Jerry F. Dhonau, whose reporting at Little Rock’s Central High School during the historic school integration crisis in 1957 helped his newspaper win a Pulitzer Prize, died Friday at Albuquerque, N.M., according to Ernie Dumas, a family friend.
Dhonau was 83.
In his later years, Dhonau and his wife, Joyce, split their time between residences in Albuquerque and Little Rock, where he was born and reared and spent most of a long and distinguished career in journalism. He was the editor of the editorial page of the Arkansas Gazette when the newspaper closed on October 18, 1991, and wrote a farewell editorial for the paper’s final edition that morning.
After the Gazette closed, Dhonau briefly wrote a weekly column for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette before taking a job as an editorial writer and editor of the Sunday editorial digest for the Daytona (Fla.) Beach News Journal. He taught journalism at the University of South Florida and Stetson University. He also taught journalism for short periods at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and the University of Central Arkansas.
The Gazette won two Pulitzer Prizes in 1958.