Professor Grossman retires, but the work continues
(This was published on July 10, 2025 in The Southampton Press, The East Hampton Press and The Sag Harbor Express, and also on the website 27East.
By Michelle Trauring
Inside The Cleveland Press newsroom of the 1960s, one word sent Karl Grossman running:
“Copy!”
The nimble 18-year-old took off—grabbing the story from the declarative reporter and delivering it to another desk at the city’s leading daily newspaper.
During the day, this is what copyboys and copygirls did, he explained. But the night shift looked much different. He would often find himself alone in the city room and, when the phone rang, he answered it.
If it was about an event happening in Cleeland itself, he put together a memo for the city desk. If it was about news in Shaker Heights or another neighborhood on the outskirts of the Ohio metropolis, the memo landed on the suburban desk.
“But if somebody called with some horror story, some tale of injustice and iniquity and danger,” he said, “then you wrote a memo and you gave it to a team of maybe eight or so.”
They weren’t called “muckrakers” anymore, or investigative journalists yet, but that is what they were a decade before the term was popularized by reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein during the Watergate scandal in 1972.
And it’s precisely what Grossman himself would go on to be.
“I was just a kid and what astounded me was that once these journalists documented what these people would tell me, there was—about half the time—a resolution of the problem, to solve the problem completely,” he said. “And I just thought, ‘That’s what I want to do.’”
Earlier this month, Grossman retired from his cover six-decade career as an investigative journalist and professor at the State University of New York at Old Westbury, where he taught for 47 years and led the development of a comprehensive media and communications major.
“It’s a very hard thing, after nearly a half a century of being a teacher, to leave that,” he said from his home in Noyac, “but, suddenly, I’ve gotten old, and I’ve had back problems, and the drive to Old Westbury, it’s 150 miles round trip, and it’s not great for my back. My wife, too, felt that it’s time to step back and retire.”
At age 83, Grossman said it’s hard to remember exactly what he was thinking at age 14, when he’d chosen to spend the day with the president of Queens College for his Eagle Scout Day. But even then, he’d known he wanted to be a professor.
That trajectory changed when he attended Antioch College in Ohio, he said, a pioneer in work study programs. There, he met his future wife, Janet, and in their second year she selected the Cleveland General Hospital for her cooperative education placement, where she worked with children with tuberculosis, and seeking to be close to her, he landed in The Cleveland Press newsroom.
Etched about its entrance was the newspaper’s motto –“Give people the light and they will find their own way”—with a lighthouse. There, Grossman saw those words come to life every day, he said.
“Once you literally gave people the light, journalistically, they’d find their own way,” he said. “And all kinds of terrible things, all kinds of things that are wrong, would be rectified. And it happened again and again, what I was observing.”
Grossman knew that he needed to be part of it, but he wanted more education first. So he jumped on his motorcycle—with Janet on the back—and they headed home to New York.
“The people at The Cleveland Press primarily said, and this was the bias back then, they were really against education—that you learn more on the street with shoe leather than you’ll learn in a classroom,” he recalled. And they just said, ‘Just get into the business.’ But I thought, ‘I need a little bit more schooling.’”
He attended Adelphi Suffolk College in Sayville—later Dowling College—for a year and a half, and served as the founding editor of the first newspaper at a four-year college in Suffolk County, which he named the New Voice.
“That was all I was able to deal with, sitting in a classroom,” he said. :I really had this itch to get into journalism.”
In the spring of 1992, Grossman answered an ad in The New York Times and got a job as a reporter at The Babylon Town Leader. When he arrived, Robert Moses, a Babylon resident, had just announced his plan to build a four-lane highways the length of Fire Island.
That would be Grossman’s first big story and the start of his beat at the intersection of investigative and environmental journalism—cementing him as an enemy of Moses.
“Moses had the media of the New York metropolitan in his pocket,: he said, “but the little weekly newspaper in Babylon, he didn’t.”
Grossman wrote story after story about how the highways would destroy the nature and communities of Fire Island, and was among those who pointed to an alternative: a Fire Island National Seashore. A grassroots effort led to its creation in 1964.
But that same year, a New York City corporation—which was snatching up newspapers in Suffolk County—bought the Leader, leaving Grossman without protection. And when he covered the opening day of the 1964-65 World’s Fair, where Suffolk CORE and NAACP were protesting racism in hiring by the fair, he was soon after fired. Moses had complained to the Leader’s new owners about the coverage.
These are the types of stories that Grossman has shared with his students—tales of journalism, justice and injustice, a well as moments of facing failure and overcoming it.
“It’s investigative reporting, I tell the kids. ‘You gotta do it. I can’t just tell war stories,” he said.
Over the past 47 years, Grossman has taught, guided and mentored upward of 9,500 students. “It’s, to me, so exciting that some of them are doing this kind of work,” he said. “They’re all over media.”
Among them are Kathryn Menu, the co-publisher oof The Express News Group, which publishes The Southampton Press, The East Hampton Press and The Sag Harbor Express. During her senior year at college, she took Grossman’s environmental journalism course, which solidified her life path, she said.
“I was inspired by the impact that Karl’s work—and the work of other journalists—had in protecting the public from catastrophe and harm,” she said. “As journalists, a lot of the times, we are writing about trailblazers and those who are actively changing the world for the better—and in Karl’s case, he was that trailblazer and that journalist on the ground exposing the truth and affecting real change.”
In 1974, Grossman founded the Press Club of Long Island, which has grown to be one of the largest chapters of the Society of Professional Journalists, the biggest press organization in the United States. He began hosting the nationally aired television program, “Enviro Close-Up,” 34 years ago, and has guest lectured around the world.
Bob DeLuca first crossed paths with Grossman when he was a graduate teaching assistant at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and forestry in Syracuse in the mid-1980s, he said, where the professor was a guest speaker.
“I was very impressed by the critical investigative journalism he had done on the whole proposed Shoreham nuclear plant back in the day,” DeLuca said. “We had lunch the day he came to speak, he encouraged me in my pursuits and I asked him for contact information.”
After completing his master’s degree, DeLuca reached out to Grossman, seeking is advance on where he might look for work on Long Island. The journalist immediately suggested Group for the South Fork.
Today the organization is known as Group for the East End. And DeLuca is now its president.
“It’s not an overstatement to say that but for Karl, my entire career, family and life here on the East End might never have happened,” he said. “So I am ever grateful not only for Karl’s great journalism and investigative writings, but for his belief in me that forever changed my life for the better.”
Moses Nunez echoed that same sentiment. His career as an Emmy-winning senior broadcast engineer for Major League Baseball would likely not exist without Grossman who was his professor at SUNY Old Westbury nearly 10 years ago.
“I genuinely, in my heart of hearts, think he’s one of the greatest professors that I’ve ever had in my entire life,” he said. “And if I could go back in time and just have one more class with him again, I would do it in a heartbeat.”
In the weeks after Grossman announced his retirement, SUNY Old Westbury reached out and asked if he would be willing to teach one class per semester, but online only—investigative reporting in the fall and environmental journalism in the spring.
He couldn’t help but to accept.
In the meantime, he will be working on his eighth book, “Choose Life,” which explores environmental and energy issues whether that be the dangers of nuclear power and the causes of cancer or planet-threatening climate change.
And he, of course, will continue his own work as a newspaper journalist, including penning the “Suffolk Closeup” column in The Express News Group newspapers.
“Not to sound political but when [President] Trump talks about the press being the enemy of the people, from being a kid at The Cleveland Press to being 83 years old today, I have found that the independent free press in the United States continues to be the greatest friend of the people, the great friend of the underdog, not the enemy of the people,” he said. “And I try to, through my 47 years of teaching, imbue my students with that philosophy.”