin, I believe. At any rate, the important point was the students were very upset about this racist graffiti and that day when it first appeared, they marched across campus, and then they were going to march to the president's house. They went out into Washtenaw and marched from the University Oakwood Street to Hewett where the president's house was located. This represented about, like, five or six blocks of Washtenaw. What I did was I went out and directed traffic to make sure that the traffic didn't head into this mob of students, and I would tell the traffic, and I say, These students are protesting, they're very upset. You need to make a right turn. You can't go through here, do this, do that. But it was an example of the engagement that I had with the students and how you could immerse yourself into the fabric of the university in so many ways, if you were willing to do that, if you were fearless enough or extrovert enough to do that. So to be able to apply those skills or level of engagement all across 20 years of reporting for the Ann Arbor News and then 11 for working for EMU, which is another form of reporting, is extremely gratifying and yielded just a ton of acquaintances. I still have all sorts of Facebook friends from EMU students who remember me from back then and remember Mr. Larcom, who was goofy and quirky, but he sure got down with the people.
• [00:50:30] AMY CANTU: This was great. Thank you so much.
• [00:50:32] GEOFF LARCOM: Yeah, great fun.
• [00:50:33] ELIZABETH SMITH: Thank you. AADL talks to you as a production of the Ann Arbor District library.