There once was a building on Detroit’s east side where a dignified gentleman poured into young people through lessons taught on and off the basketball court.
The building, located at Grandy between Warren and Forest, housed Northeastern High School, home of the Falcons. And the gentleman who mastered the art of getting the best out of students, sometimes without even saying a word, was the late Robert “Smitty” Smith (Dec. 9, 1932-May 9, 2024).
“He could give you a look and that look would correct the behavior,” said Barry Cannon, who, as a sixth grader, was told by Smith that he would be a Falcon after Cannon had led a team of fellow "ragamuffins" to a basketball tournament championship when Cannon was attending Ferry Elementary School. “Coach Smitty was very competitive and he didn’t use any flowery words. But he was a nice man, too, and a father figure for me. And when he told you how he wanted something done, he expected you to follow it to the letter.”
Speaking during the late evening on Oct. 8, after a full day of classes and extracurricular activities at Martin Luther King Jr. Senior High School, where the 59-year-old Cannon is an assistant principal and athletic director, the recent Distinguished Alumni Award recipient from The University of Olivet found the energy to dish out words of wisdom passed down directly from Smith.
“Coach Smitty taught everyone he coached that we were gentlemen first, students second and athletes third, and always in that order,” explained Cannon, who was entrusted by Smith to be a basketball team captain his senior year of high school, which actually occurred about 6½ miles north of Northeastern, at Pershing High School, where Coach Smith and Cannon transferred after Northeastern closed in 1982. “And I brought that same philosophy from Coach Smitty and Northeastern to King. It has helped to produce some quality, quality people — boys and girls — and I call them ‘scholar athletes.’ ”
When Cannon returned to Olivet on Oct. 4 to receive the Distinguished Alumni Award during the Distinguished Alumni Award and Athletic Hall of Fame Presentation and Dinner, some in the audience may have detected a subtle accent that doesn’t quite sound like Detroit. A reason for that could be Cannon’s birthplace — Marion, Alabama.
However, Cannon makes it crystal clear that the award he received from Olivet would not have been possible if not for the people who shaped him in Detroit — particularly around the neighborhood of Northeastern High School — including his parents, Willie and Bobbie Cannon; siblings Donnie, Willie Jr., Michael, Carolyn and Chenell; and Cannon’s “Fab 5” neighborhood friends, Anthony Fleming, Geary Howard, Frederick Johnson, Joseph Burton and Craig Jones.
“My father moved up to Detroit in the mid-1960s for employment and he came back down South to get us. And when we moved on the east side in the Northeastern neighborhood, everyone was like one close-knit family,” recalled Cannon, who picked up the nickname “Bone” around sixth or seventh grade, in part because of his slim build as a kid. “I ate at my friends’ houses even more than my own. And most of the people in the neighborhood were Southern people. It’s like all the people that came up from the South at that time settled around Chene.
“It was rough over there, but I was surrounded by people who wanted me to succeed and they kept me away from drugs and people who were doing crime. Families were on welfare and food stamps, but I used all of that as a source of motivation.”
Along with Coach Smith, helping Cannon to stay “motivated” as a youth and young adult, were a host of mentors from his community that still provide a spark in Cannon when he calls out their names as he did during the evening of Oct. 9: John Baker, Mary Cain, Brenda Gatlin, Johnny Goston, Frederick Hodge, Larry Houser, Kenneth Moon and Charles Whiteside.
“There were a lot of men that saw something in me and taught me, but there were women, too, like the great Brenda Gatlin, who won a state championship at Northeastern as the coach of the girls basketball team (in 1975),” said Cannon, who, with a basketball scholarship to Olivet, earned a bachelor’s degree in sociology and physical education, and at the urging of mentors, later completed graduate programs at Wayne State University. “When I worked at Southeastern High School, when Ms. Gatlin was the principal, I could tell when something was important because she wouldn’t call me Mr. Cannon, instead she would say: ‘Bone come into my office.’ But whatever may have been going on at the time, Ms. Gatlin was always all about the kids.”
The record shows that Cannon also has been all about Detroit kids for multiple decades. In fact, for the first 30 years that Cannon was a Detroit public schools employee, he never missed a day of work, an accomplishment that was fittingly recognized by the school district.
“I think showing up every day for work goes back to me never missing a practice when I played,” said Cannon, a now-35-year Detroit Public Schools Community District veteran, whose earlier career journey also included being a certified social worker at Boysville of Michigan and Todd Phillips Children’s Home. “In the schools, we basically work nine months and have three months off. And then we have half days and holidays. And, now, if it snows even a little bit, the schools might be closed. So, I see coming to work every day as just something I should do if my health is good because I never lost sight of all the hardworking blue-collar workers that we have in our city.”
Just as Cannon does not make a big deal about his attendance record, on the evening of Oct. 9 — after a long day that included parent-teacher conferences that he had a major role in organizing and a volleyball match at King after school — Cannon also downplayed a compliment he once received from Coach Smith.
As Cannon tells it, about 10 years ago, Coach Smitty told his former point guard that he was one of the best basketball players to ever wear the uniform for Northeastern, a school that produced the prolific scorer Mike Robinson, who is in the Michigan State University Athletics Hall of Fame; Wilbert McCormick, an outstanding floor leader for Dick Vitale and Dave "Smokey" Gaines at the University of Detroit; William "Spider" Griffin, whose nickname was explained in the Detroit Free Press on March 1, 1964, when Griffin was selected to the 1963-64 Free Press All-City League first team; and many, many more stellar basketball players during Northeastern's 68-year history.
"When Coach Smitty said I was on his all-time list, I'm thinking that Northeastern had players that went off to Michigan and Michigan State and U of D, and I played for Olivet. But Coach Smitty said: 'Why wouldn't I be on his list?' because he called me one of the best leaders he ever coached," remembers Cannon, who, to this day, says there is no such thing as a "superstar" high school athlete despite the many celebrated student-athletes he has watched up close during his time at King, including the New York Jets' All-Pro cornerback Ahmad "Sauce" Gardner, who starred for the Crusaders (Class of 2019) as a cornerback and receiver. "Coach Smitty also brought up how far I went with my education, and I would still say that there are others that are more deserving to be on his all-time list of players.
"But if you want to know what's really important to me, it's helping young people become successful. Being a teacher or a school administrator, these are exalted positions because we're vessels and God uses us to impact others. The pay is when you see young people become successful, and I mean successful people — good husbands, good mothers and good members of our community."
Scott Talley is a native Detroiter, a proud product of Detroit Public Schools and alifelong lover of Detroit culture inits diverse forms. In his second tour with the Free Press, which he grew up reading as a child, he is excited and humbled to cover the city’s neighborhoods and the many interesting people who define its various communities. Contact him at stalley@freepress.com or follow him on Twitter @STalleyfreep. Read more of Scott's stories atwww.freep.com/mosaic/detroit-is/. Please help us grow great community-focused journalism bybecoming a subscriber.
