Take every media image of college students in the late 1960s, and think "opposite." That was Gene Mustain as the Northern Star sports editor. Few of Gene's friends back then would have predicted he'd become one of the nation's best investigative reporters...

In the spring of 1967, Michael O'Connor created a special section for the Northern Star that he knew exceeded press capacity. "There were five or six of us who hand-inserted those, all 18,000," the Kankakee native said. "I was the only one who had experience...

Kathy Orr McDonald was the kind of journalist with ink in her veins. And a real dame. As managing editor and editor at the Northern Star in 1982-83, KO, as she was known to Star-types, was a familiar presence: cigarette dangling from the corner of her...

John Kringas shoots for one of the world's greatest newspapers, the Chicago Tribune. During college alone, he published images in the Tribune, the New York Times, The Associated Press, the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, the Grand Rapids Press, the Rockford...