INDIANAPOLIS – Jenny Green sits on the front porch of her Indianapolis home in a navy blue IndyStar sports polo shirt and jeans, sitting on a wicker chair where she can watch chipmunks and squirrels darting across the yard.
He stayed at his home on Delaware Street and, often, looked down at his feet.
Green is humble. Praise shames him. He hates attention. He loves nothing more than being behind the scenes making things happen, making things better.
Now, after all, it’s been his life as an editor extraordinaire, doing all the things that make a good story, a beautiful story, and doing it with little credit. Producers don’t take bylines and Green has always liked that.
Truth be told, Green doesn’t want to be doing this, either. Interview about his retirement after 35 years of active, compelling journalism, helping to produce newspapers in major metropolitan markets in the United States, his last 20 years at the Indianapolis Star.
Green, 58, resigned as IndyStar sports director Sept. 1 for health reasons.
Five days later, she is reluctant to tell her story, one of a humble upbringing that made her a woman who, at 23, was news director at her first paper. Who, 28 years old, was the third leading to the Cincinnati Enquirer. And who, in his early thirties, ran the Broward County edition of the Miami Herald.
Green never got the chance to be a leader. Everywhere she went, people saw something in her, something that said this woman should be a leader. Green had a gentle, calm spirit in the newsroom, IndyStar executive editor Bro Krift said.
“He earned the respect of his peers for his dedication to his craft as well as his dedication to his colleagues,” Krift wrote in an email announcing Green’s retirement. “He cared about you and me and everyone who came into this newsroom.”
Green’s departure from journalism leaves behind a portfolio that brought readers some of the biggest stories to make headlines in the U.S.
The first Black President, Barack Obama, in 2008. The tragedy of Sept. 11, 2001, changed the American landscape. The controversial “hanging chad” election of 2000 between George Bush and Al Gore in Broward County. Elian Gonzalez, a five-year-old boy found on Thanksgiving Day 1999 off the coast of Florida clinging to the inside as his mother died trying to bring his family to the US from Cuba.
In Indianapolis, Green was there for Andrew Luck’s retirement in 2019, the Pacers-Pistons riot in 2004, the Hamilton Avenue massacre that left three children and four adults dead in an Indianapolis home. And he was present in the 2006 crash that killed five Taylor University students and resulted in the misidentification of two victims.
Green was there, too, for Qudrat Wardak, a bad-hearted baby who came to Indianapolis from a squalid Afghan refugee camp. He received his new heart in February 2005, a light of joy and hope, he died three months later.
Jenny Morlan will never forget the death of the little boy because of the destruction, but also because of Green’s heart and compassion.
Green was the front page editor of the IndyStar that night in 2005, when another editor called him into the newsroom and told Qudrat that he had died. Green went back to his desk, sat down and cried.
“He couldn’t even say the words, ‘Qudrat is dead,'” said Morlan, a former IndyStar editor who sat across from Green in the newsroom. “
And how he cared about the people in the newsroom. Green would never ask anyone to do anything he wouldn’t do.
Morlan says that if the living room was a restaurant and, to run smoothly, that restaurant needed the dishes washed, Green would wash the dishes.
As big stories broke, Green would not only edit but step in to write episodes and stories, never putting a line on them. Just writing to make things better.
Green loved journalism. He still loves journalism.
“I wish I could stay,” Green said as he left his home last week. “I would.”
‘She had this presence’
Green is the daughter of writers, a father and mother who sometimes starved. He was a young man in Kansas who, one winter, lived in a small studio room no bigger than a sun porch with his parents and two siblings. To see also : Business will become high-tech. She was a little girl who, in that terrible winter, walked in the dark, cold winter to use the outhouse.
He was a student who was eligible for free school lunch until his mother, Donna Barker, noticed that children who received free lunch had different colored cards than children whose families paid for lunch.
Donna and Ed Barker sent the money to make sure Green and his two brothers had cards that would keep other kids from teasing them.
As a little girl, Green tagged along with her parents as they drove from town to town to art fairs, her mother a sculptor and her father a potter.
His father, Ed Barker, always said: “It’s not a way to live, it’s a good life.”
Green did not dream of becoming a journalist. It wasn’t something a young girl living in remote Kansas dreamed up in the 1970s. But after high school, Green went to the University of Kansas, where he enrolled in a copyediting class, and he loved it. Then he enrolled in some media classes and liked that more.
He started working for the university newspaper and knew that this would be his career. When he graduated from college, Green didn’t have to look for a job. His first professor took care of it.
“He fell for Jenny,” said her husband, Ted Green. “He saw something there.”
Green was hired as a copy editor at the Argus Leader in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. But soon, the newspaper saw what his professor had seen. At 23, he was named editor of the paper.
Fifteen months later, Green landed a position at the Cincinnati Enquirer as a copy editor and wire editor, then assistant news editor. And he became the editor, the third in charge of the paper.
That’s when Ted Green met his future wife.
Ted Green worked in Boca Raton and was out in the sun playing beach volleyball. He was interviewing for the Enquirer’s sports copy desk in the early 1990s. He went to the news conference surrounded by people, mostly in their 40s and 50s, mostly men.
“And at the end there was a beautiful 28-year-old editor, I mean it’s amazing,” Ted Green said. When he was introduced at that meeting, Green called him “Tan Ted.” He was addicted.
He watched Green go around the table asking what issues were coming up the next day, local, national, what would run ahead. “The man, who was leading the meeting, is a 20-year-old woman,” Ted Green said. “He had this presence.”
When he was hired by the Enquirer, Ted Green kept watching in awe of this young woman who, almost, ran around the newsroom. At night, journalists would go out to the bar after work. Green and Ted ended up at the same bar on more than one occasion. They fell in love and got married in 1994.
Two years later, they both found impressive jobs and “Tan Ted” and Green were headed for the sun.
‘You want to make her proud of you’
In the spring of 1996, the Greens set up a new home in Florida working for the Miami Herald. They lived in Hollywood, near where Green headed the copy desk of the Broward County edition of the newspaper. Read also : Paramount + ordered nearly as many UK shows as Netflix during the first half of this year’s report. Ted Green worked in a major newsroom as an assistant sports editor.
Green’s desire to give readers the best, the best in his newsroom, went to new levels.
When the storm ended in disaster in Broward County, a family was electrocuted when they tried to save each other while walking in water with lines that fell down, as people were driving into ditches thinking they were on their way, Green and his colleague Mary Byrne wanted them to see that they were on their way. the dead were not buried.
They wanted to make sure they were on the front page of the Broward County book. Green and Byrne drove down I-95, battling floodwaters, and pulled into the parking garage by the Miami Herald headquarters. They rolled up their jeans and entered the newsroom.
And they changed the front page of the Broward edition.
“They were worried about Broward news getting coverage, they risked a lot,” said Ted Green. “They did this on their own. That was their commitment to their readers.”
Paul Hasha was there for all of that. He hired Green at the Miami Herald and watched Green head the copy desk in a Broward newsroom of 100 people.
“He was one of the calmest, most professional, organized writers I’ve ever worked with,” Anger said. “I remember thinking that’s unusual in this business. There’s not a lot of drama; there’s not a lot of hands.”
Green never wanted to raise his voice. However, he said that one night in Cincinnati he called out to the newsroom when the reporter had not closed the file and the deadline was approaching.
“So I did that once,” Green said, laughing. “One time.”
But for the most part, Green never yelled. He didn’t have to. “People wanted to do good not only for themselves but for him,” said Anger. “You wanted to make him proud of you.”
Green was incredibly smart and capable, said Rick Hirsch, who led the Broward County bureau during Green’s tenure and is senior talent development editor at McClatchy.
“In some ways, he was too good to be a journalist,” he said. “He was kind and reasonable and he had a journalistic judgment. He was just a professional and he had fun and he had a sense of humor and he didn’t take himself too seriously. When you put all of that together, how many journalists do you know that check all those boxes?”
Green shined on the Herald and so did Ted Green. Soon, both landed dream jobs — Green to be the country editor of USA Today and Ted Green to be the assistant sports editor at the Washington Post. It was perfect. It would have been great, but Green was pregnant with twin girls. They didn’t want to put undue stress on her pregnancy.
After her daughters were born, Green got another call, this time from the Indianapolis Star. The paper wanted him. She and Ted agreed that the Midwest would be a good place to raise their children.
They loaded six-month-old Anna and Dylan, three cats and their lives into a U-Haul and hitched a ride to Indianapolis. Green continued to climb through the middle of the IndyStar.
“It doesn’t surprise me at all that he did well at Indy,” said Anger. “What he did there, you could already see it coming.”
‘The heart of the Star for 20 years’
For the past 20 years at the Indianapolis Star, Green has been part of every aspect of the news. To see also : Judge says 10-year-old girl can join softball team due to ban on transgender sports. And he did it modestly, with compassion, earning the respect of all who crossed his path.
“I’ve never seen him get angry or say anything bad about anybody,” said Kim Mitchell, media manager, media manager. “(He’s quick) to help with the impossible. He’s humble, soft-spoken and will give you the last $20 in his wallet. Then ask if you need more money.”
After Green’s retirement was announced, IndyStar reporter Gregg Doyel wrote an email to the newsroom.
“If you’ve never worked with Jenny, you wouldn’t know how good she is because she doesn’t tell you or carry herself in a way that shows she’s special,” he wrote. “She’s special. Her style is one reason. Her acumen as an editor is another. Her leadership style is another. Jenny is the best sports editor I’ve ever worked for, and there have been many, and the best by a wide margin … nothing hurts like this.”
He is universally respected, as Morlan Green describes it, “respected by the highest authority and the student in the newsroom.”
“He would do more by keeping quiet,” said Ted Green. “And he also inspired incredible confidence in all the editors and all the writers. I think he’s been the heart of the Star for 20 years.”
A heart that never felt a beat.
“I’ve never worked with someone more credit-worthy than Jenny,” said Nat Newell, assistant sports editor, who is IndyStar’s interim sports director. “So it can be hard to understand that he was a big part of our success.”
But more than success, more than anything else, was Green’s leadership.
“Here’s the thing I remember about Jenny and the feeling is more than a series of anecdotes,” said Hasha. “You know what they say? You don’t remember everything about someone, but you remember how they made you feel. They made you feel special.”
Follow IndyStar sports reporter Dana Benbow on Twitter: @DanaBenbow. Reach him via email: dbenbow@indystar.com.
