Ask Phil Luciano his secret for success and longevity as a columnist, and he’ll talk baseball.

“Greg Maddux is the greatest pitcher of his generation because he moves the ball around,” he says. “If you’re a one-trick pony and you’re always (complaining) about Democrats, or Republicans, people get tired of that. So I keep moving it around.”

Phil has written a column for the Peoria Journal Star four times a week for the past 15 years. Even figuring for vacations and holidays, that’s close to 3,000 columns. He writes what he wants, sets his own family-friendly schedule and realizes how few journalists get that kind of freedom and impact on a town.

“Once in a while you get to help people,” he says. “That’s the appeal of a small city, that everything I do can change things – running a city manager or two out of town, or just helping people with their problems. There’s a lot more immediate effect.”

He’s won a long list of awards, including being named the best columnist in Illinois three times by The Associated Press and twice by the Illinois Press Association. So what’s the appeal?

“I’m a very average person. I like pro football, I drink beer, I smoke cigars. But I know how to use semicolons. So my tastes are very average. A guy like Mike Royko – what was his genius? He was a regular guy who could write. Those two things normally don’t hook up a lot.”

Shelley Epstein, a fellow Northern Star alumnus and associate editor at Peoria, adds: “Phil has the primary quality every columnist needs. He’s a great reporter. He asks the right questions and doesn’t stop asking them until he gets the full answer.”

Phil learned those skills at the Northern Star, during one of the most contentious periods in the paper’s history. In 1986, Phil was part of the reporting team that helped oust NIU President Clyde Wingfield. This after he’d entered NIU as a business major and quickly realized he was in the wrong place.

“About two years later I wandered into the Northern Star and thought, hey, this is interesting. People kept showing up all the time, even when they didn’t have to be there. The paper came out five days a week. That blew me away. I thought, you know, this is a good way to really be a pain in the a–.”