Friends from around the country shared stories, tears and laughter Monday afternoon as they celebrated the life of Virginia “Ginny” Carroll, a Medill professor who was found dead in her home last week.

Carroll, 53, a hard-nosed, old-school reporter, had a kind heart and warm personality that made her easy to like, a procession of her friends and colleagues told about 125 people gathered in Fisk Hall for an hourlong memorial service.

“You couldn’t know her and not fall in love with her very quickly,” said Felix Gutierrez of the Freedom Forum, an international journalism foundation that awarded Carroll a fellowship in 1997.

Carroll came to Northwestern in September after three decades of distinguished work in both newspapers and magazines. She had been teaching the Magazine Publishing Project this quarter before she was found dead in her Chicago condominium May 7, a victim of hypertensive cardiovascular disease.

With her gusto, versatility and keen instinct for human nature, colleagues said, Carroll was an outstanding reporter. Newsweek recognized that when Carroll was doing freelance work for the magazine in the late ’70s, said Melinda Beck, a former Newsweek writer now with the Wall Street Journal.

“She was our best stringer and as good as any bureau chief we had,” Beck said.

Carroll eventually became a bureau chief for the magazine, first in Detroit in 1986 and then in Houston in 1989.

Her quick rise through the ranks of Newsweek is an inspiration to female journalists, several speakers noted.

“We can admire her as a woman who stood up to a glass ceiling in journalism,” said Terry Wimmer, a University of West Virginia professor who earned his Ph.D. at the University of North Carolina along with Carroll.

“Ginny was a great role model for young women,” said Janice Castro, a Medill assistant professor. “She came to play.”

And when Carroll decided to make a career change to teaching, she brought the same passion she had poured into being a reporter.

“She had … deep insights to the doing of journalism,” said David Abrahamson, a Medill associate professor who co-taught two classes with Carroll. “She had found a true second calling.”

Medill graduate student Rachel Davis called Carroll a natural teacher “who turned a group of students into a class of writers.”

“She was one of us, a true student,” Davis said. “She knew us in a way many professors cannot. She came here to share her ideas and share herself.”

Davis said she was privileged to have been instructed by Carroll, and wished that others could have shared the experience.

“Only a small number of people were her students,” she said. “And we are better people and better journalists for it.”

Although attendees said the world lost a great journalist and teacher last week, the tearful eyes in Monday’s crowd reinforced that above all it had lost a great friend.

“If the pain we are feeling is the price of knowing Ginny, I think it was worth it,” Castro said.