Hello. I am sure that we all remember Walter Cronkite, the trusted voice of the news. He was the person many of us turn to for clarity and credibility in an era when journalism was seen as a pillar of truth. And maybe you had a favorite newspaper columnist or reporter, someone whose byline you recognized, whose storytelling shaped how you saw the world. Well, journalism has changed. The 60s, 70s, 80s, even into the 2000s were a different time for reporters. News was consumed in the pages of the morning paper or through the evening broadcast, often delivered by a handful of trusted voices. Investigative journalism thrived. Print newsrooms were bustling, and there was a deep sense of responsibility to inform the public. Fast forward to today and and the landscape looks completely different. News is 24 7, digital and often consumed in bite sized formats. Traditional newspapers have struggled, and the way stories are told has evolved dramatically. But through all of these shifts, one thing remains constant. The power of storytelling. Journalism, at its best, doesn't just report the news. It brings people and places to life. It holds up a mirror to society. It captures changes as it happens, and it preserves moments in history. My guest today, John Gallagher, knows this firsthand. A veteran journalist and longtime reporter for the Detroit Free Press, John spent over 30 years documenting the rise, fall and rebirth of cities like Detroit, Cleveland and Pittsburgh. In his new memoir, Rust Belt Reporter, which I highly recommend, he shares what it was like to be in the trenches during one of the most transformational times in journalism and in the cities he covered. Today, we'll talk about John's career, the changes he's seen in journalism, and the role of memoir writing in making sense of history, both for cities and for ourselves. Whether you're interested in urban renewal, the evolution of media, or even writing your own life story, this conversation is for you. Welcome to Boomer Banter, the podcast where we have real talk about aging. Well, my name is Wendy Greene and I am your host. But first, dear listener, let's be honest. As we get older, our social circles shrink, friends move away, some relationships fade, and life can start to feel a little quieter, maybe even a little lonely. And at the same time, many of us worry about our energy going down, our memory, maybe our remaining years. And we realize that most of us don't have any role models for aging well. And that's exactly why I created the Boomer Banter membership. A warm, welcoming space where real conversations happen, friendships form, and we navigate this next chapter together. For just $25 a month, you will get exclusive access to two interactive meetings each month. And the best part, you can Try the first month for free. No commitment, no risk. Just email me at wendyboomer Biz and I'll get you set up. And if it's not for you, no hard feelings. But if you love it, and I think you probably will, we'll welcome you into our thriving, supportive community. So spots are limited. Don't wait. Grab your free month today. Email me@wendyboomer.net biz so let me tell you just a little bit about our guest today. John Gallagher is a veteran journalist and author whose book Reimagining Opportunities for Redefining an American City was named by the Huffington Post as among the best social and political books in 2010. His recent book, Rust Belt Reporter, a memoir about his more than 30 years covering the fall and then revival of heartland cities like Detroit. John was born in New York City and joined the Detroit Free Press in 1987 to cover urban and economic redevelopment efforts in Detroit and throughout Michigan. He is a 2017 inductee into the Michigan Journalism hall of Fame. And John was a guest on boomer banter in August 2021 to share another book he wrote titled the Englishman and Detroit, another fascinating book. I would, I would encourage you to check out episode number 64 to learn more about that. But right now I'm happy to welcome John back for episode number 225. We've come a long way since 64, John.

Wendy, thank you so much for having me back. And congratulations on, what was it, 225 episodes. That's wonderful. Yes.

Isn't that incredible? Yeah, I know. I'm excited.

Off the corks and when you hit 250. Right?

That's right. That's right. You're going to come for the celebration.

Right.

So what a fascinating career you have had, John. And from your book, I saw that you actually started your career in New York. Right.

Chicago.

Chicago.

Chicago City News Bureau of Chicago. Went to New York for a journalism program. Came, came to Detroit that way. Yeah. So I've been around. Well, actually, I was in upstate New York for a few years at newspapers up there, Rochester and Syracuse.

Yeah, that's what I thought. You did some reporting.

Well, that's prelude to coming to Detroit.

To coming to Detroit. So a lot of what came through in your book was this purpose that you had that was so inspired. Right. By the work that you were doing. Can you tell me some more about that?

Well, you know, when you, in your intro, when you talked about aging well and where we're at now at this point in our lives, the only Analogous time for me was when I was about 21 and getting out of college and not understanding, not having a real image of what I wanted to do. No clear career, career path. But I had worked on my school papers and, you know, I loved reading, I loved writing, and I decided I was going to be a journalist. And when I finally got that job and I talk about it in the book, that there was only forward, as I said, you know, I mean, the first couple of years out of college, I hadn't done much. I hadn't, you know, I had a couple of unsatisfying jobs. And so I really thought that journalism, I found myself in that field and, and I love doing it because it's fun. We all, all of us who do, we, we commiserate about the long hours and we, you know, we, we go to get a nice cushy PR job, they double our pay and all that, but we had so much fun just getting out, roam around and talking to everybody and being there at, you know, big events happening and, you know, going face to face with the mayor or the governor or whoever it is or, you know, the, you know, the super bowl or whatever it happens to be. So, yeah, I love journalism and, and I really thought I found myself. And, and as you mentioned, you have to dedicate yourself to the field, truth telling, storytelling, fairness, all that sort of stuff.

Yeah. And it sounded like, I mean, you really have to pay your dues, too. I mean, you had some terrible night shifts.

Well, yeah, my first seven years in the business, I spent five years on the night shift. I remember once working every Saturday night for nine months in a row on the midnight police beat, you know, midnight to dawn, you know, for a year. So, yeah. And, you know, everybody gets these assignments that are, they don't like. But you're learning. I mean, you have to learn. I mean, it takes a long time to get good, you know, find your footing in, in journalism, like any field. I mean, you, you know, you don't become a famous brain surgeon in med school, right? So, so yeah, you pay a lot of dues, but eventually you kind of emerge after what, you know, eight, 10 years in the business, you kind of emerge into what kind of journalist you're going to be.

And so when you found yourself at the Detroit Free Press, had you already been on a city beat, like, understanding the economics and everything?

Yeah, to some extent. I was in, I previously had been in Syracuse, New York, at the paper there. And that's basically what I was really starting to cover. All these cities go through the same rise in the early 20th century, fall and, or collapse and then slowly try to rebuild. And so there are a lot of strategies being tried in all these cities. Most of them did not work for a long time, which is why Detroit's such an interesting city, because what they were trying actually worked. After, you know, 40 years of failed efforts, they finally started to piece it together. But yeah, so I had started doing that then I had a year in New York at Columbia University on a journalism program, one of these mid year mid career fellowship things and, and really paid attention in the classes on economics and urban and all that stuff to what was going on. And then I got recruited to come to Detroit from there. So I, and, and they wanted me to cover this urban affairs kind of beat, which is what I was interested in. So it was a, it was a good match.

Yeah, I mean, it's so exciting the stories that you had to share about that. And I, I know there were some issues that became a little bit controversial as you were covering them, so you can, you know, enlighten us.

Well, the, the first big thing we jumped into was sort of a redlining kind of story. Redlining that is banks abandoning the city of Detroit. And I and two other reporters spent months doing data and walking neighborhoods and knocking on doors and, and demonstrated, we thought pretty convincingly that the banks had, you know, had pretty much abandoned the city of Detroit and was very controversial, but, you know, won a lot of awards and all that sort of stuff and, and actually led to some real action. So what banks have to tell the public about what they're doing and where they're loaning and who they're loaning to. We get much more of that now because of the kind of work that we did and that others were doing about this. And then of course in Detroit, never Adult Newstown, we had Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick who came into office in 2000 with enormous charisma and, and great ability. It turned out that he was, he was a crook. And, and we had that. And then of course we had the city of Detroit filing bankruptcy in 2013-14.

Oh, was it that recently?

10, 12 years ago. And that the only big city to ever do that. And it looked like it was going to be this enormous calamity for the city. I mean the last blow to a city that had been declining for 40 years. And instead it turned out it just almost miraculous spin through bankruptcy where they really straightened out the city's books. So, you know, I got to do all that stuff And a lot more. That's, as I said, the great thing about being a journalist. You get to go everywhere. You get to talk to everybody, being on the inside of all this kind of stuff.

So what was. I mean, your book is titled Rust Belt Reporter, right? So I think a lot of journalists are like, oh, I've got to get to New York. You know, I got to be where the action is. What was so exciting about being a Rust Belt reporter?

Well, I'm sure When I was 21, 22, I wanted to go to the Paris bureau or the New York Times, right? There aren't too many openings there. But if you're covering cities, you can either cover, you know, a Sun Belt behemoth like Phoenix Rising, or you can do one of the older cities that's been suffering and cover the revival. And I. I found that by. By luck or by happenstance, the recovery of Detroit was, I thought, the great urban story in America because of the way they did it. There had been an awful lot of cities that had tried these big showcase projects. In Detroit, you had the Renaissance center being built in the 70s, this enormous fortress on the riverfront that's now mostly empty. Other cities, we tried festival marketplaces. That was another one, you know, downtown malls. But in Detroit, it was a whole bunch of things that. That slowly caught on most. Not sort of government policy, things that just people were doing and, you know, entrepreneurship and community gardening and urban farming, and it just, you know, rescuing old buildings and vacant lots and in interesting ways. And that's really where it began. So, you know, a lot of folks say, oh, yeah, Detroit's back now. The Wall Street Journal called Detroit the most surprising boom town in America. But it's not just because of the bankruptcy or maybe Mayor Duggan. Our mayors have been a really good mayor for 12 years. It goes way back. And there's all kinds of things that happen slowly and mostly behind the scenes that were slowly lifting up the city.

I love that you said entrepreneurship, you know, because we saw. We see some of that here in Greenville, South Carolina. We had. It was a mill town, right? And there's been a lot of revival of the old mills into shops and restaurants and even apartments. And a lot of that has been entrepreneurial driven.

Well, of course, Detroit was the, you know, the Motor City, the corporate town of all corporate towns. The biggest corporations in the world with GM and Ford and Chrysler. You know, GM was number one on the 4 Fortune 500 list for, like, 75 years in a row. So everybody in town was either a mechanical Engineer or a guy working the assembly line, and they weren't with everybody. After the early 1900s, which was a very early entrepreneurial time in Detroit with Henry Ford and all the others creating these car companies, it very quickly consolidated into these enormous industrial corporations. And as recently as 2000, I mean, there was no sense of entrepreneurship in Detroit. There were no incubators or accelerators to train entrepreneurs. There was no venture capital in town. Universities were not doing much to turn out entrepreneurs. And there was no culture around that. Yeah, around that. And since then, we've created all that stuff. You mentioned my friend Randolph that I wrote the previous book about, he was a key player in that. But now we have two major incubators in the city, plus others in the suburbs training entrepreneurs. We have, I don't know, a few billion dollars in venture capital that's been invested Detroit startups. We have hundreds of these little firms doing, you know, smartphone apps and a lot of mobility kinds of things, you know, to do with electric vehicles and, and monitoring traffic and, and all this sort of stuff. A lot of healthcare, a lot, and a lot of retail type stuff. And so we've really reinvented the whole notion of entrepreneurship here, and that's been a big help.

That's fantastic. So I want to switch a little bit. So you. So you have been spending the last 30 plus years writing stories about events that are happening, and now you took the time to write about your story. How different was that to do?

Well, it's funny. Well, just a little background. I retired from the Free Press from full time at the end of 2019, December 2019, just before COVID just before the pandemic.

Oh, great.

I had no sense I was ever going to write a memoir. We go into lockdown in March of 2020, and I just, every morning I just started to noodle around a few anecdotes and memories that I had. And within a couple of months, this book was emerging from. From that. Once I got into it, at the first, writing about myself felt a little intimidating, a little scary at first. But once I got into it, it became just another writing assignment. Like. Like, if I can write about urban redevelopment, I can write about how I felt, you know, working the night shift for five years. I mean, it's all about putting the words on the paper and shaping them and making them say what you want to say. So at some point, it became just another one of my assignments, as odd.

As that sounds interesting, because I would think, you know, I mean, like, writing in a journal is one thing. I know nobody's going to read it, so I can say anything I want to say. Right. To put it in a book that other people are going to read, I would think you almost have to like be the third person writing it.

Yeah, almost. Although I like to say they're outward looking memoirs and inward looking. So as a journalist cover, I was writing about my career, but covering Detroit, covering the recovery, covering the downfall of newspapers that you refer to. And so I, I, I had a slight distance from that. In my memoir I write about my feelings to some extent and how I met my wife in Detroit and all that. But, but it's not, it's not the same kind of intimate, inward looking memoir you would be doing. If you're doing, you know, recovery from an abusive childhood relationship or, or overcoming disease or, or something like that, that is much more intimate. And that's when you really have to lay yourself bare. So, so I think you get a sense of who I am as a person from my book. But it, but it's, but it's that more outward looking, it's how I encountered the world, what, what I see in the world rather than, you know, what the world saw in me.

Yeah, I think that's probably a good description because you do talk about some of the big events like the Berlin Wall. Tell us about that. That was quite an exciting event. Almost, almost event.

Right. Well, in 1989, of course, the Berlin Wall came down, Communism fell and east and West Germany were reunited. And this wall that had been dividing Berlin and was the symbol of East West Cold Wall War conflict finally opened. And I had been invited by a German American foundation to take like a two week visit to Germany and interview a lot of people and all that. And so we happened to be in Berlin the week that the Wall opened. And first thing I did is go to the Brandenburg Gate, the famous gate that was the symbol, the symbol of the Cold War. And I stood there that evening with TV cameras, news crews from around the world lined up and thousands and thousands of people, people. And I thought, you know, my only, the only time in my career I'm actually at the place the whole world is watching, right? And you know, that, that we, I mean, we had a wonderful week interviewing all the East Germans who were coming through and interviewing them and, and all that. And you know, like everybody else, I went to the wall and chipped out a few pieces of the Wall. And I remember we, they, we, they took us into East Berlin. It was still sort of separated, even though it was technically, it was Separated. And they took us in and we did a bunch of interviews there. And the. The American ambassador to East Germany was from Detroit. And so they arranged for an interview for me with this guy. And I could only do it from East Berlin from a phone booth in a tavern or something. The phone lines wouldn't go from east to west, so. So I was by myself at night in East Berlin doing this phone call, then had a walk back to the. The streets feeling like, you know, like I'm in a spy novel. And, yeah, I get to the one elevated train station and I get in the wrong line, and some big East German border guard tells me to get. Get my butt over the other line and all that. And they used to say as you took the train back over no man's land into the west, you could feel the temperature rising just because it was so cold, because of the lack of freedom. And it's true. I mean, it was such a relief to pass over this horrible no man's land with a barbed wire and everything and get back in. And that was, like I said, just sort of an accidental thing. And I happened to be there, and it was wonderful. And I've got my date lines, as we call them, from East Berlin. You know, most people don't. Don't get to do that as journalists. The lucky thing that happens when you're in journalism, you get to go everywhere and see everything.

Yeah, that. That's a pretty amazing story. I know. It was a great read on that part. One of the things that we talked about, you and I, before we did this show was giving people hints on how to write a memoir. And, you know, I was reading yours going, yeah, well, you've been to the Brandenburg Gate and you saw the rise and fall and the rise again of Detroit. You know, like, I don't have amazing stories like that. How do I write a memoir?

Well, there's all kinds of memoirs. We. We spoke about outward looking versus inward looking. But I've become kind of a student of memoirs. I think that the book that kicked it all off was Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes. The Irish. You know, about his Irish boyhood.

Yep, yep.

In which he had nothing in terms of great events or anything like that. It was just a. What he called a miserable Irish childhood, but became a bestseller, so. And, you know, there's all kinds of. I mean, all of our lives are so different. That's one thing that struck me when I was doing this. I have my life, and, you know, every other memoir is completely different. So I would not let that intimidate anyone. I would simply. If you want to try this, simply get some writing done. And you can use pencil and pad, you can use a computer, you can write every day or once a week or whatever. The only rule for me is that it has to get done. I mean, you have to do it at some point. And it doesn't have to be a full blown memoir that you're going to publish and you hope people will read. It can be very personal. It can be. There's a lot of sort of private memoirs that people write just for their families. You know, like there's. There's someone I know who's doing a memoir about her father in World War II based on his letters. He had been a very voluminous letter writer home.

Interesting.

And, and you know, she may do that just for her family. And of course there's journaling and diary keeping, which they can be entirely personal. So it's up, it's up to each person to decide what they want to do. Do they want this to go out there into the world and have people tell you what they think of it, you know, which is what I wanted. Or it can be just very personal for your family or friends or just for me. Or it could be just a tool of self discovery. I was reading recently Michael Phelps, the Olympic swimmer who, you know, won, I don't know, 18 gold medals or something, and he had a hard time once the Olympics ended, he was doing marijuana. I think he was arrested once, maybe whatever it was. But he writes now that he's journaling just as a help to figure out his thoughts, make sense of his life. And so it could just be something like that. It doesn't have to be, you know, full blown thing.

Yeah, you know, it's interesting. I mean, journaling I've been doing most of my life and there are times that I think I'm gonna have to destroy these all before my children see them. And then there are other times that you think, you know what I'd like them to know what. Because we have such different viewpoints of our parents than probably the life they really lived. So we'll see. It's interesting to think about.

Well, that's the thing, you know, I, I have, I. I've never been successful at keeping a journal all the time. I usually do it for. I did it my year in New York. Sometimes I do to keep a vacation journal, that sort of thing. And, and I've had that same thought, what am I going to do with These eventually. Am I going to burn them?

That's right.

Put them in my archives that no one is ever going to read. So everybody has to kind of decide that. And I don't know if anybody has any thoughts on how to, how you process that. I'd be happy to hear.

I know, because a lot of times, like you said, journals are really for our own mental health, you know, to help us figure things out and sort things out and, and memory, you know, like I, I would take the kids on vacations. I'm like, let's journal about this. So we remember when we get two years from now and go, where do we go? What do we see?

So I think it'd be fun to have kids do that and you do that and then discuss it later. I think that'd be a great thing to do.

Yeah. And we did that when I took them. Yeah, it was awesome. So you gave me the perfect lead into this next question when you said Michael Phelps had a hard time after he finished the Olympics. And I, I kind of remember you mentioning some stuff when we talked several years ago when you had first retired. So what do you wish that you had known before you retired about what life after a full time career would be like?

That's a good question. You know, I, I did not want to just stop working cold turkey and so I immediately started freelancing and within a few months I was working on this book. And, and so I'm still doing that. But the, the thing that is hard about retirement, of course, is boredom. Boredom is much more dangerous than stress. Stress means you've got a lot of demands, but you know, most of us can, you know, juggle, handle, but boredom is the, is the really hard thing. And, and even now, even though I stay purposely active with my work, some volunteer work, that kind of stuff, it's those two or three hours a week or whatever it is when you're just staring at the wall and thinking, oh, what am I going to do? And that's when you start to think, oh, do I have aches and pains? Or whatever? So I, I guess I, that's a good question. I'm not sure what I wish because I, I know my mother and father, my dad worked at General Motors for 40 some years, retired, and then he and my mom sold real estate for another 25 years. So they both worked well into their 80s early. And, and so I never intended to, to just stop. Totally. And if I did, I mean, if I wanted to say, okay, I'm done freelancing, no work Whatever. Then I'd really have to think about what to do with my life. I'd probably take up some whole new thing. A friend who was an architect for 45 years or something and gave it up, you know, retired, and now he does music. He, he goes online and he plays the keyboard and he, he puts earphones on and he works with some guy in Stockholm or somewhere and you know, they do jazz together over the Internet like this. So that's cool. Yeah. If you're gonna, if you want to do something totally different, I, I guess in general, you have to throw yourself into whatever it is if you're going to keep working part time. If you do something totally different, you really do have to throw yourself into it. And, you know, you can't just say, oh, I'm every day of Saturday. I can sit back and relax because you'll be bored awfully, awfully quick.

And you're right. Boredom then creates your, your awareness of all the other things that, that are going, think are going wrong or could be going wrong or. Yeah, so. And, and you mentioned, you know, doing some talks at lifelong learning institutes. You know, I think that people in our age group, once they leave their full time careers, they are like ravenous to learn new things. So you'd learned about memoirs now, so.

Right.

Keeping a sense of curiosity. Right.

Yeah. And you know, our generation, whatever people may think of boomers, we had had such interesting lives and lived through such an interesting period in history and we've read so much.

Yeah.

And you know, we're not shy about talking to people. You know, as I say, sometimes if you give a little talk to a college class and no one raises their hand, no one wants to be the first one to speak, and you talk to a group of seniors at like a lifelong learning institute, everybody has questions.

Yep.

And it's, it's a great conversation because they remember the history and all that. So. So I think, you know, boomers have a lot to, A lot to offer and a lot to live for, and they just have to kind of figure out a way to kind of. What's the old word? Actualize it somehow.

There you go. That's right. No, I agree. I'm glad you said all of that because I think that is important. I'm curious, John, speak of Curiosity. With the 24 hour news cycle and all the digital news and the way things have gone with journalism, if you were starting out today, would you consider journalism as a career?

I think for someone. Well, I, I would try to do some kind of writing Career newspapers are a tough road to hoe these days and I've the people. I feel bad for the young journalists who wanted to have the kind of career, newspaper career that I was able to have. My newspapers are diminishing rapidly by the time I retired. But at least I got through it in my career. Now it's pretty tough. I would, I would not do I get into sort of the economics, urban affairs because that was I thought the big story in the country, you know, 40 years ago. Now I think it's environment and climate change. So I would probably try to be an environmental writer today and just learn as much as I possibly can. I'm doing a freelance piece now on climate change in Michigan and all the many ways we're starting to see it show up already. So I would do that. But you know what you need and what newspapers used to give you is, is a career path. Lots of newspapers, lots of big newspapers, you could hook on with one of them and you know, have a very satisfying career in Cleveland, New York, Philadelphia, Detroit, whatever. And it's just not there anymore. Yeah, you don't have those big organizations. I know my father spent 40 some years with General Motors. I, I spent my time in, in the newspaper business mostly in Detroit at one paper. But I get a sense the economy doesn't work that anymore. There's sort of constant reinvention and, and that's hard. So I think that's hard for the young people.

And here's a great question. How does journalism continue to be honest investigations? To continue honest investigations as opposed to being financially motivated?

Yeah, that's a great question. And of course some, some papers appear to be moving in the direction of financially motivated. Another thing that's sort of insidious, you notice at the top of a newspaper story when you read it online now they'll have bullet points, points like and you have a 20 inch story but you have two bullet points at the.

Top and you're done. You got it and you're done.

But some of those are generated by AI now. Ah, they will, maybe they'll either read your story and they will generate it or, or I'm writing about Mayor Duggan in Detroit and they scrape the web for anything they can find on Mayor Duggan and put a couple of bullet points. So newspapers are the good ones are fighting that are people at my old paper are just adamant they're not going to let and you know, some machine write their stories. If anything that we put up there is going to be our stuff that we've generated. So, you know, so that's a problem. And, but just the sheer lack of resources compared to what we used to have.

Yeah, yeah. And you know, they're just trying to stay alive too. So that's.

Yeah, yeah. Hanging on by their fingernails. Yeah. When I got to the Detroit in 1987, we had 300 plus people in the newsroom. This would have been reporters, photographers, copy editors, librarians, opinion writers, editors of all kinds. Now they were down to about 80 to 90 or 100. So a 70% decline in head count. And that's typical around the country.

Yeah, it's a, it's, it makes it much harder and it's. Yeah. I mean, for those of us that grew up with newspapers, you know, I, I would love getting the Sunday paper and so I could sit there for a couple hours with my coffee in the Sunday paper, you know.

Yeah. And you know, just things like the, the travel budget. It used to be if something broke, they would say, get your butt to, you know, Chicago to cover this or whatever.

Yeah.

And no one would say, well, what's it going to cost? You put in a proposal, we'll consider it. Which is get, get on a plane and go. And now they don't do that at all. It's just the travel occasionally. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, TV news has, has lots of.

Money, lots of big budgets.

Yeah, there's that. So much. Right.

Not so much. So if I gave you a crystal ball, do you. What do you see for the future of Detroit?

Well, I think this recovery that we've been in now for about 20 some years that I write about is going to continue. There'll be some minor setbacks, but somebody asked me recently, is that Detroit recovery is this fragile, could it all fall apart? And I said, no, we're beyond that. It's incomplete still. I mean, there's still too much poverty. The schools are still not producing good enough test scores. You know, still a fair amount of vacancy around parts of the city, but we're too far down the road not to be. So what I think is that the, the, the identity of Detroit as the car capital of the Motor City, that will continue to erode as it has already, both because of all the imports and interesting what, what the tariff situation is going to.

Right. Yeah.

But that will, entrepreneurship will continue. The new, the new generation that doesn't remember the days of Detroit's decline, doesn't remember the city suburban antagonism that used to divide this community from the 50s, 60s, 70s, you know, white black antagonism that's faded a good deal. That will continue to sort of get better. So I think it's going to be. Continue to. To. To improve. And, you know, it has the unique position on the Great Lakes, you know, half a mile, beautiful Canada and all that. We'll continue to do that. So I think it's going to be a more lively city. I think it's going to offer more opportunity because we're moving in that direction. And these, these cycles take, you know, 50 to 100 years to play out. So we're early in the upswing. So I think the next 30 or 40 years, I think we'll just continue to see some improvement.

So what do you see your role in that, now that you're not writing about the economic recovery? What do you see your role in?

I guess I would like to write some more books and maybe do it in a more personal way. So in the memoir, I tell some stories in Detroit about going out and about around the city and seeing this and talking to this person. More personal than my daily journalism was. I'd like to continue that and maybe go even more in that direction.

Yeah. What do you get, what do you enjoy about writing books, John? It's a lot of work.

Yeah, it's a. It is, but there's a. There's sort of a completion, feeling of completion when you do it and you just, you know, I do the first draft, it's pretty bad. I work on it, keep going. And, and then at the end, it's almost like a musical note that. That resolves at the end. Major key or whatever it's called, you just, you just feel good. And that, that just makes you feel good. And it's so absorbing. Yeah. Even in a newsroom when other people all around and TV sets going and phones ringing, you know, you're just so absorbed in what you're doing. It's like a. It's almost like a, you know, self. Self hypnosis or something. You just, you just focus on this one thing.

I love the way you describe that musical completion. You're telling. You're telling a story through your words.

Yeah.

Last perfect note.

That's what you're going for.

I love that. Well, this has been fabulous. And I can't wait that you're going to be our guest on the Boomer Believers tomorrow night. And anybody that wants to have the opportunity to check out our Boomer Believers group and ask John questions and hear more of his stories, I am inviting you to join us for no charge tomorrow night. It's Wendyboomer Biz. If you want to be a part of our believers group and talk to John, just drop me a note, tell me that and I will and send you an invite. So thank you John. And if you want to talk to John directly, he gave us permission to share his email address which is JT Gallag G A L L A G49gmail.com.

Yeah, when you have a name that's fairly common, it's hard to get an email that's you can't do just Jay Gallagher or something. Somebody else knows that.

Everybody has that right. I know. J.T. gallag 49. Were you 49 when you got that?

That's the year of my birth.

Ah, okay.

Yeah. Baby boomer.

You are a baby boomer. Okay. So also if you are enjoying these stories, I have one favorite ask of you. Please go and rate and review the podcast wherever you listen to podcasts. And while you're there, look up the podcast for Older Women and Friends. My friend Jane Leader is an award winning author who takes a deep dive into the joys and challenges of being an older woman. Joys and Challenges Both Older Women and Friends is a podcast that sets the record straight, dispels the myths, and explores the many contributions older women make and the wisdom they have earned and are anxious to share. You can find older women and friends wherever you listen to podcasts. Or you can go to Jane's website, janeleaderle-e r.net and you can find all the episodes there. Before I let you go, let me tell you who's coming up next week. It should be a fascinating episode just like today's was a fascinating episode. We are going to be talking with a woman named Sandy Rosenthal. She is an activist, an author, and the woman who took on the Army Corps of Engineers and won. Sandy's book called Words Whispered in Water tells the gripping story of how she uncovered the truth behind the levee failures during Hurricane Katrina despite powerful forces trying to silence her. So imagine discovering that the disaster of Hurricane Katrina wasn't just an act of nature, but a preventable engineering failure and then deciding to do something about it. She'll share how she exposed the COVID up, the personal risks she faced, and how she transformed from an everyday citizen. She was not an activist before this. She transformed from an everyday citizen into a nationally recognized advocate for change. It's a powerful lesson in resilience, purpose and why speaking up matters. That episode will stream live on Boomer Banter on Monday, March 31st. John, so good to see you again and I can't wait to see you tomorrow night.

Thank you, Wendy. It was a pleasure. And I look forward to the conversation tomorrow. Reading and anything people want to ask is. Is fine with me.

You're open. Thank you so much. This has been really wonderful.