Hey, hey, hey. This is Lisa A. And you're listening to Who's That Star? On LCC Connect at Lansa Community College. Who's that Star is a behind the scenes show where I sit down and talk with the employees at the college. This is an inside look at LCC where you will have a chance to learn about their passions, projects, what inspires them both at work and in their personal lives. I'm your host, Lisa Alexander. I'm so excited to get a chance to talk to all the people who make LCC great. This show is for you to get to know the people that work at Lansing Community College a little bit more and see what makes them tick. Are you ready? Okay. Let's go see who's today's star. Today on who's at Star we have a Lansing loco. He was born and raised in Lansing Community. He graduated from Lansing Catholic Central High School. After high school, he attended Lansing Community College and earned an associate's degree. While attending LCC, this star worked on the college newspaper the Lookout. He was a sports editor. After LCC, this star transferred to MSU and majored in journalism. As an undergraduate student, he worked as a sport editor in Grand Ledge, first for the Grand Ledge Independent, then for Ledge's Shopping Guy. Upon graduating from MSU in 1988, our star started a job as editor in chief of the Lesley Local Independent, a weekly newspaper in Lesley, Michigan. He stayed there until 1999. While employed at the Lesley Local, he also got very involved in community activities. He was president of the Lesley Chamber of Commerce for three years, president of the Lesley Fall Festival Committee for two years, and president of the Lesley Outreach food bank for one year. In 1999, he left the Lesley Local and started working for community newspapers as an associate editor of the Ingham County News in Mason. He was promoted three times in four years with community newspapers, winding up at managing editor, overseeing 14 newspapers. Wow. While serving as editor for five of them. Now that's a lot going on. How do you do that? We'll have to ask. He applied for and accepted the job as advisor of the Lookout at LCC in 2004. He worked for both MLive and LCC until 2016 when he was laid off from MLive. He has worked only at LCC since then. He and his family have lived in Leslie since 1999. He and his wife Carolyn have been married for nearly 37 years. They have three grown children, Nolan, Brendan and Danielle. His hobbies are are collecting baseball cards, playing and collecting pinball machines, watching movies, bowling, playing Softball and competing in trivia leagues. Oh, he does a lot. Okay, are you guys ready to learn who's today's star? Drumroll, please. Today's star is Larry Hook, advisor of the Lookout. Larry, we are so glad to have you here today.

Glad to be here. Thank you.

You know, you had a lot going on in regards to, like, hobbies and working so many different places. I can't wait to talk about that. But first, can you tell me a little bit about who you are and what's important to you in your life right now?

Well, I'm. I love my job at the Lookout. I'm the advisor and I oversee the. It's kind of like being the publisher of a newspaper. I oversee the staff. I do the hiring. I teach them journalism, basically informally. I'm not officially a teacher, but I set them down and give them lessons at our staff meetings and talk to them on the phone pretty much every day and assign the stories and just oversee the paper. I love doing that. Beyond that, like I said, I have a lot of hobbies and I love watching movies every night and watching baseball. I'm a big Tigers fan, even though they're bad. I really love baseball and I love playing softball. I've been playing since I was 16 years old. I've still played up until last year. We had a co ed team that went for 42 straight years.

Wow.

It looks like it's not gonna happen this year. We're kind of retiring, but I still may play on like a 50 and over team. We've been playing against 20 and 30 year olds and they've been hitting rackets at me, and I'm getting too old for that.

Hey, you did it for a long time, though.

Yeah, I did. And I love bowling. I'm the president of the LCC bowling league. I don't think I put that on that long resume.

No. Okay. I didn't even know we had a bowling team.

Yeah, it's an employee bowling league.

Okay.

And I'm the president of that. I've been in that league since it started 12 years ago, and I've been president for three years.

Wow.

So I'm in charge of that. I like being in charge of things. I've coached numerous sports. I coached all my kids in soccer, softball, basketball, bowling. I was the varsity bowling coach at Lesley for six years.

Wow.

And I founded that program. I went to the athletic director and said, why don't we have bowling? And he said, you want to coach it? And I said, I guess got into another thing. Usually I can't say no to things. So as long as I can be in charge, you're good with it. I'm that kind.

Hey, that's okay. At least you know, right? So tell me about your role in the work that you do here at LCC. I know you said you're the editor, but.

No, I'm the advisor.

You're the advisor. Okay. So can you go a little bit more in depth on what the lookout is and how you advise that the lookout is?

Well, you used to be a bi weekly paper. It used to come out every two weeks before COVID It's been published since 1959 at LCC. Like I said earlier, said in the resume that I was the sports editor back in the early 80s and I loved it then as an employee. We did things so much different back in the 80s. People don't even understand how much work it was to do stories in the 80s.

Right.

You had to write everything out by hand and type it. And it was really hard. But when I came back as advisor, then I oversee the students. There's an editor, there's an associate editor, there's a sports editor, there's a photo editor, a couple staff writers. Our staff is currently six people. Okay. And we come out, we print about six issues a year now.

Okay.

So like once a month during the fall and spring semesters. But we are online every day. We have stories published every weekday throughout the whole year, except for the one week at Christmas time when we're closed.

Right.

We print. We publish stories almost every day all year long. So in the summer and Christmas break and spring break and things we're still.

Publishing, students are still writing.

Yep, yep. And I'm overseeing it and put. Putting them on the website.

Okay. Because I didn't realize that we had the online piece, you know, for the paper. And I guess I should have because. Were you doing that before pre Covid?

Not so much, no. We had a website up until before COVID And when Covid came and we were forced to go home, we learned how to use it real fast. And it turned out it was a great move. I mean, it's so much easier now to do things online. When something happens, we can report it immediately rather than waiting two weeks or a week to get it out, get the news out. Unfortunately, there's a lot of people like you that don't realize we have an online presence. And honestly, it's the older people that read the paper, the physical paper, and the younger people that know how to use the online stuff.

So Exactly. Cause I look forward to reading. I grab the paper and I go through it and look at it, and you're right. I'm aging myself.

Yeah, well, me too. But the staff here, I mean, we have a lot of readers on staff that don't even read online, but they get the paper when it comes out and pick it up. And the other way around with the students, if they pick up a paper, they'll look at it for a second and set it back down. And I'm like, no, take it with you.

Right? Yeah.

Don't leave it there.

That is something. Did you think, like, when you started as an editor here at LCC, did you know you wanted to do journalism then?

I did, from high school, actually. I started out wanting to be a professional baseball player. I wanted to be a Detroit Tiger. And up until about senior year, I thought I was going to suddenly have great talent and be a baseball player. I didn't even make the varsity team, but wow.

Hey.

So at that point, I thought, well, it'd be cool to report about baseball, you know, and cover the Tigers or cover, you know, baseball. And so I thought, I'll go into journalism. And so from senior year on, I knew I wanted to be a journalist, and I thought I wanted to be a sports writer only. But it turned out when you go to college for journalism, they teach you all how to do news and how to do, you know, features and all that. And so when I went out into the real world, quote marks for a job, they asked me if I could do news and different things. I said, yeah, I can do that, you know. So I ended up being the editor in chief of the Leslie local.

Right.

And I did everything. I got to do the sports, but I also had to do the news and everything else. And sometimes there was nothing going on in Leslie. We only have 2,000 people in Leslie. And so there wasn't a lot of news going on. So I went out and sort of made the news because I became president of the Chamber and president of the Fall Festival. And I thought, if nothing's happening here, I'll make something happen, then I can write about it.

Exactly.

So that's how I got so active in the community, just to get some things happening so we'd have some news. And then when my kids were born, I backed off a little bit on the community service and started coaching their sports.

Right. Hey, though. But you've been busy.

Oh, I've always been so busy, and now I'm not. And it's nice.

Well, with that role Change from, you know, being an editor and actually writing and now being an advisor. And you were an advisor for a long time, but you still had a taste of the writing up until 2016.

Right? Right. I was. Yeah, I was out in the real world, and I could bring that knowledge back to my students. You know, I missed that a little bit because I worked for MLive and they kind of backed off. On what? Reporting community news just like every other newspaper nowadays, you know, because print isn't there anymore. But I used to cover city council meetings, school board meetings, a lot of business features, and I was out in the real world. And then I could report back to my students what I'm learning out there in the real world and use my real experiences to teach them the things they need to know. And I still use all those.

Right.

And one of the key things I teach my students is about fatal errors. And a fatal error is when you misspell a proper noun, especially a name. It's the worst thing you can do. You know, somebody finally gets their name on the paper and it's spelled wrong, and you don't want to do that. And when I was in. When I was in college at msu, if you had a fatal error, the best grade you could get was a D. Wow. I mean, I had a teacher named Cindy Kyle that taught me about fatal errors.

Is it more than just one? Like, more than just misprinting or misspelling a proper noun?

Is there just one? You get one proper noun wrong, and it's a fatal error, and you get a D. Okay.

So, like, if shoprite can't any name of a store, anything like that, or.

Ashley, you know, you don't ask how to spell it. You just assume it's a S, H, L, E, Y, but it's E, E. Oh, right. Or John, J, O, N. You know, just the simple things like that. I teach them. You gotta ask them how to spell it. Don't trust any website. You gotta ask that person.

Yeah, but that's good insight, and that's things that I think sometimes you have experience of being like the old school reporter I am. You know what I mean?

Definitely old school.

And so you. I don't. I mean, I feel like I always think about, you know, like, the newsrooms back in the day when people were in there and they're writing and doing how you had to get it to press and stuff like that. It just seems like it's a different time now.

It's so different. Yeah. When we built the paper back in the 80s and 90s, I was using wax and X acto knives and actual paper. You know, you had to put wax on the back of the paper and slap it down on the page and rearrange things and make the headlines fit perfectly. And it was very hard to build a paper back then. So as a result, a writer could only maybe do one or two stories a week just because it took so long to produce that.

Gotcha.

Now these students can write five, six stories a week. Pretty easy, you know, because you just type it and boom, there it is. You just throw it online.

So as an advisor, do you make sure, like, before it goes out, you have to review the whole paper or like, I know you're teaching them skills and I know that you're the person that they go to, but this is a paid position, right?

Isn't it mine or theirs? Yeah, yours. All of us.

Yeah.

Oh, the students get paid, too.

Oh, really? I didn't know that.

Yeah, they get paid above minimum wage, so.

Huh.

Yeah.

I thought that was like, okay, I want to be in journalism, so I'm going to learn. But you know what? Actually, I saw you previously at an event and one of your stellar people. Cause we're going to talk about that, too.

Okay.

Was going into. Was it sonography or rat radiology or surgical tech? It was surgical tech. The young lady, she had won a lot of awards.

Chloe.

Yeah.

Okay.

And she was. I think she was going. It was in a different major that wasn't even in journalism.

She's a dental hygienist.

Okay. I said everything, but I was trying.

To think of who you met. Yeah. That's who. Yeah, she. And yet she says. And she just wrote her farewell column, but she talked about how writing has helped her get through school. And you can always use writing in real life, you know.

Exactly.

And you can fake your way through a lot of things if you're a good writer, too.

Yeah. Yeah. So I know I'm kind of going off. I didn't ask a lot.

That's okay.

I'm going. But I wanted to talk to you about. Because this is something that I'm super proud of and that I found out about at that event. We went to talk about how great the Lookout is. We just won a whole bunch of stuff.

We did.

Can you talk about that for a minute?

Yeah. We entered two different contests. Every year, we entered two contests. One of them is the Michigan Press Association College Journalism Awards. And we won seven awards in that. We didn't get any real big ones in that one. But we got second and third and.

A couple others, but seven.

Yeah. And then in the other one, that's the Michigan Community College Press association, which sounds pretty similar, but it's MCCPA.

Okay.

That one is for two year colleges only. And we won 10 awards, including the first place for general excellence.

Wow.

Yeah. And that's the big award. If you get general excellence, that means you're better than the rest.

Hey, but I mean, when you think about seven at one and ten at another, that's you. You guys are amazing.

Yeah.

And that we must have a really good quality staff. And I actually, I enjoyed like, reading the paper and finding out what students thought was interesting. And then they'd have the part where they'd ask different questions about the students. Like they'd ask, wait, what are you doing for spring break? Or what's your favorite time of fall? Or just different things that they'd ask. And it was always kind of insightful to find out what students were thinking.

Yeah. That's something we call campus comments.

Okay.

It goes back to the old man on the street. From the. It goes way back to the 1940s or whatever. It's an old. Just ask somebody on the street a question, you know, and that's a fun little exercise.

I guess it is. I really. I love that. Well, you've been here for so long, Larry. Tell me why you keep staying. What keeps you here? What keeps you coming to work?

Well, I love journalism. I love my job. I love working with the students and seeing them succeed. Some of them come in and don't really know how to write much at all. And I like teaching them. We don't have a lot of journalism programs here. Classes we have. Mike Cohen's the only journalism teacher here, and he teaches a basic journalism class. Then I think he teaches column writing. And he does a really good job of teaching. But there's only one or two classes offered here at LCC. So a lot of the students that come in haven't even taken those classes and they're trying journalism for the first time. I get a lot of creative writers that come in and think, I want poetry or short stories and I have to teach them. No, that's not what we're doing here. But you are a good writer. I'll say. You definitely can write. Now I gotta teach you the style.

Right.

You have to teach them about quotes and make sure that they understand that you have to quote people accurately and spell names. Right. And there's a lot of things I have to teach them. So I Love being able to pass my knowledge along. I worked in journalism for 40 years, and so it's nice to be able to share that with somebody and have somebody go out in the real world and succeed. And there's a lot of them out there that are succeeding in journalism. Maddie Warren's at MSU now. She's the. Well, she's not sports editor, but she got to cover college hockey and college basketball and all this different stuff. And she loves sports like I do. And so it was nice that she. When she was here, she was editor in chief, but it was during COVID and we really couldn't do anything during COVID Right. So she's out there now going to hockey games, basketball games, you know, so I'm really proud of her. Michael Catarina, he's a lot older. He was here 16, 17 years ago, but he's made a great career in journalism as a photojournalist. Oh, wow. Brian Wells is another one that's succeeding in photojournalism, you know, and I see their names in print and get things on Facebook from them all the time. And there's other ones.

Yeah, that's a good. But isn't that a good feeling?

It is.

To see that you've been instrumental in helping people find their passions or cultivate their passions. I think that's so great.

Yeah. And, you know, out of the staff of six this year, maybe one will go into journalism, as it turns out. And if that happens, that's great. One out of six is great, because nobody knows what they want to do at this age, you know, at age 18 or 20. And some of them come in thinking they never want to be a journalist, and they change.

So how do students find you? Like, do they. Are you putting out, like, a job ad, or is it word of mouth or what? Like, are you looking for people out of high school? Or when they come in, how can someone say, oh, I want to work for the little.

That's a good question. It's a little bit of everything. And we. In July, if I have openings, I'll post a job. But a lot of times it's like in September when the school year started, and they're looking for something to do, and students don't look ahead much, you know, in July, they're not even thinking about a job. So in September, somebody walks in and goes, I'd like to work here. And I say, well, I filled all the positions now, but give me your name. And do you have any writing samples? And so that's one.

So they need to have a writing sample.

Writing samples are good resumes, but sometimes I'll see somebody. You know, we used to get letters to the editor. That doesn't happen much anymore. Somebody would write a good letter to the editor, and I would call them and say, do you want to write for us? Because you wrote really well. I've hired at least three people just from letters to the editor.

Wow.

Yeah, so that's a good way to find somebody. Writing classes for photojournalism, I call Ike Lee, the teacher here, and say, do you have anybody that would like to be our photo editor? And the last two people I've hired came from Mike Recommendations. If he recommends them, I know they're good enough.

Exactly.

Okay. So. And, you know, I recommend people to other papers, too, at times and say, you know, like to state news for Maddie. I knew she'd be great out there. So.

Yeah. Now, is there, like, an association with, like. I know you said that they had, like, we won awards, but do they have conferences? We do for student writers and student newspapers. And do they do things like networking and stuff like that?

Not as much as you'd hope, but yeah. The last conference we went to was at CMU. It was April 1st. No fooling. No, but April 1st, and there was several seminars they had speakers come in from. They're former CMU people that are in the journalism world now. They work for the Detroit News and MLIVE and different places like that. And they came in and gave lessons on sports writing, photography, news writing. And then there was a featured speaker that spoke during the luncheon, and that's where we got our awards at the end of that day. But it's a whole conference that day. All the advisors from the 10 papers that were competing, we meet and get together and. And come up with ways that we could work together.

Okay.

A lot of those things never seem to happen.

Yeah, it seems like you get busy, but at least you communicate and start.

But what I do with those is just ask a lot of questions to the other advisors. How do you do it? You know, how many times do you print a year? How much do your students get paid? Do they take a class or do they. You know, because some of them. Some of the students at other colleges don't even get paid. They take a class, and it's part of the class.

Oh, wow.

And then other ones pay more than we do. Other ones have a lot more students than we do. In fact, most of them have more than we do. And yet we still won the award.

Cause you putting out papers. I mean, putting out articles.

We average about 15 articles a week during the school year. And I asked most of those advisors and they said usually five to six articles a week.

Wow.

Right?

You can see that's a good thing. I feel like you're giving them a good experience.

I work them hard.

Yeah. And they get that. But it carries over. Right. Like into a real life setting. So I just could talk to you all day about this, but let's find out a little bit more about you. I mentioned some hobbies.

Okay.

And the one that I wanted to talk about is the pinball. Yeah, tell me about that a little bit.

I liked playing pinball when I was a kid. I got my first pinball machine when I was 13. I put it out in my garage, and I opened the garage door and let kids in the neighborhood come over and put their quarters in.

Okay.

And I made enough money on the first one to buy a second pinball machine. So from then on, it just became a passion of mine. And I now have 11 pinball machines. They're all from 1968 to 1989 is when they were manufactured. So they're all older. They're all antiques.

You got space. They're actual true size.

Yeah, they're full size. And I have five in my basement, six in my garage.

Wow.

So, yeah, they don't all fit in one place, but.

Yeah, but that's nice, though. You still got a nice five. You have people downstairs, then people outside. You can have the pinball. You could have the what,'70s party.

We do. We do, Yeah. I have records out there in the garage. And I have a refrigerator, of course, so we can have beverages. And we have a ping pong table and yeah, yeah, we have a lot of fun out there. Party. We have birthday parties out there. And then in the winter, I was too cold to go out in the garage, so I still got five in the basement. I can play. So.

And then you talked about. You're on the bowling. You're the president.

President of the LCC Bowling League.

Of LCC. Bowling league. Then what type of movies do you like? You enjoy?

Oh, I love comedies and I love thrillers. I like most movies, but I collect certain. Like all the Adam Sandler movies. I have them all.

Okay.

I'll watch them back to back to back until I get to the end and then I go to somebody else. Then I'll watch all the. Like. Right now I'm watching Olivia Newton John movies, which is pretty obscure.

Okay.

But you'd be surprised. She's been in 18 movies.

Wow.

Because everybody thinks Grease, Xanadu, that's it.

Yeah, yeah, she's.

She's been in 18 movies, and some of them she's just got a cameo appearance. But it's just how I end up watching a lot of movies I wouldn't watch otherwise.

Yeah, you find a person and then. Cool, Larry, that's a good idea. Actually, I never thought about that. So.

Yeah, I'm gonna watch all the James Bond movies pretty soon. That's when I got collected. You know, there's 27 of them, so that'll be good.

So with all the different Bonds, you just like the Bond series? Not a specific Bond.

Right.

Just a Bond. Okay. Oh, yeah. That's interesting. And then you said you like competing in trivia leagues.

Yeah, we play in trivia leagues on right now. It's Tuesday nights. But a bunch of my friends. I got friends that I went to high school with, and we still play together.

Oh, wow.

We play trivia together. And my family. My son is a Trivia Master. He's 26 years old, and he's so good at trivia.

Wow.

And he loves music, and he's a musician, so he gets all the music questions. Right. And he knows geography, and he knows history, and my thing's sports, and I know a lot of movies, obviously.

Yeah.

So. And then my wife, she knows, like, cooking and books and different things. So you put all your knowledge together.

And, you know, you a dynamic team, huh? Since they can't be beat. All right, well, I mean, I could talk to you all about all day. Larry, you're very interesting, but I'm gonna ask you something. I want to know, like, what are you most proud of that you've done in the last year?

In the last year? Well.

Or if you can't think of that.

Period, I'm thinking in the last year, I guess getting the general excellence award as a professional, I mean, that's. That's huge to me to have our staff get first place in general excellence for, you know, so professionally, it would be that.

Okay.

As a family man, I'm just proud of my kids and my wife. You know, I have a great family, and my son's getting married this year.

Oh, congratulations.

Yeah, and I'm really proud of him. He became a nurse, and he's working at Sparrow Hospital.

Oh, wow.

Really proud of that. So, you know, I guess I'm proud of me for having such good kids.

Exactly.

If I can use that. But, you know, my kids are all amazing and very smart, and they work Hard. And they're good kids and they don't get in trouble.

Hey, that's a great thing right there. When you can see that you've put in the work and, you know, your kids have come out on the other side. All right. Hey, that's a good thing.

I kept an eye on them all the way up, coaching them and everything I could, so.

Yeah, you spent the time and you did that.

And my wife did, too. She was with. She did all that, too, so she's a great mom.

Well, I wanted to. We're gonna wrap up our interview, but I wanna let you kind of describe what you think your next big project is.

We gotta redo our living room and we gotta clean out the basement. But I'm always working on my baseball. We didn't mention my baseball card collection,.

But I. Yeah, I didn't know.

400,000 Baseball cards.

What.

So that's one of my other hobbies that, you know, I'm constantly collecting baseball cards. And I have every tiger from 52 to present, every tiger's ever made, 1951 to current, and I have all the complete top sets from 70 to present.

So, Larry, you are. You really are into those. Like, how did you get into that to keep it going? I guess my thing is, is that, you know, people start collections, but you've been dedicated and true with the pinball machines, with the baseball.

Yeah. The records, the albums.

The record. Yeah. Like movies.

Yeah. And once I get started, I can't stop. So. Yeah. I never get rid of anything, and my wife doesn't collect anything, so.

So you take all this space.

She's wonderful because she lets me have my toys.

Oh, yes, she is. She is.

Yeah. But big projects beyond that, just keep doing what I'm doing. I'm enjoying life right now. You know, I'm getting near the retirement age, but I'm not ready to retire. I want to be here at least three, four more years.

Oh, wow. Yes.

I've got 19 years now, so I don't know if I'll get to 25. But I'm not in any rush to leave because I like doing what I'm doing.

Right. That's a good thing. Yeah. And I just want to thank you so much for coming on. Who's that star today? You have so much. We could do part two and three, just to kind of dive a little bit more into some of your interests. But I do. I'm proud of the lookout, and I think you make a lot of that happen. Even though the students are doing the work, you guide them. So thank you.

Yeah. Advisor means you give advice if they want it. If they don't want it, then you just let them work. But I oversee everything. So, yeah, I'm proud of them. I'm proud of my staff.

Well, we're glad that you're here on staff with us at LCC. And thank you.

Thank you.

You've been listening to Who's That Star? I'm Lisa A. and you can listen to this episode of Who's That Star and other shows from LCC Connect anytime online at LCCconnect.org. Thank you for listening. Catch me next time to find out Who's That Star.