Charles N. Wheeler III
The director of the Public Affairs Reporting (PAR) graduate program is Professor Charles N. Wheeler III, a veteran newsman who came to the University of Illinois at Springfield following a 24-year career at the Chicago Sun-Times.
Wheeler covered state government and politics for the Sun-Times since 1970, when he covered the Sixth Illinois Constitutional Convention. For the last 19 years of his Sun-Times tenure, Wheeler was assigned to the newspaper’s Statehouse bureau. During that time, he was elected to 16 consecutive one-year terms as president of the Illinois Legislative Correspondents Association and served for many years on the PAR program and admissions committees.
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I’m 94, so I remember lots of Christmases. The Christmas of 1944 was the one in which the merry was strained through a kind of holiday sieve. My father had suffered a heart attack the previous month. He had survived but was still bedridden, and doctors thought he might never work again. So I’d dropped out of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University and, the following Monday, headed for the Chicago Daily News Building in hopes of getting a job as a copygirl. I did.
And I found myself, a former journalism major, in the heart the city room of the