Pete Waldmeir, a 'fearless' Detroit News columnist, dies at age 92

Detroit — Pete Waldmeir, a legendary Detroit News writer who covered major mid-20th century sporting events across the globe before becoming a venerable news columnist over a career that spanned half a century, died Monday morning following four months of hospice care. He was 92.

Waldmeir passed at away in his sleep surrounded by family at his home in Grosse Pointe Woods, said his eldest daughter, Patti Waldmeir.

A native Detroiter, Waldmeir spent 53 years at The Detroit News until his retirement in 2004, following a 32-year run as a general news columnist.

Born Jan. 16, 1931, to Joe Waldmeir and Helen Nielsen in a home on Mark Twain Street on Detroit's west side, Peter Nielsen Waldmeir grew up in the city during the Great Depression and was raised by a single mother of three. During and after his long newspaper career, Waldmeir was active in the Old Newsboys' Goodfellow Fund, raising money for the charity to buy Christmas presents each year for Metro Detroit children from low-income families.

He often wrote about how he received one of those gifts from the Goodfellows as a child living in poverty. Waldmeir graduated from Denby High School in 1948 and served in the U.S. Marine Corps in 1951-53 during the Korean War.

Waldmeir is survived by his wife of nearly 48 years, Marilyn, daughters Patti Waldmeir of Chicago and Lindsey Waldmeir of Grosse Pointe Woods and son Christopher (Rebecca) Waldmeir of Grosse Pointe. He was preceded in death by his eldest son, Peter W. Waldmeir, an attorney and longtime Grosse Pointe Farms city councilman who died in June 2019 from cancer.

Waldmeir was generally viewed as one of Detroit's most influential newspaper columnists from the 1970s through the 1990s, garnering a large and devoted readership, said Judy Diebolt, a retired Detroit News metro editor.

“He really was a must-read in Detroit newspapers," Diebolt said. "Pete was a tell-it-like-it-is columnist. He was pretty fearless. He kind of loved to take on the big guys.”

Typically constrained to a single page column in the metro section of roughly 600 words, Waldmeir's writing was lively, relatable and often pointed.

"Michigan's roads are a mess," Waldmeir wrote in April 1996. "There are more four-wheel drive vehicles in service here than in Bosnia, and not because there's a war on. We need 'em to survive the commute from home to job to school and back."

He skewered politicians from both parties — once calling a husky Gov. John Engler "the Rotund One" — and let unsympathetic characters have it, particularly Detroit's business moguls.

In a May 1998 column about the closure of Joe Muer's seafood restaurant after 69 years at Gratiot and East Vernor, Waldmeir ripped the businessman for spending years talking down Detroit and the state of business at his upscale establishment. "If anything, Muer deserves the restaurant business version of the Jack Kevorkian award for assisted suicide," Waldmeir wrote.

Waldmeir thrived as a thorn in the side of those in power, said Roger Martin, a former Detroit News Lansing Bureau chief in the late 1980s and early '90s.

"He was a pain in a lot of people’s butts — and he relished that role and he played it well," said Martin, who later had to navigate Waldmeir's prose while representing clients in the public relations business that the columnist would write about. “He certainly drove subscriptions for a number of years.”

After returning home from the Korean War in 1953, Waldmeir landed a sports writing job at The News before working his way up into the sports columnist ranks in the early 1960s. He spent several years as an apprentice of sorts to intrepid sports columnist Doc Greene.

At different points, he covered Michigan, Michigan State and Notre Dame sports, the Detroit Lions, Pistons, Tigers and Red Wings, and major sporting events ranging from boxing legend Muhammad Ali and Sonny Liston's controversial bout in 1964 to the 1966 Le Mans sports car endurance race in France and the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City and the Tigers' World Series win that fall. There were a smattering of Stanley Cups, Super Bowls, Indy 500s and Kentucky Derbys throughout his career.

Waldmeir was named Michigan Sportswriter of the Year in 1967, 1969 and 1971, won a Headliner Award in 1970 from the National Headliners Club, and was inducted into the Michigan Journalism Hall of Fame in 2000. In 1995, Gold Leaf Press published a collection of Waldmeir's columns in a book called "Little Beads of Blood."

“He has pursued a 50-year crusade against bad government, bad politicians and bad athletes —without pulling his punches, even when the punches were aimed at friends," said the nomination letter for Waldmeir's induction into the Michigan Journalism Hall of Fame.

In 1972, Waldmeir left the sports desk where he was the associate sports editor and became a general news columnist, where Detroiters came to see his face up to four days a week.

"When you do your job right in this business, you may gain readers, but you sure burn bridges," Waldmeir wrote on April 18, 2004, in his retirement column. "So it was a relief to take on the new assignment."

Waldmeir wrote about the problems of everyday Detroiters, used his column to advocate for different causes and publicly feuded on The News' pages with longtime Detroit Mayor Coleman Young.

“He just could not stand Coleman Young,” said Patti Waldmeir, who had a long career in journalism as a foreign correspondent.

For Young, the feeling was mutual. Waldmeir once investigated Young for taking a vacation in Jamaica, earning the newspaper columnist a profanity-laced tongue-lashing from hizzoner.

"That sona----- Waldmeir followed me down to Jamaica. All I can say is I wish that mother------ had caught me," Young is quoted as saying in Bill McGraw's book, "The Quotations of Mayor Coleman A. Young." "I'm mayor of nothing down here. It would be just two crazy Americans fighting in the alley."

With The News daily newspaper circulation, which was once 1 million strong, Waldmeir wielded power with his column — and politicians of all stripes knew it.

“There were columns where I didn’t like what he wrote about me, but that goes with the territory,” said Bob Ficano, the former Wayne County executive.

Ficano, a Democrat, said he first felt the sting of Waldmeir's opinions when he was appointed sheriff in 1983 after then-Sheriff Bill Lucas was elected the first county executive of Wayne County. But Waldmeir's writing style "wasn't vicious," Ficano said.

“It wasn’t a continuous venom, let me put it that way," Ficano said.

Waldmeir's column subjects toggled between musing about daily life on a Wednesday, writing a scathing critique of how a government agency was spending taxpayer money on Friday and then writing about his son's soccer game on Sunday.

"I think he really got into people’s hearts by having that sort of dichotomy," daughter Lindsey Waldmeir said. "It’s like when you watch a movie and you like the antagonist and you want them to do well. People would say, 'Oh, you're Pete Waldmeir's daughter,' and I'd say, 'Yes?'"

Sniffing out news

Patti Waldmeir grew up in the 1960s going to games with her father when he wasn't traveling the world covering Detroit teams and other sporting events.

She'd stand outside the Pistons locker room to get players' autographs, while her dad was inside interviewing players. To this day, Patti said, she signs the letter T the same way Pistons guard Tom Van Arsdale did when he played for the team in the mid-1960s and gave her his autograph.

When rioting broke out on July 23, 1967, at 12th Street and Clairmount, Pete Waldmeir was in the press box at Tiger Stadium with Patti and Peter, his older children from a previous marriage.

In an oral history on the insurrection for the Detroit Historical Society, Waldmeir recalled a police officer named Carl alerted him to the violence ensuing in the nearby west side neighborhood, where smoke could be seen from the stadium as the Tigers and Yankees played a doubleheader.

“You’d better get these kids out of here,” the cop told the columnist, according to Waldmeir's account.

Waldmeir drove his kids home to Harrison Township, his daughter said, and then trekked back into the city to help cover the civil unrest. It was part of a lifestyle where Waldmeir would jump from newspaper assignment to parenting and back to another assignment, sometimes while the family was on vacation, Lindsey Waldmeir said.

“At the time, we didn’t really realize he was so cool,” said Lindsey Waldmeir, 44.

Known to be a tough interviewer who could pry information out of people who didn't want to give it up, Waldmeir famously got University of Michigan officials to reluctantly confirm football coach Bo Schembechler had suffered a heart attack before the 1970 Rose Bowl game by gruffly asking a simple post-game question:

“Did Bo have a heart attack?” Waldmeir asked.

As a sports columnist, Waldmeir relished the access he had to players in an age when journalists and the athletes they covered were more likely to sit elbow-to-elbow at a bar than modern sports writers in the digital age, Patti Waldmeir said.

Waldmeir has recalled over the years how he got thrown in a locker room whirlpool — in his suit — while the Tigers were celebrating their American League pennant victory in 1968. Pitcher Mickey Lolich loaned Waldmeir a dry pair of baseball pants that he wore to go back to the newspaper's longtime office on West Lafayette Boulevard to file his column.

“I think if I had to guess, he enjoyed his career as a sports columnist more than his career as a political columnist," Patti Waldmeir said. "He could just hang out with the boys all of the time.” 

'A bidding war'

Except for his Korean War service as a sergeant in the Marines, Waldmeir worked for The News almost continuously between age 17 and 73. Through the years, he also did freelance writing for Sports Illustrated, Time, Life and other national publications.

But he remained firmly planted as a journalist at 615 W. Lafayette Blvd. — The News' longtime headquarters — until the competition came courting one day.

On Dec. 19, 1980, the Detroit Free Press announced in that morning's newspaper that it had lured Waldmeir away from its fierce rival to be a sports columnist.

"We're enormously excited to have Pete Waldmeir at this newspaper," Free Press Executive Editor David Lawrence Jr. was quoted as saying. "He is a splendid talent who knows this city, knows its sports scene and knows how to communicate that."

Waldmeir's planned defection was a counterpunch to The News snatching legendary sports columnist Joe Falls from the Free Press in 1978, said Lynn Henning, a longtime Detroit News sports writer and columnist.

"It was a stunning hire," Henning said. "And it was to lead to a stunning reversal."

Robert Nelson, then the general manager and vice president of the Evening News Association, The News' owner at the time, "was not about to lose Waldmeir to the hated Free Press," Henning said.

To keep Waldmeir on The News' pages, Nelson authorized "a virtual Waldmeir wish-list," Henning said, including a pay raise, club memberships and "lavish expense-account perks."

“That’s how hot of a property he was at the time — that the newspapers got into a bidding war for him,” Diebolt said.

Waldmeir's about-face with the Free Press was a well-publicized skirmish in Detroit's storied newspaper war.

Judd Arnett, a columnist at the Free Press, used his New Year's Eve 1980 column to poke fun at his rival's reversal in a tongue-in-cheek question-and-answer column.

"Why did the Fearless Pete Waldmeir cut and run on his Free Press agreement?" Arnett asked.

In the answer to his own question, Arnett speculated Waldmeir may have come down "with a severe case of the galloping quivers."

Or maybe the pressure from his "news room pals and the brass" at The News got to him, Arnett postulated.

"So maybe, what with one thing and another yapping at his heels, he decided to fall back on his training and do a maneuver known in the Marine Corps as 'advancing to the rear,'" Arnett wrote. "That sort of thing happens."

Waldmeir rolled with these kinds of punches throughout his career, and reflected on them in his later years as he shared advice on navigating life, said his youngest son, Christopher Waldmeir, 41.

"Dad always knew it was a two-way street," Christopher Waldmeir said. "If you were gonna hand it out, you better be ready to take it once in a while."

His father would sometimes say, "You can't always make everyone happy, so make sure you're happy and the rest always seems to work out."

Pete Waldmeir's 1980 deal with Nelson would keep him writing columns for The News for nearly another quarter century.

'So long for now'

In retirement, Waldmeir continued to be involved with the Goodfellows, writing an almost annual request in The News' editorial pages for donations to provide Christmas gifts for less fortunate children.

For his 90th birthday, Waldmeir's wife, Marilyn, and eldest daughter, Patti, reached out to living members of the 1968 Tigers team to get them to call Waldmeir. Lolich and Willie Horton called, while Denny McLain sent a short video.

Waldmeir remained an ardent University of Michigan sports fan, maintaining season tickets and going to games with his youngest son, Christopher, an Allstate insurance agent in Grosse Pointe.

In 2004, after he retired from The News, Waldmeir tried his hand at elected office, winning a four-year term on the city council in Grosse Pointe Woods. He served one term, opting not to seek reelection in 2008.

But his experience in municipal government would resurface in his later writing.

Waldmeir would occasionally submit letters to his longtime employer like a regular reader, responding to the day's news with a few sharp elbows that were reminiscent of his columns.

In January 2014, Waldmeir had a letter published in The News responding to an article about a nearly $1 billion surplus in the state budget, urging lawmakers to use some of the money to reverse "destructive cuts to municipalities like Grosse Pointe Woods ..."

"Under Gov. Jennifer Granholm and her policy of doling out 'Jenny money' to areas of her strongest political support, the Woods and the other four Grosse Pointes sent far more to Lansing than they ever got back," Waldmeir said, jabbing one former Democratic governor before going for her Republican successor, Rick Snyder. "Maybe The Nerd could toss local communities a bone with some meat on it for a change."

In his April 2004 farewell column, which was published on the front page of a Sunday newspaper, Waldmeir reflected on his 53 years at The News, writing that "most of them (were) great, some of them so-so, but all of them memorable."

"I'd like to make it clear, this isn't goodbye," he wrote. "It's just so long for now."

clivengood@detroitnews.com