Marti Frumhoff

Got a phonecall around 8:50 this morning asking if I’d heard the news about Marti Frumhoff. I had not. “She’d passed, yesterday evening, news was going around.” Wow.

Since getting home late in the day, I thought about this situation, read the other blogs and their comments about her, thought a bit. Here’re two things I’ve not seen written about her, specifically:

At some point in the early ’90s, Marti was a print publisher. I remember it well, meeting her for the first time, in a small, brick-walled office above the old Sunshine Inn on Euclid. She was putting together a new, monthly magazine, called “Steppin’ Out.” She sensed that the RFT wasn’t getting to all the news it could, so why not have publications that would complement, if not compete with the established weekly, then still in the advocacy journalism phase of the Hartmann years. I was impressed by her pitch. Though money was tight for freelancers, she had me write one story, on not-yet-famous The Urge, which I still have in a clipbook somewhere. I wish I kept a few copies of “Steppin’ Out,” just for days like today. Magazines like that take up space, in a box, in your basement. One day, you just have to move them out, then wish you hadn’t.

Also, a couple years back, there was a several-week-long, intense, hell, remarkably-intense conversation about the future of Metropolis. A group, of which I was a member, was talking of running a slate to disband the group. Marti was invited into a large meeting, of about 20-25 people, held in my backyard. Out of everyone there, Marti was the one person to wind up not signing off on the plan. See saw something we didn’t. The election went down, a curious, somewhat fractured one, but one that left Metropolis intact. Marti was a passionate, very vocal critic of any desire to discuss the matter further. It was over, she seemed to argue, there was an election, it was done. Situations like that can sometimes strain relations between folks. Marti was always the same thereafter, though. A pleasant, passing “hello,” a “hey, Thomas, what’s new?” In fact, I got that line just last week from Marti at Hartford Coffee.

In fact, I’ll probably look for her there, or at MoKaBe’s some afternoon in the near future. And she won’t be there. And I’m sorry that’ll be the case.