‘A sweetheart of a man’

Longtime Lansing journalist Mark Nixon dies at 76

It’s hard to believe that Lansing had a newspaperman who was roundly admired, imitated and loved as a writer, as a human being and even as an editor, but there was such a person: Mark Nixon, who died Thursday (Aug. 14) at 76.

Nixon’s witty, no-nonsense prose was best known to City Pulse readers as half of the “He Ate/She Ate” restaurant review series, but he spent most of his career with the Lansing State Journal.

“You get kind of jaded in the news business, but Mark never got cynical,” retired longtime Journal photographer Bruce Cornelius said.

Cornelius said Nixon’s death was related to a heart condition.

Hugh Leach, a retired veteran Journal reporter, described Nixon as “one of the best people I’ve ever met, in all aspects, professionally and personally.”

Tales of Nixon’s generosity are legion. As recently as Aug. 1, a group of stellar LSJ alumni met for lunch at Corey’s Lounge in Lansing, including Nixon, Leach, Cornelius, Michigan Hall of Fame journalist Norm Sinclair and Detroit News sports writer Lynn Henning.

Nixon left early, claiming he had a prior appointment.

When the rest of the party got up to leave, they found that Nixon had paid the tab.

“He didn’t say anything about it — he just did it,” Leach said.

Cornelius said he considered Nixon a “brother.”

“I’m a little bit pissed off at him,” Cornelius grumbled, in classic hard-boiled newsroom mode. “We had plans for lunch Wednesday, but he died just to get out of it. I think that’s a little excessive.”

John Schneider, a longtime Journal columnist, started out as a reporter in 1977, about a year after Nixon joined the paper.

They worked together on many stories, including the grisly Donald Miller “East Lansing Serial Killer” case, which started on New Year’s Eve 1976 and dragged on for years.

One busy day, Schneider overheard Nixon at the police rewrite desk, interrupting phone dictation from veteran police reporter Dan Poorman.

“How do they know it was $12,000 worth of poker chips? They have no value,” Nixon asked Poorman.

Poorman’s reply: “Just get off the phone, Nixon, and type.”

In a 2012 City Pulse story, Nixon recalled long conversations with Schneider, not about the grind of reporting, but about the craft of writing.

“We’d talk about sweating bullets looking for the right analogy, the right verb,” Nixon said.

“We thought of ourselves more as writers than reporters,” Schneider said. “We tried to be a little daring in our writing and dazzle the readers with prose. Both of us were influenced by the New Journalism — Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson, Joan Didion.”

Some days, the eggs were more soft-boiled.

“I don’t want to detract from the seriousness of many things Mark did, but we also had a lot of fun,” Cornelius said.

In the early 1980s, Nixon and a team of reporters “set expense account records” looking for the area’s best burgers and ribs, according to Cornelius.

“We’d sit around and think of ways to gouge the company — in a good way,” Cornelius said. One Christmas, Nixon and crew went to the Upper Peninsula to conduct a mock interview of the state’s Christmas tree.

Nixon was an editor and writer of the spoof Journal edition published each Christmas to support the Old Newsboys charity drive, and not just because the charity was dear to heart.

“It gave us a chance to let down our hair and make shit up, which is what we wanted to do anyway,” Schneider said.

In 2006, when Nixon left the Journal to become a spokesman for the Lansing Board of Water & Light, he treated reporters with extra courtesy.

Even reporters who were critical of the BWL got an encouraging, under-the-radar vibe from Nixon, as if he were inwardly cheering them on.

“You could not get that reporter out of him,” Schneider said. Schneider grilled Nixon more than once about the BWL’s tree-trimming practices.

“He would admit that they butchered them sometimes,” Schneider said. “That’s the way he was. He recognized that we had a job to do, unlike many people who work for institutions like that.”

In 2001, City Pulse editor and publisher Berl Schwartz took notice of a column Nixon wrote that panned Lansing’s restaurant scene.

“Of all of the columns I’ve written, that one probably garnered the most reaction, positive and negative,” Nixon told WKAR’s “Current State” 15 years later.

Impressed by Nixon’s willingness to tweak potential advertisers, as well as his long-proven writing skills, Schwartz paired Nixon with a newly hired food writer, Gabrielle Lawrence, in a long-running dual restaurant review column, “He Ate/She Ate.”

Lawrence was nervous about going up against a veteran writer and well-traveled food connoisseur, but Nixon made her feel at ease and encouraged her to relax and develop her own voice.

“I loved it that he would weave in trips he took with his family,” Lawrence said. “I just thought, ‘What a memory, to remember this bit of cheese he had in France.’”

They worked together mostly via email but ran into each other at various venues, including Old Newsboys events.

“He always had a big smile on his face, and he knew absolutely everyone in town,” Lawrence said. “He was just such a friendly presence.”

After City Pulse’s “He Ate/She Ate” column paused for the pandemic, Bryan Beverly took over Nixon’s role, but Nixon continued to email Lawrence with tidbits of encouragement and restaurant news.

Lawrence treasures a May 2020 email in which Nixon shared a memory from his days as editorial page editor at the Journal, interviewing candidates who were running for office.

“By the way, I don’t know if I ever told you this, but you remind of someone,” Nixon wrote to Lawrence. “She was young, highly intelligent and ambitious for a role in public life. Her name was Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.”

“That was the nicest thing anyone could say to me,” said Lawrence — who two years later was elected an Ingham County commissioner. “He was a sweetheart of a man.”