Neal Shine was a world-class storyteller
April 4, 2007

BY SUSAN AGER
FREE PRESS COLUMNIST

Neal Shine, darn him, betrayed us.

He was supposed to live forever. He was at least supposed to live long enough to speak at our memorial services, to make people laugh and cry at the same time while recounting our uncommon genius with perfect comic timing.

I have told him more than once, "Shine, you've got to outlive me."

Didn't he promise he would? I swear he promised.

In this business, you should know, we call each other by our last names. Shine's fit him perfectly. He lit up rooms. He lit up the people in those rooms, making each of us feel like his special friend.
Shine used to tell me I was cute as a bug's ear. He used to tell me he felt like a fraud, running the place, can you believe it?, for so many years. He used to tell me it was more fun to be a cub reporter on the street than a top-ranked editor who rarely got out of the building for lunch.

But he loved lunch, long and slow. And I loved lunch with Shine. He recited popular and obscure poetry by heart. And he told stories. He told stories most reporters don't or can't, with vivid characters and amazing climaxes and punch lines so good because they were true.
He would wipe tears from his eyes telling some of his stories and I, the audience, would do the same.

Sometimes a story wasn't funny so much as astonishing. It left us silent, awestruck by the mystery of life.

And, at the end of our lunches, he gave great hugs, hugs you could tell fueled him. He hugged men the same as women, just not quite as long.

Responsibility at the top
Here is one of my stories about Shine:
I was young, interviewing for a job at the Free Press, scheduled to meet with Neal Shine at 10 a.m. I walked into his office -- he had no gatekeeper -- to find him slamming things down, kicking at his wastebasket and cursing.
"I'm sorry," I stammered. "Is this a bad time?"

He waved the day's Free Press at me, then threw it on his desk. I saw that its front page included a photograph of a local girl, maybe 10 years old, in a dramatic moment of ice skating.

"We put the girl's picture on the goddamned front page and we misspell her name! Her parents want to cut it out and keep it forever, but we screwed up her name? "

He was as angry as I would ever see him.

I should have been scared. Instead, his fury at the misspelled name of a schoolgirl made me suspect I would feel proud to work for a newspaper like the Detroit Free Press and a man like Neal Shine.

Years later, I learned that Shine kept his home phone listed as he rose through the ranks from copy boy to publisher and even ex-publisher -- even now.

He worked for the people, he told me. And anybody had to be able to reach him with a complaint, a question or, glory be, a story worth telling.

His high standards, his good humor, his delight in stories that gave glimpses into the meaning of life on Earth:
Shine never disappointed me.

Until now.

Contact SUSAN AGER at 313-222-6862 or sager@freepress.com.