“Just a minute, Jake,” she’d say. Then in a whispered voice, “Ellen, it’s Jake. He talked to your roommate and he knows you’re here.”
Ellen would look up from her pages of sports notes and shake her head. “Tell him I’m out.”
Then she and her father would exchange a glance and Ellen would direct their conversation back to sports. She hated to lie, but where Jake Sadler was concerned, the greater evil would have been giving in to her feelings and seeing him. Jake was the only boy she had ever loved and now she could never, ever see him again. There was too much at stake. My life depends on it. My spiritual life.
“I’m sorry, Jake,” her mother would say. “Yes, we’re all doing fine. Yes. Well, I’ll certainly tell her you called.”
At week’s end Ellen was certain she knew at least enough about sports to take phone scores at the Detroit Gazette. Her father had been so thorough that she even had time to spend with her sisters and brother.
There were long talks with nineteen-year-old Megan about her troublesome boyfriend, and time spent helping Amy with her homework. Amy was seventeen that year, the quietest of the Barrett siblings, and Ellen enjoyed her company.
On the last day of her visit, Ellen, Amy, and sixteen-year-old Aaron, the only boy among them, played Password until they were laughing so hard they had to quit. Later Jane stopped by and the seven Barretts gathered round the worn oak dinner table as they had done every night before Ellen moved away.
Jane was twenty-one then, two years younger than Ellen. Growing up, the two had been inseparable, but in recent years they had grown strangely distant. Ellen searched for something that would explain the change in their relationship, but there seemed to be no answer. When I finish school, she told herself that night after Jane left, everything will be like it was before.
The next morning she leaned up and kissed her father on the cheek. It was time to get back to the city. “Thanks, Daddy.” Their eyes met and held for a moment.
“Ah, honey.” He pulled her into a hug. “You’re so grown up now. I can’t believe this is your last semester.”
“Yeah, I might even pass, thanks to you.” Her eyes twinkled as she pulled away and grinned at him.
“It’ll be our little secret. Deal?”
“Deal!” Ellen’s eyes grew watery. “I love you, Daddy.”
“I love you too, honey. Let me know how it goes.”
“Ellen?” Her mother had called from the other side of the house. She’d been packing Ellen a sack lunch for her trip back to Ann Arbor and was a blur of motion, moving across the kitchen, reaching into the refrigerator, then up into the cupboards and back to the refrigerator again.
“Yes, Mother?”
“Now, Ellen, remember to eat these sandwiches in the car while you’re driving,” she said in a pleasant, breathless voice loud enough to reach across the house. “You don’t want to pull off 1–75 and risk getting abducted by some stranger at a backwoods gas station.”
“Yes, Mother,” Ellen said obediently, raising her voice so her mother could hear her.
“And whatever you do, be sure to fill that car of yours with gasoline before you leave Petoskey. You should probably stop at Mr. Gardner’s station, right on the way out of town. You remember Mr. Gardner’s station, don’t you, dear?”
“Yes, Mother.”
“He’s been asking about you because he wants to send his son, Travis, to U of M next year. He’d love to see you, maybe hear a little bit about campus life and all. Could you do that for me, dear?”
“Yes, Mother.”
“You know, that Travis of his is certainly a smart one. He won’t have any trouble getting into U of M if you ask me. Of course Travis always did have a secret crush on you, Ellen. He was always … ”
She continued on. Ellen and her father exchanged a conspiratorial grin and he hugged her once more.
“Go get ’em, honey. You want to know something?”
“What?”
“You’re going to be a great writer one day.”
Ellen nodded, too choked up to speak.
Her mother rounded the corner with the lunch sack and presented it to Ellen as she caught her breath.
“Don’t forget what I said, dear.” She leaned over and pecked Ellen quickly on the cheek. “Drive safely and don’t take any chances in those small towns along the way. And that sports department is bound to be full of men. I guess there’s nothing we can do about that. But don’t you let them corrupt you. You’re a good girl, Ellen. I understand that this is an important break for you, but I’m concerned all the same. I don’t care what the modern school thinks of such things. A sports department is no place for a young lady, so watch yourself and be careful.”
“Okay, Diane, okay,” Ellen’s father said gently. He placed his arm around his wife and pulled her toward him. “Let the poor girl get on the road or she’ll never make it back before dark.”
Five minutes later Ellen was on her way. Her first night shift at the Gazette was two-days later and suddenly she was busier than she’d ever been in her life. Her hours were filled with senior level courses, labs and lectures and on-campus reporting. She would finish her course work, grab an apple and a bagel, and fly out the door for the Gazette. The days became weeks, and before Ellen realized it the semester was half over.
Once in a while she was allowed to forgo phone duty and cover a high school game in person. But most games were played on the weekend and Ellen’s Friday and Saturday nights were spent at the Gazette, manning the phones in the sports department. The paper had a system whereby coaches would call in their scores when the games were finished. Ellen took scores from dozens of coaches of sports ranging from track to T-ball, bowling to baseball.
The paper received hundreds of calls each weekend and interns worked the phones until midnight. No exceptions. Ellen was thankful for the work because it left her little time to think of Jake.
“Gazette Sports, what team are you reporting?” Ellen would say as she answered the phone and prepared her fingers for action. Then she would cradle the receiver against her shoulder while her fingers flew across the keyboard, transferring the details as accurately as possible into the computer. When the call was finished she would organize the information and file it to the sports desk.
“Gazette Sports, what team are you reporting?” The calls continued through the night.
The questions became part of a formula. Who was the winner, what was the score, where was the contest played, why was the game important, when would the teams play again, and how did the winning team manage to win. Space was tight, and details beyond that had no chance of making the paper.
A few interns complained about being used by the paper. There was no pay, no bylines, and no promise of promotion.
The hours were long, and Ellen’s neck grew stiff while she typed in details about park league T-ball games and high school volleyball matches.
She wouldn’t have traded a minute of it.
She had waited tables in Petoskey and then in Ann Arbor for five long years while she earned her journalism degree. Now she was working for the Gazette. Staff member, her employee badge said. Ellen took the words to heart.
As the semester drew to an end the Gazette’s assistant managing editor John Dower spoke to Ellen’s advanced news writing class. Dower was in charge of the news desk. He was pompous and condescending and had all the compassion of a frustrated drill sergeant. Ellen watched him size up the class of seniors and was silently thankful she worked in the sports department.
“Right now all of you are sitting there thinking you’re hotshot reporters about to take the world of journalism by storm.” The editor sneered, pacing before the class of fifty senior journalism students. “You think you’ll breeze out of here with your University of Michigan degree and waltz your way on to the staff of some big paper like the Gazette.”
He stopped and stared at them. “You’re wrong. Let me tell you how it’s going to be.” He began pacing again.
“When you leave here you’ll move off to a small-town paper, which, if you’re lucky, might publish three times a week. You’ll work every department, every beat, and make half of what it costs to survive.” He stopped and smiled sardonically. “You’ll do that for five years before anyone at the Gazette will even consider bringing you in for an interview. Any questions?”
Only one student in the room dared to raise a hand.
“Does that apply to interns at the Gazette?” Ellen asked.
The editor leveled his gaze in her direction and vaguely recognized her from the batch of interns currently doing time at the paper. “It especially applies to interns at the Gazette.”
Ellen began brainstorming ways to be more valuable to the Gazette staff. Instead of asking only the routine questions when scores came in, she asked a few more, searching for news worthy of more than merely a box score. She hit pay dirt a week later, four hours into a Friday night shift.
She was filing the information from the previous call when a score came in from a young boy named Chin Lee wishing to report the results of a junior-high basketball tournament. As Chin Lee rattled off the score, Ellen saw that the boy played for a school located in a neglected part of town. Most of the players had Asian names. Strange. Usually the coach calls in.
Ellen took down the usual information and then paused a moment. “Who’s your coach, Chin?”
The boy was quiet a moment. “Uh, well, we don’t have a coach. Is that okay?”
Bells went off in Ellen’s head.
“Sure, but who works with your team, who makes up the plays for you?”
Chin hesitated. “We, uh, we get together a few times a week and watch tapes of the Los Angeles Lakers. We see their plays and we learn them. Then we use them in games.”
Twenty minutes later Ellen had the phone numbers of the other players on Chin’s team and enough information to write a magazine article on the boys.
She stood up from her desk and located the sports editor, Steve Simons.
“What is it, Ellen?” He looked up from his computer screen.
Ellen cleared her throat and proceeded to tell him. Three hours later she had written her first feature story for the Gazette. Simons told Ellen it would probably run in Sunday’s paper.
On Saturday night Ellen could barely sleep. It was like being a little girl, waiting for Santa Claus to come. Only this time he rode a bicycle and his knapsack carried nothing but a stack of newspapers. The moment she heard the paper smack against the sidewalk outside her dormitory, Ellen rushed outside and tore it open. What she saw made her gasp aloud.
The Gazette had played her story on the front page.
After that there were other stories. A ninety-year-old runner attempting a final race in memory of her recently deceased husband; a Little League coach who had taken three boys from his son’s team into his home when their parents turned out to be drug dealers. The list grew.
Two weeks before graduation Ellen learned of an entry-level opening in the sports department at the Gazette.
“They told us we’d need more experience, but I’m going to go for it, Daddy,” Ellen told her father that night on the telephone. “Think I have a chance?”
“Are you kidding, honey? They’re probably hoping you’ll ask for an interview. Otherwise they might lose you to the competition.”
“Pray for me, will you?”
She knew the request would make her dad smile. He had raised them in the Catholic church, and at first when Ellen started attending a Protestant church he had been discouraged, disappointed in her decision. But he was used to the idea now and seemed to enjoy her open discussion of prayer.
“I’ll pray, honey. Now get back to school and get that job.”
The interview came one week before graduation. Ellen bought a new skirt and jacket for the occasion and then worried that she was overdressed. She was the picture of professionalism as she walked up the marble steps and went inside, but she was assailed by doubts. I’m too young … I don’t have enough experience … They don’t want a woman sportswriter … I should turn around and go home … Who am I kidding?
She made her way through the newsroom and into the sports department just as she remembered the words John Dower had spoken to her senior class: “When you leave here you’ll move off to a small-town paper, which, if you’re lucky might publish three times a week. You’ll work every department, every beat, and make half of what it costs to survive. You’ll do that for five years before anyone at the Gazette will even consider bringing you in for an interview.”
Ellen entered the sports editor’s office and the first person she saw was John Dower. He smiled kindly and motioned for Ellen to sit down. There was no mention of her inexperience.
An hour later she left with her first job offer.
She called her parents with the news.
“I don’t know, Ellen,” her mother said, her voice filled with concern. “I’ll worry about you out late at night covering sports games in a city like Detroit. Working with all those men. You’ll have to be so careful, dear. Are there any other women in the department?”
“No, but I’ve made a lot of good friends, Mom. I’ll be fine.”
“I just wonder if it’s smart for a young lady to be involved in a job surrounded by men.”
Then her father got on the line. “Honey, I knew you could do it!” He was bursting with pride. “Aaron and the girls will be so happy when they hear about this.”
“I’ll be covering high school sports for a while, but that’s fine with me. Can you believe it, Dad? Me? A full-time staff reporter for the Gazette?”
“It’s what you’ve always wanted, honey.”
“As far back as I can remember.”
“Before you know it you’ll be covering U of M games. Then I’ll be down every week.”
Ellen laughed. The Barretts had lived in Ann Arbor fifteen years earlier and her father was fanatical about Wolverine football. “So that’s why you taught me all that stuff about sports.”
“You better believe it. I’ll expect sideline passes to your first U of M assignment.”
Graduation came and went, and Ellen began working sixty-hour weeks. She covered more high school sports than she thought possible. Newspaper copy was measured in column inches, and most of Ellen’s assignments carried a maximum length of twelve inches. But there were times when she was given more in-depth projects, feature pieces on high school coaches and star prep players.
Two months passed. Ellen found a simple, one-bedroom apartment five minutes from the office and bought a few meager furnishings. Occasionally she ate a late meal with the sports staff after deadline on Friday nights, staying out until long after midnight swapping anecdotes and unwinding after an evening of tight deadlines.
Now and then she was asked out by one of her coworkers, but Ellen was adamantly opposed to the idea. There were nineteen writers and a dozen part-time reporters working for the Gazette sports section. As the only woman among them, Ellen would not consider being anything less than professional in their midst.
She spent most of her free time on the telephone with her parents and her sisters. They talked about a hundred different things from boyfriends to schoolwork to part-time jobs, but they respected Ellen’s wishes and none of them ever mentioned Jake Sadler.
One day Simons asked to see Ellen in his office. He was an intelligent man in his late fifties with two young grandchildren. Ellen thought he was the kindest editor at the paper.
“The Wolverines have their first scrimmage of the season this Saturday,” he said. “We want you there.”
Ellen was stunned.
“We’ll have a senior writer cover the game, but we’d like to try you on a few U of M sports features and see how you do.” He grinned. “Congratulations, Ellen.”
The day before the game she was given her press credentials. Ellen stared at them and remembered the long hours taking scores over the phone. She was twenty-three and she had arrived.
Her assignment was a simple one. Interview the offensive coordinator and determine the Wolverines’ approach for the coming season. They had a freshman quarterback known throughout the country for his passing ability. Would Michigan stick to its ground game with such a talented athlete leading the offense? Ellen’s story would answer that question and reveal the personal side of the coach.
Game time was ten o’clock Saturday morning, and Ellen’s apartment was thirty miles east of the stadium. She planned to be there at seven, eat breakfast somewhere off campus, and go over her list of questions before arriving at the stadium at nine. That gave her fifteen minutes before her interview with the coach.
Ellen was aware that this would be her first time to work an event alongside male sportswriters who were far more accomplished than she. Certainly the broadcast journalists would be there. Joe Stevens from WGRT, a grizzled veteran with years of sports experience, and Mike Miller from WCBS, a handsome newcomer who had played tight end for Michigan before suffering a career-ending knee injury. Mike was also actively involved with a Christian Athletes’ Fellowship and helped out at the local Children’s Hospital. He had a promising career in broadcasting, and Ellen admired his work.
She prayed she could earn their respect and come across confident and capable. She planned to work among them often.
The morning began badly. She overslept and couldn’t decide what to wear. She finally pulled onto Interstate 94 at 6:45, telling herself she would skip the leisurely breakfast and stop for fast food in Ann Arbor. Half an hour later she was minutes from the stadium, driving along State Street looking for a place to stop.
At the intersection of State and Stadium Way she stopped at a red light and glanced at the seat beside her to check how much cash she had. But her purse wasn’t there. Strange. She looked nervously up at the light. Still red. She scanned the backseat of her four-door compact and again found nothing.
At that moment the white van in front of her began to move. Green light. She pressed her foot onto the accelerator and scanned the floor of her car once more, desperately hoping to find her purse.
The crash came almost immediately. She jolted up against the steering wheel and then back against her car’s headrest.