Insight
Remember
When •
Print Honors
From the pages of the Jewish News
from this week 10, 20, 30, 40, 50
and 60 years ago.
Former Detroiter Jerry Flint is lauded by his profession and his alma mater.
A new American Jewish Committee
survey shows half of all American
adults have no idea what "the
Holocaust" means, nor can they
identify 6 million as the number of
Jews murdered during the Nazi
Germany effort to exterminate
European Jewry.
ALAN ABRAMS
Special to the Jewish News
erry Flint, a native Detroiter who once served as
the Detroit bureau chief for the New York Times,
is the latest recipient of the most prestigious
award in business journalism.
Flint, who now lives in New York City, was awarded
the Gerald Loeb Award for distinguished business and
financial journalism on June 30. The award is presented
by the Anderson School of Business at the University of
California, Los Angeles, and is named in honor of the
former E.F. Hutton vice chairman and best-selling
author.
For the 72-year-old Flint,
good things come in twos.
Wayne State University,
Flint's alma mater, will be
presenting him with its 2003
Arts Achievement Award on
Oct. 4.
Why an arts award? "It
must be for my dancing,"
quipped Flint last week. But
in reality, it reflects the con-
solidation of WSU's schools
of fine and performing arts
with that of communica-
tions. Flint will be in Detroit
to receive the award.
"I've invited him to stay
with me," said Al Halper of
West Bloomfield, a former administrator of the
Highland Park Public Schools who has known Flint
since both were third-grade classmates at the former
Irving Elementary School near downtown Detroit.
"Do you want to know what my real name is?" asked
Flint? "It was Yehudi Meyer Flint. Yehudi became Judah
and eventually was Anglicized to Jerry." His sister, Faye
Glosser, lives with her husband Saul in Southfield. Their
parents were Peretz and Balche Flint.
A retired Detroit Public Schools teacher, Glosser said
their father, who owned a hand laundry, was not pleased
when he heard that Jerry wanted to become a newspa-
perman. "He thought all newspapermen were drunks."
IT
Detroit Roots
Flint attended Jefferson and Durfee intermediate schools
(U.S. Rep. Sander Levin, D-Royal Oak, was his class-
mate at Durfee) and graduated from Central High in
1949.
At Wayne, he was a staff writer on the student news-
1993
paper, and Halper says he introduced their April Fool's
edition.
Glosser said Flint's first job in journalism was writing
for the Automobile Club of Michigan's monthly maga-
zine. "Len Barnes used to do a day trip feature, and he
and Jerry would go out and write and photograph it.
My mother saved all his stories," said Glosser.
After a three-year stint in the Army, Flint joined the
Wall Street Journal in 1956. He worked in their Chicago
office from 1958 until 1967, when he became the
Detroit bureau chief for the New York Times.
One of his biggest stories at the Times was the admis-
sion by then-Michigan governor and potential 1968
A delegation of 27 Detroiters are
joined by prominent Israeli leaders
and administration and faculty
members of Technion-Israel
Institute of Technology in dedicat-
ing the Bernard L. Maas Michigan
Dormitory on the Haifa campus.
1913
"The auto industry wasn't
Jewish-friendly because it
was essentially an engineer-
dominated industry, and
engineering was not a very
open profession for Jews
in the 1920s and 1930s,"
— Jerry Flint
Republic presidential candidate George Romney that he
had been "brainwashed" while on an official visit to
Vietnam.
"Lou Gordon had sent me a tape of his television
show where Romney had made the comment," recalled
Flint.
"I didn't think the Romney story was that big a deal
because I knew what he had meant. But after my story
ran, it was picked up on the AP wire and it ruined
Romney's presidential chances. I don't think he would
have made a good president anyway, but it was an exam-
ple of the media just waiting to get somebody and get
points for it," said Flint.
Flint also oversaw the Times' coverage of the 1967
Detroit riots. In 1973, he was transferred to New York,
where he worked on the national desk, in the financial
department and as chief labor writer. When he left the
Times in 1979 to become Washington bureau chief for
Forbes magazine, his successor as labor writer was
William Serrin, a former Detroit Free Press staffer.
PRINT HONORS on page 28
Rabbi William D. Rudolph, 30, is
appointed director of the Hillel
Foundation at Michigan State
University in East Lansing.
A granite monument is dedicated as
the site of the Sosnowice ghetto in
Poland on the 20th anniversary of
the destruction by the Germans of
the Sosnowice and Bendin ghettos,
where 90,000 Jews were murdered.
Irwin I. Cohen, Detroit attorney
and community leader, is elected
president of the Michigan B'nai
B'rith Hillel Foundation, Inc.
Rabbi Hayim Donin is the new
spiritual leader of Congregation
B'nai David of Detroit.
•
'10114fItioNWsirffilff,11111.
Mr. and Mrs. Albert Schiff of
Columbus, Ohio, establish an
annual interfaith scholarship at the
B'nai B'rith Hillel Foundation at
the University of Michigan in Ann
Arbor in memory of their son
Arnold Schiff.
Sidney Schwartz, head of the
Beth Israel school of Flint, accepts
appointment as principal of
Englewood Hebrew School of
Chicago.
— Compiled by Holly Teasdle,
archivist, the Rabbi Leo M. Franklin
Archives of Temple Beth El
8/ 8
2003
27