“This was a woman who really grabbed life and ran with it,” Judy Diebolt said of her close friend and colleague, longtime Detroit Free Press columnist Glenna "Nickie" McWhirter. 

McWhirter, 92, died on May 16, at Sunrise Assisted Living in Troy.  

McWhirter was sort of a "Swiss Army knife" to the Free Press, as she worked at the city desk, in the lifestyle section, covered advertisements in the business department, and more. 

Diebolt was a reporter who worked under McWhirter at the Free Press beginning in 1970, and she learned a lot from her as both a friend and former editor. 

“She was a terrific editor for young reporters and took great pleasure in teaching them how to write and teaching them how to be better, and she made it fun,” said Diebolt. “I know of very few people who worked with Nickie that didn’t feel like they were better journalists for having spent time with her.” 

More:Nickie McWhirter: My Christmas tree’s loaded with significance this year

More:Nickie McWhirter: 'Time warped and worn, with a heart well hidden'

At the time, in the late '70s, the sexual revolution was happening and women were just beginning to go into the workplace and become political forces. 

“The whole dynamic of the country was changing at the time and Nickie just had a great feel for it,” Diebolt said. “She had three children and she held down this high-pressure job at the newspaper as an editor. She dealt with a lot of issues women were suddenly dealing with and they could relate to her. She was sort of like lightning in a bottle in her ability to understand and elaborate on these things.”

Women in the newsroom were demanding recognition and change; McWhirter was at the forefront of the cause. 

“Young women reporters would dig up a good story and a male editor would wanna give it to a male reporter and she’d say ‘You go right up to him and you stand your ground.’ I mean she just encouraged you to stick up for yourself, and fight for your stories and fight for recognition,” said Diebolt.  

Apparently though, the Free Press had more women in the newsroom than most papers at the time. 

Josephine Thomas, another former Free Press reporter and close friend of McWhirter's, worked at the New York Times after her time in Detroit. Part of the reason she got hired was due to the fact that The Times was in the process of settling a discrimination lawsuit because it had so few women. 

"The Free Press was sort of the high point for having women in the newsroom and Nickie was part of that, she was an editor so she was someone who had power and she was a voice of authority, so in that sense she contributed to the vision that women could, would, and did contribute to the newsroom," said Thomas. 

McWhirter’s mentorship and praise put many incoming journalists in a great spot. 

“For young woman in our business at the time I started, she was a role model,” said Diebolt. “As a young reporter, and other young reporters at the time would tell you, too, we just looked at Nickie and saw a whole lot of possibility for our futures." 

A pivotal memory in Thomas' journalism career happened when a young girl's homicide took place at Cobo Hall. McWhirter was her editor at the time and told Thomas to go to the morgue and find out why the girl was downtown in the first place.

When two detectives came in and called her a scumbag, then the girl's mother followed weeping, Thomas was hesitant to ask the grieving mother questions. 

"I went away and went over to the pay phone in the corner and I called the city desk and I said ‘Nickie, I just cannot go and ask this grieving mother about her daughter, this is horrible.’... Nickie said to me ‘Of course, you don’t have to ask her any questions and you don’t have to work here, either,' " said Thomas. 

After that push, Thomas started a conversation with the mother, who ended up being relieved to be able to talk to somebody about what happened. 

"I’ve never forgotten that conversation with Nickie because it was one of many, many awfully uncomfortable conversations I’ve had with people in the middle of tragedy," said Thomas. “Nickie was tough, friend or no friend, she held your feet to the fire, and I’ve always appreciated that about her, she did not cut you any slack." 

McWhirter made her journalistic mark at a lot of places in Detroit. 

“She was very interested in the automotive industry,” said Diebolt. “This was a woman who sat down and had drinks with the captains of industry like Lee Iacocca and Henry Ford II.” 

Great career aside, McWhirter was the life of the party.

"She had a wonderful sense of humor, she was smart, she was generous, a lot of energy, was always up for an adventure," said Thomas. "She was just a lot of fun, we were all young then, Nickie was a lot older than me, she was 15 years older than I am, but I never thought of that because she was young at heart."

Unlike many women who had a career first, later getting married and having children, McWhirter had a whole life already before she got into journalism. 

"I think one of the things  that impressed me about Nickie was that she had a family and she chose journalism, so she kind of had two lives, like a lot of women in her generation," said Thomas. 

McWhirter was survived by three children, daughter Suzanne Orlicki and sons Charles McWhirter and James McWhirter, as well as seven grandchildren.

“Her work was really her life, she just loved writing and working downtown and spending time with the fellow writers," said Orlicki.

McWhirter was a proud University of Michigan graduate and longtime resident of Grosse Pointe, a place where she had several properties and made many friends.

Donations in her memory are appreciated to Planned Parenthood and the American Heart Association.