Former Indy Star editor Dawn Fable Lindquist, now a language arts teacher at Avon Community High School, is out of the hospital and embracing recovery.

  Here is what she told inquiring friends about her condition on Facebook Monday, when she posted "post-surgery glamour shots":  

    "some vision issues turned out to be a benign brain tumor. Doc took it out Thursday. Now I am on the mend"

     Dawn gives plucky new punch.

     She is also a sweetheart who was a highly-focused journalist when she came to the Star in the late 1990s.

    From 1998-2004, she worked in features at the Star, repeating the job she polished at The Times of Northwest Indiana, where that features section won high awards. She was an editor, a planner, and an assigner of stories.

    Like so many other journos, she decided to make a career switch into the education profession, For 10 years now, years, since 2005, she has taught English, creative writing, speech and compositon to her students in Avon.

     I have a particular fondness for Dawn, because of her work ethic, grace, humor, her lovely name and her bursts of enthusiasm for what is to me the unknown world of fashion and beauty. It also helps that I was among the editors at the Star who vetted and hired her when she applied. 

   Journalists stick together, whether in or out of the newsroom.

   Here is her address for get-well cards, confirmed by her husband David Lindquist, who remains at the Star covering music and various other arts.

     Dawn Fable Lindquist, 3601 Periwinkle Way, Indianapolis, Ind. 46220-5499

    Newspaper photographers have a rep for being mavericks; they're the men and women who, by virtue of job design, are more removed from the newsroom drama and, sometimes, more independent and quirky by nature.

  Mike Fender fits the bill in all the good ways. Always easy-going, totally grounded and professional, he was a Newsie who gracefully absorbed the Star/News merger in 1995, rolling with the punches, doing excellent work both in the field and as a manager.

     He is the consummate newspaper shooter veteran: he started working for newspapers as a sophomore in high school, and then went "straight from high school to the Xenia Daily Gazette," and to three other newspapers before he came to the Indy Star.

    OK, so the news:  as of Feb. 20, Mike left the Star, wearing an Elvis outfit, to become director of multimedia at Angie's List. He posted some wonderful and true reflections on Facebook:

   "Newspapers have their struggles, many businesses do. But the list of great photographers, writers and editors I have shared time with at the Star will always be like a family to me. A somewhat dysfunctional one, but one I've come to love none the less.

   "They used to call newspapers the "Daily Miracle." Now in this crazy digital world that miracle happens at even a faster pace. Despite all the changes the people working at the Star today are still a relentless bunch trying to tell you something you don't know every minute of every day."

      A friend of Mike's emailed me a while back that the move to Angie's List was not only profitable but a reflection of "the photo (not the writing...) on the wall" (my expression) -- meaning there was not much future at the digitally-directed Gannett-owned Star where staff and salaries are frequently cut.

    Best to Mike, and hoping your velvet Elvis artwork from Mexico made the move to the new joint as easily as you. 

    I