In high school, Mark Ridolfi ran a vending box route for the Indianapolis News, an afternoon paper with an avid following.

“We’d race from the downtown loading dock out the east side, aiming to beat the end-of-shift whistle at RCA and other manufacturing plants,” he recalls. “Every day, I’d be surrounded by plant workers who couldn’t wait for their paper.”

And, he would read the paper cover-to-cover between stops.

“The deadline rush and daily encounters with quarter-carrying newspaper customers pretty much assured my career choice,” he says.

After Mark’s parents moved to the Chicago area during his senior year of high school, Mark elected to stay in Illinois for college: first at the U of I’s Circle Campus, then College of DuPage and finally NIU for his final two years. In a dilapidated house called Campbell Hall, he found a home.

“It was a night-and-day difference when I walked into the Northern Star,” he said. “It was a bunch of crazy, long-haired students working their butts off. Making decisions – not relying on someone else to make them.”

Adviser Jerry Thompson was a constant presence, too, teaching students to think like journalists.

“The Star had covered a big fire on Greek Row,” Mark says. “I came in the next day and said I was going to go check on fire damage. Jerry said, ‘I guess that would be a story. But a real reporter would go check the inspection dates on fire extinguishers around town.’ So I did, and sure enough, some were out of date.”

Those reporting skills served Mark after graduation, when he took a job with the Moline Dispatch. After that came a stint as Quad Cities bureau manager for United Press International. When UPI’s existence became shaky, Mark returned to the Dispatch as a reporter and later city editor.

In 1987, he returned to Indianapolis, as assistant city editor for the paper he’d once delivered. But in 1993 he went to the Quad City Times in Davenport, Iowa. He’s been there ever since, first as city editor and, since 2002, as editorial page editor.

Mark’s editorial page work won first-place awards from the Illinois Press Association in 2002 and the Iowa Newspaper Association in 2007, 2009, 2010 and 2011.

He’s been on the Mid America Press Institute board for 11 years, serving one term as president. He’s also a journalism educator, having advising the student newspapers at Blackhawk Community College and Augustana College, and teaching interactive journalism at Knox College in Galesburg.