At 3 a.m. one night in 1982, Tom McNamee realized he’d made it in journalism.

He’d been with the Chicago Sun-Times about two months as a general assignment reporter. This night, he’d drawn the overnight shift in the press room at police headquarters, “basically baby-sitting in case the world fell apart before morning.”

The phone rang. It was fellow Northern Star alum Mark Brown, also brand-new with the paper. Brown was baby-sitting the city desk, alone in an otherwise-empty newsroom.

“Tommy?” Brown said into the phone, almost in a whisper. “It’s just you and me. We ARE the Chicago Sun-Times.”

Tom’s first stint at the paper lasted until 1997 and included “fires and murders, awful crashes and absurd City Council meetings.” He followed Cardinal Joseph Bernardin’s final days, climbed in the rubble of a massive earthquake in Mexico City, talked in Louisville, Ky., to the recipient of the world’s first artificial heart and in Germany to a Chicago man who had been held hostage by terrorist hijackers.

All of which could be traced to the Northern Star, where Tom fell in love with journalism. He remembers struggling with his first story, about an alternative school for small children. “I had to talk to strangers and I had to write stuff down in a little notebook while standing up and I had to turn in my story that very same day and, hell, I could barely even type,” he said. “By dinnertime, I was exhausted.

“But what I remember really more than the stories I wrote are the people I worked with and the spirit we shared. The great excitement for all us, I think, flowed from this wonderful realization that we could do something important with our lives. That’s what Jerry Thompson told us. It’s what we told ourselves. And it was true.”

Tom left the Sun-Times in 1997 to become editor of North Shore Magazine, where he helped mix serious journalism with fashion spreads and restaurant stories. But he missed newspapers – so much so that he returned to the Sun-Times in 2000 to be Sunday editor.

Along the way, Tom and fellow reporter Don Hayner have written three books about Chicago and co-hosted a Saturday morning radio talk show on WLS.

Tom’s wife, Deborah Wood, is a free-lance writer and former Chicago Tribune copy editor and writer. They live in Skokie and have three children: Caitlin, 15, Jared, 14, and Graham, 11.