"She's fearless." Mom of Pulitzer-winner from Mount Carmel reflects on daughter's career

Parents are always worried about their kids, and the mother of a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist is no different.

Evansville resident Freida Henneberger is the mother of Melinda Henneberger, who won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for a series of columns she wrote for the Kansas City Star demanding justice for the victims of an ex-Kansas City police detective accused of serial sexual assault and exploitation over the span of 35 years. Melinda's tireless work on the series led to public calls for a federal investigation into the practices of the Kansas City (Kansas) Police Department.

Freida is proud of her daughter, not only for winning such a prestigious award but for her entire, decades-spanning career that's included stints at esteemed newspapers like the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Dallas Morning News, among others. She reads everything her daughter writes, though usually only in print — even if that means having a friend from Kansas City mail her article clippings.

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But it was Melinda's first gig in the news business that Frieda remembers the most fondly: When Melinda, then just a seventh-grader, started her own newspaper while attending St. Mary's Catholic School in Mount Carmel, Illinois.

The "Chestnut Street Chatter," named after the street where Melinda's middle school was located, featured stories by both Melinda and her classmates, Freida said, though the latter would often need jostling from Melinda to get their assignments turned in by deadline.

"She would assign all her friends articles to do," Freida said. "When she got off the bus (after school) I knew they hadn't finished them because of the way Melinda's ponytail was bouncing. Their mommas made them go to bed and not stay up all night writing articles."

Melinda remembered the "Chatter," which she said a Mount Carmel man helped publish, as actually her second venture in making her own newspaper. One year earlier, when she was in the sixth grade, she'd formed the "Sixth-Grade Girls," which was written out by hand.

Neither Freida nor Melinda could say exactly what made her fall in love with journalism at such a young age. The family did have a knack for writing; Freida taught business and shorthand writing at Mount Carmel High School and Melinda's uncle, Bob, worked for years on a play about Abraham Lincoln that was never published.

Melinda credited her uncle with teaching her how to read at a young age and getting her interested in sharing and discussing stories. When she was 3, Melinda said, she told her parents that she wanted to be a journalist.

Freida and her husband, John, needed some convincing. They didn't know anything about journalism and worried Melinda wouldn't be able to get a job.

"(To my parents), that seemed very fanciful and very impossible," Melinda said. "But it was the right thing and (though) this is not an easy line of work, I could never imagine doing anything else that would be this satisfying."

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Melinda, a graduate from Mount Carmel High School and the University of Notre Dame, was a Pulitzer finalist for three straight years before finally winning in 2022. She hopes the award brings attention to the stories she wrote and brings justice for the victims involved.

"The victims still have not seen any answers, much less justice," she said. "The fact that this former officer is still walking around free and living on his pension from the police department continues to outrage me."

Henneberger's work as a journalist has on occasion intersected with her personal beliefs. At the New York Times, where she worked for 10 years until 2007, Melinda was the paper's foreign bureau chief for Rome, Italy, where she reported on the Vatican and Pope John Paul II. Freida and her husband, John, both Catholics, were thrilled.

"I still have the picture of her with the Pope, meeting on his plane," Freida said.

But Melinda was also covering the Vatican at a time the church was rocked with scandal involving priests sexually abusing children.

"As a journalist, it was a great story," Melinda said. "As a Catholic? It was devastating."

It's stories like that one and her Pulitzer-winning work that gets Freida nervous for her daughter's safety. Freida noted, on more than one occasion, just how "fearless" Melinda was when it came to her job. She mentioned Melinda spending nights entrenched with a homeless camp while working for the Dallas Morning News in the 1980s as an example of a story that kept her up at night.

But Freida said she also knew there was little she could do to dissuade her daughter from reporting on what she thought was important.

"There was never a day in that little girl's life that she did not know what she wanted to do," Frieda said. "That was her interest and that's what she did."

Contact Ray Couture at rcouture@courierpress.com or on Twitter @raybc94.

This article originally appeared on Evansville Courier & Press: Before Melinda Henneberger won a Pulitzer, she ran a school newspaper