From the Publisher: 40 Years on Deadline 

click to enlarge

• File: Glenn Russell
• Sally Pollak interviewing Peter and Elka Schumann of Glover's Bread and Puppet Theater in 2019

Sally Pollak was in the middle of reporting two stories for the Burlington Free Press in fall 2016 when she received — and ignored — an email warning that she was about to lose her job. Two days before her 58th birthday, Gannett made it official. "An HR flunky in from out of town told me my position had been eliminated," she wrote in a well-observed essay, titled "Last Word," published in Seven Days on November 9, 2016.

She had covered sports, features and food — in that order — for the Gannett-owned daily for 25 years.

A few months later — and not for the first time — I asked if she would be interested in coming to work at our local independent weekly. Sally wasn't done talking to Vermonters and telling their stories, so she said yes. She's spent the past seven years at Seven Days, finishing what she started.

Next month, after a long, varied career in journalism, she is retiring on her terms. She sounded almost surprised when she remarked, in her singsongy, Julia Child-like voice, "I've been on deadline for 40 years!"

There's a bit of the old-fashioned, smoke-filled newsroom movie in the story of Sally's career, which includes the distinction of being the first female sportswriter at the Free Press. The fourth of five girls, she was a tomboy — and still is! — but wasn't on any teams growing up in New Haven, Conn. Instead, she roughhoused outside with the neighbor kids and watched countless games with her mom, an "incredible athlete," as Sally described her, who played multiple sports in college.

Her father was a professor at Yale Law School. When Sally was 15, he moved the family to Philadelphia for a similar job at the University of Pennsylvania. Four years later, in 1978, then-president Jimmy Carter appointed him to be a federal judge.

click to enlarge

• Courtesy of Glenn Russell
• Sally Pollak on assignment circa 1992

Sally was still in college, at the University of Massachusetts Boston, when she heard about a clerk job back home at the Philadelphia Inquirer. It was a lowly position, answering phones, putting away mail, basically "doing anything to support the writers and editors," but "it clicked," she recalled. She spent most of her time on the sports desk, receiving copy that reporters called in while covering games across the country. Back when the daily newspaper was the sole source of box scores, player statistics, horse-racing results and other breaking news, she was responsible for making sure all of that information was timely and accurate.

It was "deadlines like you can't believe," Sally recalled.

The newspaper had a union, too, which guaranteed her a shot at reporting opportunities when the Inquirer expanded to cover new areas in and around Philly. In addition to her desk duties, she started writing about high school sports and, in the process, developed an eye for "little neighborhood stories."

One night Villanova was playing the University of Vermont and a Burlington Free Press reporter was covering the game for the Inquirer. He called in and got Sally, who asked: "Are you a sportswriter in Burlington?" When he answered affirmatively, she said, "I want your job."

Within a few years, she had it.

Sally already loved Vermont — from childhood trips and summers working at Camp Killooleet in Hancock. In fall 1989, after a visit with relatives in the Adirondacks, she screwed up her courage to saunter into the Burlington Free Press on a Saturday and chat up the sports editor.

There were no job openings at the time, but seven months later, she got an invitation to "try out." That involved getting dropped off at a baseball playoff game at Mount Mansfield Union High School, returning to the Free Press and writing a story about it. Worse than the deadline pressure? At the urging of her mom, "I wore a dress," Sally recalled, horrified.

Ultimately, though, she scored a job, shattering the glass ceiling as the Freeps' first full-time female sports staffer. Down-to-earth and unpretentious, Sally was well suited to her beat of high school football. She ditched the dress for jeans and a flannel shirt — the uniform she has worn, in one form or another, ever since.

If anyone could get an interesting quote out of a 16-year-old boy, it would be Sally. She recalled that former attorney general T.J. Donovan, then a point guard for Burlington High School, was always full of them.

Covering young athletes naturally led to human interest stories. But before she moved to the "features" department at the Free Press, in 1995, Sally went back to the Inquirer for a year to cover high school sports in a big city. Being courtside with a notebook to witness the rise of a young Kobe Bryant was thrilling, but she really missed Vermont.

She also wanted a child and knew that being a single mom was incompatible with the schedule of a sportswriter. She returned to Vermont and the Free Press, adopted a baby girl, and moved to a different part of the newsroom. When longtime food writer Debbie Salomon left the paper, Sally started writing for the Savorvore section, sometimes incorporating her daughter, Sophie, into her eating adventures.

click to enlarge

• Matthew Thorsen ©️ Seven Days
• Sally Pollak

With or without a toddler in tow, Sally brings a childlike curiosity and sense of wonder to her reporting that has not waned over the decades. In our last conversation, she was marveling at the mechanics of a manure pit she'd just visited and puzzling over how to translate the story into captions for a cartoon.

Writing never gets easier, she noted. But, over the years, Sally developed a voice that is funny, intimate and conversational.

In short, she fit right in at Seven Days and agrees the paper has been a good place for her to wind up her work in Vermont journalism. Over the past seven years, she has written about anything and everything that catches her eye, from Olympic runners to quirky collectors to chefs in recovery from substance-use disorders. Her "Life Stories" pieces, memorializing interesting Vermonters who have died, are a testament to her fearless reporting and deep knowledge of the state. The younger members of our reporting staff have learned a lot from watching her talk her way into almost anything and turn a story around quickly.

Sally calls it a luxury and a privilege to have had a job that allows her to be "out and about, meeting people and doing stuff. You're not sitting at a desk; there's always some action." But after 40 years of reporting stories, she yearns to be in the place she loves — without an assignment or a deadline.

"Oh, my God, imagine that," she said. After June 8, she won't have to.