A veteran police officer, now retired, ambles across the stage to accept an award for his service to his community.

A roar of cheers fills the room.

People are standing beside  their tables and applauding. A number of his church members are on hand.

Up come the couple who have put their faith in their community years ago when white flight set in.

Rather than flee, they stayed and built a fine arts academy for black youths from the West Side and nearby suburbs. Again, people stand and cheer.

And there is the locate state senator, whose list of deeds draws another long, rousing applause.

These were some of the folks recently honored at the first annual fundraiser for the West Suburban Journal, a weekly paper that didn’t six years ago. But here it is, holding its first gala fundraiser and the money will go for its intern and scholarship program.

I am taken back and it is not just from the vibes in the dining room.

So, here is a paper growing in a time when others are disappearing. A paper serving a large sprawl of black communities on Chicago’s West Side that gets into the act, talking about what’s happening and gets attention for doing it.

As the night goes on, the story is told slowly how L. Nicole Trottie, the publisher and everything else for the paper, began with an idea and found support and advice and built up an organization around volunteers and interns and slowly one employee after another, and, according to the Illinois Press Association, became the first black female publisher of a weekly newspaper in Illinois.

Nicole’s dream, as someone said, has surely come true.

Stephen