Hotline Profiles Dennison, Smith

Mike Dennison, a reporter at the Lee Newspapers State Bureau.

Where’s your hometown? What was it like growing up there?

Seattle. It was wonderful growing up in a city that, in the 1960s and 1970s, was still like a large town with scores of vibrant, middle-class neighborhoods just minutes from downtown. Housing was affordable and traffic was minimal — long before the Microsoft and coffee booms. Bill Gates grew up not far from my neighborhood in northeast Seattle, a couple of years ahead of me at a different school.