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Special section • Star Century: 100 years of The Indianapolis Star

Columnists may have gotten their pictures splashed in the newspaper, but for some reporters, it was their stories and deeds that made them well-known names to public officials, if not the public at large.

Among them was Carolyn Pickering Lautner. Don't let the long name fool you -- her colleagues knew her simply as "Pick."

At 19, while a student at Butler University, she started as a police reporter at The Star, breaking the male-only rule on the police beat.

She turned to veteran reporter Mary Bostwick, a legendary member of The Star, for advice. "She taught me that you had to be one of the boys," Pickering said. "You had to drink with them, swear with them and jump on the back of the police wagon with them."

After graduating, she landed a job at the Chicago Herald-American but returned to The Star in 1952.

She was assigned to cover the Federal Building and took up where she left off with the police beat. Sources in the building came to trust her and only her. Even when other reporters filled in, sources would wait for Pick to return to give her the news.

She covered stories ranging from bribery of city inspectors, a story she got by hiding out with sheriff's deputies to watch an actual payoff, to a nationwide bail-bonding business secretly backed by racketeers.

An avid golfer, she also covered women's golf. She left the paper in 1978.

Lester Hunt joined The Star in 1948. "To his admirers, he was No. 1. To his detractors, he was a hatchet man whose reportage strayed into advocacy and politics," according to a retrospective of his career in The Star after his death.

He covered welfare secrecy, helped expose a highway scandal in the administration of former Gov. George Craig, and election fraud in Lake County in 1960 and 1961. He died in 1962.

As a mark of his stature, The Star gives an award for exceptional work in Hunt's name.

And there was Charles Griffo, considered one of The Star's last legends of old-time newspapering when he died in 2000.

Griffo, who retired in 1996 after more than 50 years with the paper, was known as a "natural snoop who warmed many a barstool alongside cops, lawyers, judges and bail bondsmen over the years."

More importantly, he felt police reporters should always be one step ahead of the cops.

Among his more sensational stories was the "dresser drawer" murder case of Dorothy Poore, an 18-year-old Clinton girl found stuffed in a drawer in the Claypool Hotel in 1954.

A small green hotel blotter overlooked by investigators, but found by Griffo, bore the signature of a suspect. It led to the man's arrest and his conviction for murder.

Politics, not murder, is what drove Robert P. Mooney, who joined The Star in 1962.

He was an Ichabod Crane-like character who worked from a desk laden with layers of ancient press releases, memos, memorabilia and other clutter, which he insisted contained invaluable, if unused, political gems.

Pounding out stories on a typewriter, he never hesitated to help a new reporter answer City Desk calls on a Saturday morning. It was all part of the game for Mooney.

He died at age 57 in 1978 from complications after surgery.

Call Star reporter Rob Schneider at 1-317-444-6278.