Remembering Etta Sanders: Trib reporter, longtime resident

By Carl Glassman
POSTED JUNE 29, 2007

In her four years as a freelance reporter for this paper, Etta Sanders filed many stories, often about local youth issues and the World Trade Center site. But the story she didn’t tell—and few people knew—was the one she lived daily. Hers was the story of emotional fortitude, courage and dignity in the face of terrible odds. Etta died on June 5 at the age of 50, less than a week after finishing her last piece for the Trib.

Two years ago Etta was diagnosed with inoperable, incurable lung cancer. “The news isn’t good,” she told me over the phone that day, “but it could be worse.”

I don’t recall now just how it could have been worse. But it was just like Etta to leave you with the hopeful illusion that somehow life would still be normal, that she would carry on. She never sought sympathy. She never made her illness an issue. Not ever.

I asked her husband, Andrew Weinstein, what he would most want others to know about Etta. It was her courage, he said. She was an inspiration.

“Etta never gave up, she never gave in, she never wasted time feeling sorry for herself,” he recalled. The couple lived together for 28 years in a loft on Park Row. Their twin sons, age 8, attend P.S. 234.

“There were times when she couldn’t do anything,” Andrew said, referring to the side effects of chemotherapy that could leave her bedridden for two days at a time. “But she always tried to do everything she could to be a mom.”

Etta’s cancer sometimes reduced her voice to a raspy, near whisper, but it couldn’t still her determination to ferret out the information she needed for a story. Back in July 2005, after returning to a life beyond tests and therapies, she was back on her beat, covering an 8 a.m. board meeting of the Lower Manhattan Development Corp. She sent me this e-mail following that meeting.

“It was actually nice to do something normal like go to the LMDC meeting. (I did feel a little woozy at one point, but these meetings will do that to you even in the best of circumstances). I even asked a question—actually I wrote it down & the Newsday reporter kindly asked it for me.”

Etta stood just an inch over five feet. When I picture her on the job, I see her looking up at some towering city official, her voice raspy and straining with the next question. But with bulldog tenacity softened by a disarming smile, she made herself heard, and she got answers.

Always the consummate professional, Etta not only refused to let cancer get in the way of her work, she also would not allow it to compromise her reporting. She completed the draft of an opinion piece shortly before she died and I did not see it until after she was gone. It expresses her strongly held belief that exposure to the dust and fouled air from the collapse of the World Trade Center caused her disease, a view she never shared with me, even as she covered WTC-related health issues. Maybe she wanted to assure me of her objectivity. One of those stories, based on interviews with local pediatricians, showed that Downtown children were not experiencing a higher rate of pulmonary problems. She caught flak from some quarters for that story and I now see how difficult it must have been for her to write it.

But that was Etta, whose integrity and courage, sharp intelligence and gentle being made her a fine reporter—and a wonderful person.

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