Mary Schmich grew up in Georgia in a family of 10. She went to high school in Phoenix and attended Pomona College in California, where she co-edited the college newspaper. She still remembers the smell of rubber cement. After graduation, she worked for three years as a Pomona admissions officer, then studied in France for a year on a Rotary fellowship. In 1980, as a student in the Stanford University master’s journalism program, she interned at the Los Angeles Times. She remembers the clatter of the newsroom’s typewriters. In August 1980, she got a job at the Peninsula Times-Tribune in Palo Alto, Calif. It had computers. In 1983, she moved to the Orlando Sentinel, and in 1985 to the Chicago Tribune. Briefly a features writer, she then spent five years as a national correspondent based in Atlanta. She has written a column since 1992. She writes three times a week mostly about Chicago but also about life at large. She has been a Nieman fellow at Harvard and a Pulitzer finalist for both features and commentary. From 1985 through 2010 she wrote the Brenda Starr comic strip.