Matthew Tully’s love affair with journalism began when he was 3 years old, sitting on the sofa with his Uncle Rob while the two pored over Chicago-area newspapers. A young Tully studied the comics first before his uncle introduced him to the sports pages.

“I remember curling up next to him on the couch and learning how to read by reading stories about the Chicago Cubs with him,” Tully wrote in his last published column for IndyStar in June. “About 45 years have passed, but I can tie my deep affection for reading, for newspaper journalism and for the Cubs to those moments.”

Tully, born in Washington D.C. on Sept. 12, 1969, died Monday evening, two years after being diagnosed with stomach cancer. He was 49. He and his wife, Valerie, have a 7-year-old son, Reid.

A reporter and columnist for The Indianapolis Star since 2002, Tully was raised in Gary and Portage. He graduated from Indiana University and previously worked in Washington, D.C., covering the U.S. Senate for five years. That was a dream job for the political junkie, but when the opportunity came to move back to Indiana, he and his wife were ready.

“I’m a Hoosier at heart, to my core,” he wrote.

Swarens remembers Tully:Well done, Matt Tully. You served Indiana well

The Manual Project: Read some of his most impactful work

A powerful, thoughtful voice

Tully is being remembered today as a powerful, thoughtful voice in the Indianapolis community, penning nearly 2,000 columns over the years, frequently taking on politicians, police and others in positions of power. But it was his passion for children and education that sealed his legacy.

“The Manual project is what really established him as a columnist,” said his longtime editor, Tim Swarens.

It was the summer of 2009, the economy was tanking, and the newspaper industry seemed to be going down with it. Tully was wrestling with the idea of changing careers, Swarens said. But he wanted to go out on a high — doing something of real significance.

He embedded himself at Manual High School, then a struggling IPS school on the southeast side. He planned to be there for a few weeks, telling the stories of students and staff. A year later, he had taken the school and the community along on an incredible journey filled with heartache and triumph.

But it was a Christmas concert that showed not just the spirit of students and not just the love of a community but the power of journalism and the influence of Tully’s voice.

Spencer Lloyd still gets chills when he remembers that night. Lloyd was the choir director at the school, and Tully had come to know him and his students during his many visits to the school.

Lloyd, who now teaches at Madison-Grant High School in Fairmount and at Indiana Wesleyan University, said Tully challenged the community to show they cared for these kids by attending the concert.

“It’s a great life lesson for everybody,” Lloyd said recently. “Matt had the idea — what if we invited all of Indianapolis to come to this Christmas concert? What if the community responds and you change lives?”

The community did respond. In a big way. More than 2,000 people jammed the school’s lobby and the auditorium. Most had no connection to the school. Lloyd will never forget seeing then-Indiana Supreme Court Justice Randall Shepard taking a seat on the floor along with dozens of other people. So many were turned away that the choir had to put on a second performance.

Making a difference

But it didn’t stop there: Tully’s columns moved IndyStar readers to send in nearly $100,000 in donations to help students and inspired the newspaper to launch its Our Children Our City initiative, a 10-year commitment to address children’s issues in the city. Today, the initiative is known as Our Children and funds multiple charitable organizations that feed, educate and mentor youth.

“The whole experience I think truly changed the trajectory of some of my students’ lives," Lloyd said, "and Matt had a huge part in that.”

The community’s response reinvigorated Tully, who opted to remain in journalism.

“This was his passion, and he decided he wanted to stay and invest his life,” Swarens said.

Tully, who was named Indiana Journalist of the Year in 2008 and won the Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism in 2010, would later write a book about his experience at Manual: “Searching for Hope: Life at a Failing School in the Heart of America.”

Former IndyStar editor Dennis Ryerson said the Manual project was Tully at his best.

“This wasn’t a column about education as much as it was a column about a community,” Ryerson said by phone from his home in Denver. “Matt was always challenging people to do the right thing. He worked very hard, and he was a man of the highest ethics.“

'Stellar right out of the box'

When Tully first came to him in 2005 with the idea of becoming a columnist, Ryerson listened but was skeptical.

All journalists want to write a column, but most have only three columns in them, he told Tully, who at the time was covering city hall. Tully was different.

“Matt was stellar right out of the box,” Ryerson said. “He looked out for the interests of the community with the tenacity of a mother cat.”

Troy Riggs remembers that passion for truth and accountability from a man he considered a friend. The former director of public safety and police chief in Indianapolis sat down with Tully many times over the years to discuss crime in the city. When Tully told Riggs about his cancer during one of those meetings over coffee, Riggs prayed for him on the spot.

For a professed non-religious man like Tully, it could have been awkward. It was not, Tully said at the time.

“Other than times with my family, that might have been the most profound, touching moment of this whole cancer experience,” Tully wrote.

The two men often came down on different sides of an issue, but they enjoyed sparring, Riggs said.

“Matt was a deep thinker who brought issues to the forefront that needed to be discussed. And whether you agreed with him or disagreed — and there were plenty of times we disagreed — he always made me think and sometimes changed my mind.”

Riggs, now public safety director for the city of Denver, said Tully “drove the discussion of a lot of the issues of the city.”

He welcomed differing viewpoints, Riggs said, because he wanted to understand those who had another way of looking at the world.

“I’ve dealt with a lot of journalists in my career, and I’ve never met anyone who was any fairer. He understood the dynamics and the challenges of government at a level that most people never will.”

More important than any of that, Riggs said, “Matt was a good man who loved his wife and son. They were always first in his life.”

Suzette Hackney saw that love first hand when Tully invited her to a neighborhood cookout when she first moved to town three years ago. As IndyStar’s new opinion columnist at the time, she had not had a chance to work much with Tully.

“He didn’t come to the office much, so I didn’t know him at all. He was having a cookout, and that’s how I got to meet Val and Reid.”

It was also how she got to see what she considered Tully’s best side.

“Reid was such a little gentleman, so smart. And I could see the kind of dad Matt was right away before I even got to know him. That’s what made me like him. I fell in love with him because of the kind of dad he was.”

Hackney would later become Tully’s editor and learned to appreciate his perfectionist tendencies, his lack of ego and his commitment to good journalism.

“He recognized the power we have as opinion journalists,” she said. “He didn’t take that for granted.

Tributes:Indianapolis remembers Matt Tully

Committed to the community

He was a political columnist, but his commitment was to this community, Hackney said. Even when he was taking a politician to task, it wasn’t because he had the power to do so. “It was because he wanted that person to do better for our community.”

Tully could tell a story that “got to your heart,” said longtime Star librarian Cathy Knapp. The two bonded in the early mornings at the office over coffee and politics. “We just had really good discussions and we built a rapport,” she said. “Matt had a passion for those in need of help. What he wrote about, he cared about.”

Karen Ferguson Fuson first worked with Tully at the Gary Post-Tribune early in both of their careers. She was in sales; he was a reporter fresh out of IU. When her career brought her to Indianapolis as president and publisher in 2010 and she learned he was on staff, she sought him out, knowing he could help her get to know the city, its people and its culture.

“Matt was the kind of person you loved to work with and have on your team,” she said.

The two shared a love for kids, the Cubs and their community.

“Matt set a bar for what it meant to care about your community,” said Fuson, who left IndyStar in 2015. “His compass always pointed in the right direction in terms of his community and his family.”

Tully’s love of place and love for the people of the Hoosier state were evident in his writing, said Jeff Taylor, IndyStar editor from 2012 to 2018. The writer’s deep understanding of the political and cultural landscape helped Taylor in his new job.

“I loved talking to him, hearing his take on things. I really respected Matt’s commitment to the people he wrote for in Indy.”

Calling him “a voice of the people,” Taylor said, “If you’re a columnist, you tick people off sometimes. But I don’t think that anybody could think that Matt was anything other than a real professional who loved what he did, loved writing about the people of Indiana and who also had an appropriate level of respect for the people who were the subjects of his coverage.”

"Matt was a passionate journalist who cared deeply for this community," said Ronnie Ramos, IndyStar executive editor. "He loved what he did and Indianapolis is better today because of Matt's work."

'A wonderfully caring man'

While he loved talking politics and baseball with friends, his family was his world. He appreciated becoming a father later in life, peppering conversations with talk of Reid, friends said.

“As much as anything, I liked talking with Matt about his family,” Taylor said. “His love for them came through every time. I don’t know that there are a whole lot nicer people who land on the planet than Matt.”

Ryerson agreed. “Such a wonderfully caring man. He was just a treasure in every way.”

Tully embraced his responsibility as a columnist, spotlighting the good and bad in the city. It was, he said, “the greatest job in journalism.”

And he earned the respect of the man in the state’s highest office. Former Gov. Mitch Daniels, now president of Purdue University, said in a statement that Tully was “tough, thorough, but always fair, and never cynical.”

“He invested the time to learn our history and to become part of our community.”

In October 2016, Tully shared his cancer diagnosis with readers in a column about life’s lovely distractions during difficult times. For him, those distractions included music, reading, politics and his beloved Cubs, who had just wrapped up a regular season that was the best of the 40-plus he had followed.

“I thought, how great it was that I get to spend the next few weeks of my cancer fight being distracted by the possibility that my favorite team could end a World Series drought that began just before William Howard Taft won the 1908 presidential election,” Tully wrote.

“It’s funny. As serious as life has been of late, I’ve come to realize that trivial things can actually be some of the most important things,” he wrote in 2016. “And if I get to spend a few nights in the coming weeks watching the Cubs with my little boy and my wife cuddled up next to me — well, then this October won’t be so bad.”

The Cubs would go on to win that World Series, and Tully attacked his cancer fight with the same intensity, enduring countless rounds of chemo and trial treatments. But eventually, it became too much. He ended treatment several weeks ago, preferring to spend what time he had left enjoying the company of his family and visits from friends.

One of those old friends, Spencer Lloyd, left Manual High School five years ago, but he keeps reminders of that 2009 Christmas concert and a subsequent trip to Carnegie Hall for his students on the wall of his office. Framed front pages from The Star tell the story.

“I hang those on my wall as a reminder of what’s possible,” Lloyd said.

When students ask about the newspapers, it’s Lloyd’s turn to tell the story.

“Let me just tell you, there was a guy named Matt Tully and he wrote an article. And all this happened.”

Read selections from Tully's Manual Project series.