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Where once the presence of large numbers of men had been par for the course at The State News, the absence of men on campus during World War II brought women to work at the paper. There simply wasn't anything else interesting to do, recalled Neva Ackerman-Moyer.

Ackerman-Moyer, who was a journalism student at Michigan State University from 1943 through 1947, was part of the newspaper's first all-woman editing team that ran the paper during the war, a radical concept at that time.

Ackerman-Moyer remembered outgoing male staffers writing columns about how women would feminize the offices. "Contrary to their predictions, the women editors did not hang curtains at the windows," she later wrote.

The paper closely followed war news with wire coverage and analysis offered by various faculty members. Their greatest coup was The State News' D-Day extra edition, a never-to-be-forgotten experience for the staff.

For months, the world awaited the expected invasion. Like most other papers, The State News made careful plans in advance by gathering background material, setting file pictures in type and carefully rehearsing what staff would do when the news came.

At last, on the early morning of June 6, 1944, the teletype bells began clanging and every staff member was called into action. "We dared not leave anybody out," Ackerman-Moyer later wrote, adding staff were "falling over each other in excitement and virtually pushing the Linotypists over the finish line."

The paper hit the streets around 5 a.m., as staff grabbed bundles of papers and ran out the door, beating the Lansing State Journal and Detroit Free Press to readers' hands.

"We stopped traffic on Grand River (Avenue) passing out copies to early morning commuters," Ackerman-Moyer wrote. "It was a huge triumph."

In more ways than one.