Helene Foellinger — the Publisher

Helene Ruth Foellinger (1910–1987) ran the News-Sentinel for forty-five years and, in doing so, ran a large part of Fort Wayne's civic life. She was a newspaper prodigy first: valedictorian at South Side High School in 1928, where she edited the school paper to national scholastic honors, then a mathematics graduate of the University of Illinois in 1932. That year she joined her father's News-Sentinel as a reporter and feature writer and — having convinced Oscar Foellinger of the need — became the paper's first women's editor, building the women's section she also wrote a column for. She joined the board of the News Publishing Company in 1935. When her father died suddenly in October 1936, she succeeded him at twenty-five: the youngest publisher of a major daily newspaper in the United States, and one of the very few women in the role anywhere.

Her press record is the record of the paper's strongest decades. She held the News-Sentinel to its afternoon dominance, presided over the 1950 joint operating agreement that she designed and then led as president of Fort Wayne Newspapers — a piece of business architecture national observers praised — and kept the paper independent and family-held until 1980, when, at seventy with no family successor, she sold the News Publishing Company to Knight Ridder for nearly $70 million. She retired on October 30, 1981, after forty-nine years at the paper. In 1974 she had become the first woman inducted into the Indiana Journalism Hall of Fame. Her philanthropy with her mother Esther — the Foellinger Foundation, founded 1958 — belongs to the Charities record; the typewriter she worked at, dating to about 1931, is held by the History Center. She died March 25, 1987. "Helene" was a presence in Fort Wayne far beyond her paper, but the paper was the instrument: for two generations, what Fort Wayne argued about at supper had been set in type under her name.

Sources: Indiana Journalism Hall of Fame, Helene Foellinger biography (1974 inductee, by Joseph F. Sheibley); The History Center, object record 88.64.58 (Foellinger typewriter; career summary); Foellinger Foundation histories (1932 hiring; 1935 directorship; 1936 succession at twenty-five; 1980 sale; October 30, 1981 retirement); University of Illinois 150 for 150 profile.