Left to right: Lonny Cain, Mike Korcek, Tim O'Malley, Ruby Grubb, Kim Shire and Rich Schovanec.
More than 100 people turned out Feb. 24, 2000, to
honor the seven inductees featured below. Four inductees attended: Lonny
Cain, Mike Korcek, Tim O'Malley and Rich Schovanec.Ruby Grubb represented
her late husband, Don. Paul Street represented his 93-year-old grandfather
of the same name; and Kim Shire represented her father, Hallie, who spends
winters in warmer climates. Also during the evening, Jerry Huston was honored
with this year's Bridge Builder Alumni of the Year Award for his pro bono
legal work on behalf of Northern Star editors.
Lonny Cain joined the Northern Star copy desk only three weeks after graduating from West Aurora High School in June 1966.
His heart has never left.
The 35-year friendship began accidentally: The Introduction to Journalism class he had registered for was canceled for lack of enrollment. The instructor, legendary Star adviser Roy Campbell, helped Lonny get a job at the newspaper.
"I was terrified and excited at the same time," Lonny said.
He stayed on the desk for the fall semester and quickly rose to Copy Editor by the spring term. During his one semester of reporting, he covered the police beat and brags that he "was actually able to get then-Police Chief Jim Elliott to fix tickets in the Star parking lot for us."
Lonny returned to management for the rest of his Star career, first as city editor and later as editor.
"He championed truth, fairness and accuracy. He clearly understood the who, what and where of each story and, more importantly, the why," said Thomas Wartowski, a 1971 alum who worked alongside Lonny at the Star and later at the Rockford Morning Star. "It was the 'why' that drove Lonny. He knew intellectually and felt deep in the marrow of his bones why journalism was important, why it was important to cover stories, why it was important to write them fairly and accurately."
After earning his degree in 1970, Lonny's career took him to the morning and afternoon newspapers in Rockford, the Joliet Herald-News and even back to DeKalb, where from 1980 to 1983 he worked as newsroom supervisor for the Journalism Department's DeKalb News Service classes: "One of the lowest-paying, greatest jobs I've ever had."
It was here Lonny met his wife, Cindy Wojdyla, who then was an NIU journalism student. The two are celebrating nearly 20 years together and have two sons. Lonny has an older son from his first marriage, which began (where else?) at the Northern Star.
In 1984, Lonny became managing editor of the Ottawa Daily Times and since has provided cub reporting jobs to many young Star grads while keeping active in the Northern Illinois Newspaper Association.
His career has come full-circle now: He's teaching a Monday night section of J-200 this spring.
Don Grubb came to NIU in 1959 with a dream: Build a first-rate journalism department. His tools: A $300 budget, an Army barracks building and the support of English professor Edith Marken, who had known Don professionally and was responsible for his being lured from a fledgling program at SIU-Carbondale.
Don taught classes and advised both the Northern Star and the Norther, NIU's yearbook. He routinely made administrators nervous, first by being a staunch defender of student press freedom and second, by founding the Northern Illinois Newspaper Association and bringing hundreds of journalists onto campus every year.
Ruby Grubb, Don's widow, remembers NIU President Leslie Holmes berating Don because the Star had used the word "brothel" in a story. These types of meetings with presidents and administrators weren't uncommon.
"They thought whoever was in charge would tell the students what to write and how to think," Ruby says. "They didn't seem to know about freedom of the press."
Even so, within a couple of years, Don had talked the university into giving him four faculty members, including new Northern Star adviser Roy Campbell and professor Hallie Hamilton. He also secured tenure for Campbell and, later, civil service status for Jerry Thompson, to make job threats less a part of Star advisers' daily lives.
"Don Grubb was more than merely a friend of the Star," wrote Bob Bruce, a 1967 graduate and now a University of Oregon administrator. "He was a loving and doting parent. ... His style of teaching and administration allowed students to grow in their understanding of the rights and responsibilities of becoming a journalist, even when it meant allowing students to learn from their own mistakes for which he had to endure academic or administrative rebuke."
By the time Don stepped down as chair in 1976, the department boasted a full-time faculty of 14, and 800 majors. At the time, he was quick to downplay the faddish interest in journalism following Watergate. "The aura of glamor in journalism is false when you have to work your tail off in such a demanding profession," he said.
Don died of cancer in 1992. He was 68. Perhaps not coincidentally, some say, journalism ceased to be a separate department four years later, in the name of cost cutting. "It was kind of like a death in the family," daughter Karen says. Her sister, Virginia, adds: "We're just glad Dad wasn't here to see it."
Hallie J. Hamilton came to NIU in 1958 before there was a journalism
major to be found.
A World War II veteran, Hallie had worked at summer camps, in a steel mill,
and as a waiter, a bartender, a service station attendant, a door-to-door
salesman and even a farmer. He also logged time in free-lance writing and
photography, and spent the seven years prior to his arrival in DeKalb in
public relations.
But teaching was his true love. As the creator and nurturer of NIU's photojournalism program, Hallie opened the eyes of countless students to photography. Many of those, of course, found work at the Star -- where Hallie served as adviser during summers and when adviser Roy Campbell was on sabattical.
"I always thought the kids did an excellent job when you left them alone," Hallie says. "In the beginning it was pretty tough. We spent a lot of time in the president's office defending freedom of the press. It was a new thing to them."
Students remember Hallie as a mentor and friend.
"Hallie brought much more to the classroom than camera mechanics and darkroom techniques," said Thomas A. Wartowski, a 1971 alum who changed his major from psychology to journalism after meeting Hallie. "Looking through the viewfinder, Hallie showed his students how to see life from new perspectives and opened up their horizons."
Born in 1924 in Bridgeport, Ill., Hallie earned a journalism degree from Franklin College in Indiana. He completed his master's in journalism at Northwestern University. Eventially, he earned his doctorate in 1968 from Indiana University.
Hallie's first job at NIU was in Regional Services, where he was supervisor of student and sports publicity. In 1961, he joined the Journalism Department as an instructor and became renowned for his photojournalism classes. He also taught courses without cameras, including advertising copywriting, article writing, industrial editing, layout and even press problems. In 1971, he won NIU's Excellence in Teaching Award.
"Hallie does not teach just photojournalism, or even just journalism,"
former journalism chairman Don Brod wrote in 1977. "He teaches an attitude,
a feeling of responsibility, a love of learning."
Hallie retired from NIU in 1991 and now spends the cold months in Gulf Shores,
Ala., with his wife, Floann.
To understand Mike Korcek, you really need to know about Jim Tillman.
Tillman played center for the Loyola basketball team in the mid-1960s. At 6-foot-5 -- small for a center even by 1960s standards -- he was a ferocious rebounder and once even blocked Lew Alcindor's famed sky hook. Loyola's radio play-by-play announcer nicknamed him "Ajax," because of the way he "cleaned the boards."
None of this was lost on a 6-1 basketball nut and Northern Star writer.
"To me, he was a hero," Korcek says. In fact, when Korcek earned a regular column in the Star, he named it "Ajax Cleans the Boards." Even today, friends from that Star era in the late '60s still call him "Ajax" and remember the column ... and the late-night, waste-can basketball games in the newsroom.
That passion for sports, from the monumental to the minutia, became a career. Korcek joined the NIU Sports Information office in 1973, after a stint in the U.S. Army at European Stars & Stripes. In 1984, he succeeded the legendary Bud Nangle as director, and built a legend of his own. In 1995-96, College Hoops Insider voted his office No. 1 in the nation for basketball service, and No. 2 the next year. In 1999, Korcek was inducted into the media wing of the Illinois Basketball Coaches Association Hall of Fame, and in 2000 he received the "Scoop" Hudgins Lifetime Sports Information Directors Award.
Korcek hasn't forgotten his Star roots. He's on the alumni board, was the creative force behind the Hall of Fame and works closely with the Star's sports staff.
"There are literally a thousand great stories about Mike Korcek, says Ray Gibson, longtime friend and Northern Star contemporary. "But the best one and the one that really counts is his loyal friendship. ... It is also one of his chief character flaws. How else can one explain how a man works 80 hours a week, 52 weeks a year for an institution that may not understand his expertise and skills? It is loyalty to the Star and helping students. It is loyalty to the craft. I can't tell you how many hours were spent at the Star at night as Mike reworked his pieces. He still does it at the Sports Information office. He strives for perfection."
Nangle, now retired and living in California, agreed.
"He lives and dies with every victory, every defeat, every achievement, every disaster that befalls NIU," he said. "His loyalty knows no bounds. He is, in my opinion, Mr. Northern Illinois University."
Having to choose between running for office in NIU's Student Association or joining the advertising sales staff at the Northern Star in 1987 was no contest for Tim O'Malley. The Northern Star won out in the end -- because students were paid to work at the Star.
While earning some extra cash may have been the incentive at first, through the years Tim has given more than his share back to the Northern Star, its students and its alumni.
"I consider myself lucky to have worked at the Northern Star," he said. "It really has made a difference in my life and career."
From his first semester at the Star through today, Tim has continued to make a difference.
"The kid was determined," Business Adviser Maria Krull remembers about Tim's early days at the paper. "We had a sales incentive program where students would get to go to an advertising conference in Seattle. Tim told me, 'I'm going.' And sure enough, he did."
As advertising manager, Tim began the first sales training workshops for students on the advertising staff, which included bringing in outside professionals to share their experience and expertise. As an alumnus, Tim continued to give back, first with the creation of a mentor program to bring students and working professionals together and later with his role as the Northern Star Alumni's first president.
"I take pride in the fact that I was able to help change the way things were done for students at the Northern Star," he said. "Now it's a given that when we leave the Star, we go back and help."
After graduating from NIU in 1989, Tim began a successful career in advertising and sales that includes working for the Chicago Tribune from 1989 to 1993 and for the Los Angeles Times from 1993 to 1997. In 1997, he took a new challenge as publisher of Where Chicago magazine. Today, he is senior vice president of the entertainment division for TravelCLICK, the leading marketer of electronic media advertising and management information products to the worldwide travel industry.
Tim and his wife, the former Sue Dispensa (also a Northern Star alum), live in Indian Head Park and are raising two sons, Danny, 4, and Timmy, 20 months.
One of the Northern Star's most steadfast supporters, Rich Schovanec of the Chicago Tribune, never worked at the campus newspaper. In fact, he didn't even attend NIU. But neither fact has prevented Rich from adopting the Northern Star as his own and taking its students and alumni under his wing.
For 11 years, Rich has used his expertise in advertising to guide the Northern Star's students and alumni to successful careers in sales, and for the past six years he has extended himself even further, lending professional experience to the Northern Star Publication Board.
A graduate of DePaul University, Rich worked in ad production at the Wall Street Journal before joining the Chicago Tribune's advertising staff in 1969. As he rose in the Tribune ranks to senior sales manager, he frequently took time to work with new employees and interns.
Then, one summer in the late 1980s, one of his student interns committed him to speaking at training seminar for new advertising staff at the Northern Star. And so began Rich's commitment to the paper and its students.
"Working with the kids from the Star has been a lot of fun," Rich said. "It was real easy to want to be associated with the Northern Star and stick with it because of all the people that work so hard and care about what they are doing."
In 1989, Rich was instrumental in starting a Tribune-sponsored advertising-sales
conference for Northern Star students. The conference was so successful
that he helped expand it over the years to include other student newspapers
from Illinois and, eventually, other states as well.
Rich has ensured that his mentoring efforts will continue with the involvement
of another advertising mentor from the Chicago Tribune, Rusty Anglin.
"The whole point was to establish a place for kids who want to stay in the newspaper business to learn and establish connections to people who can help them," Rich said. "I guess I got involved because I always hoped that there would be someone else out there willing to do the same thing for my kids."
Recently retired from the Tribune (but not the Northern Star), Rich lives in Downers Grove. His two children, Louie, 31, and Ellen, 29, both have chosen careers in sales.
The Northern Star's integrity and fierce independence may have reached fruition in the 1960s and '70s, but only after Paul Street helped plant those seeds decades earlier.
As adviser to the weekly Northern Illinois, he saw the paper through World War II, when few male students remained on campus, and for a decade of change thereafter. "The veterans got back and immediately you had a different complexion in the paper," Paul says. "It became much more cosmopolitan."
The son of a rural Missouri minister, Paul was hired by NIU (then called Northern Illinois State Teachers College) in 1938. He taught composition and journalism, and advised the yearbook, the alumni publication ... and the Northern Illinois.
He stayed 17 years, serving as an advocate for student press freedom ... and teaching that freedom comes with great responsibility.
"He would take the paper and put it on the bulletin board and circle all the errors with red pencil," remembers Tom Woodstrup, editor in the late 1940s. "Many times that was kind of embarrassing, but what he was teaching us was good journalism."
Paul also devised an ethics manual, outlining how students were completely responsible for anything they published. It included the admonition that if the newspaper planned to publish a story critical of someone, the reporter first should face the person, explain the criticism and allow a response in the same story.
Paul encountered skirmishes along the way, usually having to do with university presidents Karl Adams and, especially, Leslie Holmes complaining about something the students had published.
"Holmes didn't believe much in 'Let the students publish it if it's true,'" Paul says. "My argument was, they're never going to learn responsible journalism if you don't let them check things and publish honestly."
By the 1950s, students had grown tired of the newspaper's nondescript name. Paul helped organize a student contest in 1954 to rename the paper, with Northern Star eventually winning out over Northern State News.
Paul left DeKalb in 1955 to teach at the University of Kentucky. He stayed
there until his retirement in 1975, and eventually moved back to DeKalb
with his wife, Lina, who died in 1997.
Today, at age 93, Paul serves as editor of the newspaper at Oak Crest retirement
center in DeKalb.