Roberta deBoer, The Blade’s city columnist, gives her take on Millie — and it’s surprisingly acerbic. Truthful, but acerbic.
Back when ABC ran a regular weekly feature that Peter Jennings introduced as the Person of the Week, Millie graced that show in a segment we all clustered around newsroom TVs to watch. When it ended, I wished out loud I could have met the sweet old lady they depicted, because whoever it was, it wasn’t Millie. You could think of her as an old lady, if you were brave enough - but sweet? Millie was a porcupine of a human being, which of course only made her even more interesting.
And this anecdote, which I remembered as happening while I was at the paper, at a Toledo convention of ONWA:
Maybe a dozen or so years ago, a statewide women’s journalism group held a convention in Toledo. This was about the time Millie, whose slowing-down phase was obvious to all but her, got a new assignment. It was a desk job of some kind so, to her way of thinking, it was a lesser assignment.
During one of the journo group’s gatherings, everyone passed around the microphone so they could identify themselves and their newspaper and say something about their work. As someone who was there tells it, here’s what Millie said when her turn came:
“I’m Millie Benson, and I write junk for The Blade. But I get my pension and my salary, so I’m the highest-paid junk writer around.’’
Aghast, a fellow Blade-ite urged her to disclose her other accomplishments.
“Oh, yes,’’ Millie was reported to have said breezily, “and I wrote some books too.’’
(By the way, The Blade’s Roberta deBoer is not the same person as the Roberta DeBoer you may remember from the Baby Jessica custody battle 10 years ago.)
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Joshua Benton is the director of the Nieman Digital Journalism Project at Harvard University, among other things. Before that, he was a staff writer and columnist for The Dallas Morning News. (More.)
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