On Prof. Greene - from one of your 'pups'

On Thursday, journalism lost one of its greats. Bob Greene, 78, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and editor, was also my teacher, mentor and friend. I haven’t been in a joking mood but luckily, Prof. Greene was, among many things, a funny man. So I thought I’d share some funny vignettes about him.
Two memories from his “Journalism 13” class, aka journalism boot camp:
- He taught us to dig up dirt on people. Literally. He once came to class with a bunch of gloves and big garbage bags he had picked up off people’s lawns that morning. We had to sift through them and piece together a story about those residents.
- Once, in the middle of a lesson, two people wearing black robbers’ masks rushed into our classroom demanding someone’s belongings and scaring the crap out of most of us. When they left, we had minutes to write a story, with our hands still shaking. It was not a real robbery, but a real lesson in covering breaking news.

That was from me. This is from some of the thousands of people he had an impact on:
Excerpt from “Pulitzer’s Gold,” by Roy Harris:
“Bob Greene was a born snoop. He had been involved in some type of investigation work since high school, when he was employed as a “sniffer” for a department store, checking out the underarms of fancy dresses that women bought and later returned. His olfactory test proved whether a woman had worn the garment to a party before bringing it back for a refund....”

The following three comments are from Newsday’s Web site:
From “realist,” Trumbull, CT:
“I was an intern at Newsday in the mid-1970s when a jetliner crashed at JFK. Bob Green was the night editor and when the passenger list came over the wire, he divided the Suffolk County phone book up among the staff and we were told to call anyone in the book with the same last names as the deceased and ask them if any of their relatives were on the plane in order to get a local angle. Naturally, being a college intern, I did as I was told but after waking a few people up around 11 pm or so with this horrifying question, I decided that this was very cruel and I just started dialing my own number and pretending to talk to people.”

From “Kathleen Wickham,” MS:
“The night before the awards dinner Bob and a gaggle of young reporters (with the same goal in mind) went to a bar (of course). We were hanging on to his every word. The waitress came over and wanted to know who he was. With a straight face, Bob told her he was with the mob. We had great service after that!!!”

Brian Magoolaghan, Brooklyn, N.Y.
"Whether he was recalling the telephone conversation that ended his reporter/source relationship with the Kennedys, meeting some dark and potentially dangerous characters in a hotel room in Turkey, the one about teaching a reporter a lesson about the difference between Farmingdale and Farmingville by making the reporter drive from one to the other and report back the mileage, or the one where he pulled black socks over his tennis shoes so that he could get into a swank restaurant, he always had us riveted and thoroughly entertained."

From mediabistro.com
By Richard Behar
"He would sometimes rant about how today's cutbacks in long-form, high-quality journalistic probes were degrading our democracy. As he once told me, the founding fathers didn't give us the First Amendment "to publish apple pie recipes."

"According to former Newsday editor Tony Marro, Greene once pounded on a wall so hard during an argument with editors that he sent pictures crashing off the wall of the publisher's office next door."

"When Newsday's bean counters banned staffers from flying first class, Greene literally measured the size of a coach seat and the size of his not-inconsiderable posterior — and informed the bosses that he'd continue flying in the front of the plane."