Detroit SPJ\u2019s Facebook post about her death<\/a>. \u201cShe was funny and was over to our house several times. She loved a good Christmas tree. One of her toughest moments at The OP was writing about a church shooting, yes, way back then, that happened in her church while she was there.\u201d<\/p>\nHe called her \u201cone of the many patient people\u201d who taught him how to be a newsroom recruiter, adding, \u201cI nearly worked with her a third time when I still had more to learn. Our tenures at Michigan State abutted but did not overlap.\u201d<\/p>\n
Her writing also appeared in The Detroit Free Press and The Detroit News from 1997 to 2008. She was a past president of the Detroit Chapter of Society of Professional Journalists.<\/p>\n
Eileen Harned wrote on the Detroit SPJ Facebook page that she knew Combs through SPJ. The two women remained in touch after Combs left Michigan.<\/p>\n
\u201cI will truly miss her and join all those who do likewise. She truly was a rare journalist!\u201d Harned wrote.<\/p>\n
She graduated from University of Florida in 1976 and went on to write for the Fort Myers News-Press, Gainesville Sun and Independent Florida Alligator.<\/p>\n
She earned a master\u2019s degree in journalism at Michigan State University in 1996.<\/p>\n
Her teaching career included three years at Ohio State University\u2019s 10-week Midwest Newspaper Workshop for Minorities. She was a journalism instructor at MSU from 2003 to 2008 and director of multicultural affairs for MSU\u2019s school of communication arts and sciences from 2004 to 2006.<\/p>\n
She taught more than a dozen journalism courses at Wayne State University from 1997 to 2003 and was director of WSU\u2019s Journalism Institute for Minorities.<\/p>\n
Combs started as an ASU associate professor in 2008 and was a journalism professor and advisor for the student newspaper, The Herald, for a decade. She was co-advisor for the Arkansas State Association of Black Journalists chapter of the National Association of Black Journalists.<\/p>\n
She was a devout Christian but quick to caution her fellow Christians not to overreach when someone says \u201cHappy holidays\u201d instead of \u201cMerry Christmas.\u201d She said \u201cHappy holidays\u201d recognized the 14 different religious holidays that occur between Thanksgiving and the end of each year. Her birthday was Dec. 1, 1955.<\/p>\n
Visitation will be 5-6 p.m. Friday, Oct. 31, at Woodard Funeral Services, followed by the funeral at 10 a.m. Saturday, Nov. 1, at First Baptist Church, both in Jonesboro.<\/p>\n
Arkansas State University will darken the tower of the Dean B. Ellis Library Friday evening in tribute to Combs for her contributions to the university and higher education<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Journalist Sandra \u201cSam\u201d L. Combs, a former Oakland Press staff writer, died on Oct. 23 in Jonesboro, Arkansas.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":28093,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[21069,21068,21071,143,145,144,21065,21067,21066,21070],"class_list":["post-28092","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-oakland","tag-arkansas-state-university","tag-journalist-sam-combs","tag-michigan-state-university","tag-oakland","tag-oakland-headlines","tag-oakland-news","tag-sam-combs","tag-sandra-combs-birdiett","tag-sandra-l-combs","tag-wayne-state-university"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28092","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28092"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28092\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28093"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28092"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28092"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28092"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}