Joe Grimm

I am figuratively swimming in Rock & Rye and nostalgia these days with the release of "The Faygo Book."

My cover story is that I got so thirsty writing "Coney Detroit" with Katherine Yung that I just had to have a Faygo. For those in the know, my favorite Faygo flavor is Rock & Rye.

The real story is that "Coney Detroit" was such a blast on the coney book that I started thinking about other iconic Detroit foods. Faygo was a natural that had not yet been chronicled. The challenge was that I needed a way in. I visited Faygo headquarters, but did not get much help there and was stymied. I stayed stuck until one of my students at Michigan State University, Alex Scharg, helped me out. Because I talk about everything I work on, I mentioned that I wanted to write a book on this iconic pop company -- don't say soda -- founded in 1907. Scharg said his high school English teacher, Susie Feigenson, was a granddaughter of one of the founders. She agreed to meet with me and that led to several more meetings. In those meetings, usually at a Starbucks, she told warm and wonderful stories about her grandfather, Perry, and especially her father, Phil. The book became more than a story about a company. It became a story about family, principles and loyalty to a little neighborhood on Detroit's near east side and the people there who worked at Faygo.

Research into what the owners said and wrote revealed a tension between the first generation's focus on being a great local pop company and the second generation's aspirations to become regional or even national. This created a tension between hometown loyalty and the urge to grow. It seemed Faygo could not have both. Would it follow the founders' vision or the new owners' dreams. The answer was neither. Getting to that answer takes us through the the elements that make up pop, the boom and bust of Detroit and the groundbreaking, heartwarming ways that Faygo advertised.

I talked about doing the project for several years, but the lack of a key source kept me writing. Finally, in May of 2017, I decided to stop talking and make a formal proposal. Wayne State University Press, which had been asking me to do the book, took me up on the proposal and we set a deadline of Nov. 1, 2017.

Now, I am visiting libraries and bookstores (see the schedule on this author page) where we talk about Faygo, take pop quizzes and sing along to "Remember When You Were a Kid?"

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Joe Grimm teaches and works with student groups as a visiting journalist at Michigan State University's School of Journalism. Since 2013, he has been working with students to create a new series of guides to cultural competence. Twelve had been published through 2017. The most popular one has been "100 Questions and Answers About Americans."

Grimm was newsroom recruiter and staff development editor at the Detroit Free Press from 1990 until August, 2008. During those years he also worked with corporate recruiting teams at Gannett and Knight Ridder. He has interviewed hundreds of people, reviewed thousands of job candidates on paper and recruited at hundreds of job fairs and college campus career days. In 1993, he established an annual jobs fair in Detroit.

In 1997, he launched the JobsPage, a journalism career site, at jobspage.com. He spun off a journalism careers blog, "Ask the Recruiter" in 2003. It became part of Poynter Online's Career Center in 2006. He has been a regular contributor to Editor & Publisher magazine, the Newspaper Association of America's Fusion magazine and UNITY: Journalists of Color.

Grimm's series of Bias Busters guides, also available on Amazon is modeled after "100 Questions and Answers About Arab Americans," which he published in 2000. He posted that guide the day after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks and it became a timely and heavily trafficked publication. The series is now 14 guides long and growing.

Grimm joined the Free Press in 1983 and has been a copy editor, news editor, front-page designer, weekend editor and ombudsman. He began his newspaper career at the Oakland Press where he was a copy editor, wire editor, copy desk chief, page-one designer, regional editor and associate editor. He has bachelor's and master's degrees in journalism and a teaching certificate from the University of Michigan.

He was an adjunct professor at Oakland University from about 1980 to 2009. There, he taught media editing, copy editing, basic reporting, editorial writing and photojournalism.

Grimm is also a historian. He co-authored "Windjammers: Songs of the Great Lakes Sailors," which was the Center for Great Lakes Culture's 2003 non-fiction book of the year. A companion book, "Songquest," came out in 2005. His compilation "Michigan Voices: Our State's History in the Words of the People Who lived It," has been through several printings being published in 1987.