Sandi Latimer

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Sandi Latimer

In spring of her seventh grade year, she fell in love with the game of baseball being broadcast on radio and decided she wanted to be a baseball announcer. Her father said if that is what she wanted to do, she would have to learn journalism. That fall she was offered the opportunity to be the area correspondent to her local newspaper, the Bucyrus Telegraph-Forum, a position she held for five years – until she went to Kent State University to study journalism.

Sandi graduated from Kent State in June 1965 and started working the following Monday at WBCO, the radio station in Bucyrus where she had done an internship the summer before. Little more than a year there as production direction, she accepted a job as news director of WDLR Radio in Delaware . In another 18 months, she was hired at United Press International in Columbus where she worked for more than 22 years, writing broadcast reports and feature stories, compiling sports scores, covering state government as well as the general run of news of Ohio .

When UPI’s financial picture started getting bleak, she showed her fellow workers how to do resumes, a technique she learned while helping out at the Women in Communications Job Hunt programs for several years. The one resume she submitted as an example landed her a job in communications and marketing at The Ohio State University Medical Center. It was at OSU where her interest in the communications contest of Ohio Professional Writers/National Federation of Press Women was reborn. She was asked to serve as contest chair in Ohio and began entering her work, winning awards both at the state and national level.

Sandi also would ‘practice what was preached’ in the health field by exercising. She was able to locate the volkssporting community and became active, completing at least one and sometimes two 10-kilometer walks a weekend. Today she is nearing the 900 event mark and has more than 10,000 kilometers to her credit.

She got caught up in another financial crunch at Ohio State and was forced to do some job hunting. Less than a month after seeing her position at Ohio State abolished, Sandi was back in the reporting field, covering state government and the Ohio Legislature for Hannah News Service.

Two yeas later, she got on the staff of the independent free weekly newspaper The Columbus Messenger, where she covers local community happenings for three of the five editions. She hasn’t last her love of sports, and works as a sports clerk at the Columbus Dispatch, compiling high school sports scores for the agate page.

In 2002, while looking for a walking route through Green Lawn Cemetery for her fellow walkers, she learned that Green Lawn needed someone to write their newsletter. Sandi says she went into Green Lawn to map out a walk and came out as newsletter editor. A few months later she was asked to be the Volunteer Coordinator, pulling together people to perform tasks that she devised.

While Sandi is no juggler, she works hard at juggling her three part-time jobs of writing for a weekly newspaper, working for a metropolitan newspaper, and working at the state’s second largest cemetery.

Using her love of history, she organizes educational and historical programs and tours of the cemetery. She combines her journalism skills to publish a calendar at Green Lawn in addition to writing the newsletter.

Many of her stories from the Messenger have won awards through Ohio Professional Writers/National Federation of Press Women. Through her 30-year membership in hat organization, she has developed a network through the high schools to promote journalism at that level.

She has been married for 34 years to Red Latimer. For 27 of those years they raised poodles, an experience she is writing about by attending weekly sessions of Ohio Writers’ Guild.

Sandi is a volunteer on FirstLINK’s food line where she answers phones for four hours a week assigning people to visit food pantries. Her age allows her to be an RSVP volunteer and she has designated Green Lawn as an RSVP site for her volunteers over the age of 55. She is a member of the advisory council of RSVP and represents RSVP on the advisory council of the Foster Grandparent Program.

She readily shares her expertise in journalism for groups and individuals who need to learn about publicity and her love of history with groups and individuals wanting to learn more about their local community.