Winifred Imhof Cook blazed a path on a typewriter.

She grew up in a small town in central Pennsylvania and knew she wanted to follow in her father’s footsteps as a journalist. When she graduated from Penn State in 1948, few women worked in the country’s newsrooms as journalists.

“My mom was a pathbreaker,” her daughter, Pam Cook, of the Bay Area, said. Winifred Cook became an editor and writer at the Trenton Times, a daily in New Jersey. Eventually, she joined the staff of the Home News in New Brunswick, New Jersey, where she worked for 25 years as a features writer and one of the first consumer affairs editors in the country.

Nowadays, 70 percent of mothers with children under the age of 18 work in the paid labor force. In the 1950s, Cook was more of an anomaly.

She was the only mother who scheduled parent-teacher conferences in the evening because she worked during the day, her daughter recalled. She knew her male colleagues got paid more than their female counterparts, and the unfairness rankled her, Pam Cook said.

Winifred Cook built her career interviewing noteworthy individuals, like Lucille Ball, Barry Goldwater Jr., Malcolm Forbes and Vidal Sassoon. She investigated consumer issues. The paper nominated her work for a Pulitzer once. She won a string of awards. She made an impression in less obvious ways, as well. A former classmate told Pam Cook decades later that he decided to pursue a career in journalism after their elementary school class visited her mom in the newsroom.

Winifred Cook retired in the mid-‘80s, long before the digital revolution transformed newsrooms. Her stories don’t exist on the internet, but in boxes filled with folders of clips her daughter inherited after her mom passed away in 1995. That year, her former paper merged with the News Tribune of Woodbridge Township. It was later bought by Gannett.

Her daughter has spent years going through boxes of old clips and memorabilia, sending stories and photos to historical societies or libraries who may have an interest in preserving some of it. Earlier this year, Pam Cook came across a clipping in those files from a Life magazine article published in 1953. It was yellowed and delicate, like old paper gets when it ages. Life magazine had written an editorial that was a paean to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's investigative reporting and fearlessness of its editorial page. The piece marked the 75th anniversary of the paper with effusive praise.

Winifred Cook didn’t have any connection to St. Louis or its paper, but the piece must have inspired her when she read it because she had saved it for decades.

Her daughter decided it should go to a female journalist, so she Googled our paper’s website, stltoday.com. She came across the names of features writers, picked one and mailed the old clipping with a short note. Given the turnover in newsrooms these days, she wasn’t sure if the writer even still worked there.

In early August, I had returned from a week’s vacation to a stack of mail in my newsroom mailbox. A package from California caught my eye. Most of my snail mail arrives from somewhere in the Midwest.

I opened it and pulled out a creased and faded page. The words that inspired a trailblazing newswoman about my paper’s courageous editorial page arrived the same week I started writing editorials for that same paper.

It felt like Winifred Imhof Cook was shaking a fist at those attacking journalists today. Perhaps she was encouraging the rest of us to keep on keeping on.

I got that page framed.

It brings to mind the work journalists around the world aim to do. It honors the writers who upheld the values of the Pulitzer platform engraved in our lobby and printed at the top of our editorial section every day -- regardless of the consequences.

Even more, that worn page reminds me of the newswomen who made a space for more voices at the table.

Newspapers have suffered deep cuts in staff and rising attacks on journalists and the freedom of the press itself. The final paragraphs of the Life editorial show how a few things stay the same, and how much everything changes.

"The Post-Dispatch in its 75th successful year is living proof that journalism cannot survive but prosper by speaking its mind and serving as the conscience -- even when a conscience must be irritating -- of democracy."

The paper marked its 140th year of daily publication on Wednesday.

Thanks, Winifred Cook, for the reminder of what endures.

Dorothy Reimers, 74, shared a long-forgotten injustice with her nieces when they were chatting during a recent summer visit.

Her principal had called her into his office a month before graduation during her senior year at Highland High School in Illinois. A four-year honors student, she had been nominated for the National Honor Society (NHS) -- but she wasn’t going to get in. The principal informed her that he was going to give the honor to a boy ranked lower than her because “it would help him on his resume,” she recalled.

Reimers was a shy girl who had grown up on a farm in the country, and didn’t question what the principal told her.

“I was ranked 12th in my high-school class,” she said.

After hearing the story, Anne-Christine Massullo, a superior court judge in San Francisco and Reimers’ niece by marriage, was flabbergasted.

“This makes me so upset for Aunt Dorothy,” she said. She and Reimers’ other nieces describe her as a giver -- a person who never asks for anything and has spent a life sacrificing for others. It’s hard for them, with successful careers, to remember that it wasn’t that long ago that a woman’s options were far more limited.

Reimers said she had never thought of the incident after it happened. But she did get a little teary when she shared the story for the first time. She had not gone to college -- never imagined it was a possibility -- and instead worked as a secretary for 20 years after she graduated. She eventually got married and took care of her husband after he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.

“She is wicked smart,” said her niece Laura Porter, a musician and business owner in Los Angeles. “We fantasize about everything she could have done with her life if she had even known it was possible.” They imagine she could have run a large corporation.

Later on in the visit, Massullo hatched a plan. She told Porter that she wanted to contact Highland High and ask officials to make their aunt a member of the honor society.

What was the worst that could happen?

The school’s guidance office secretary, Sarah Wiegman, answered when Massullo called in August. Wiegman went into the school’s storage room and pulled the files with old student transcripts. Her research confirmed that Reimers had met the criteria -- and had, indeed, been ranked higher than the boy who was inducted into the NHS back in 1962. She referred the case to the school’s NHS adviser, who presented the facts to NHS senior officers.

They unanimously voted to induct Reimers into the organization as an honorary member.

The nieces decided to surprise their aunt on Thanksgiving with the certificate. First, they asked her to retell the story for the family members gathered.

When Massullo pulled out the certificate, Reimers burst into tears.

“You did this for me?” she asked. Her older brother, now 81, was also crying.

They told her they did it because they love her. And also because she had earned it.

“Nobody had the right to take that from me,” she said, with a hard-earned wisdom. “I worked for that.” Reimers said that if the same thing happened today, when she’s older and wiser, she would never stand for it.

She wonders what happened to the boy who received the honor meant for her. The principal had taken more than an award from her; he had told her that her achievements should benefit a boy. That the boy’s future mattered far more than hers. Reimers lost out on a milestone academic achievement and the possibilities that could have come with it.

“It was stolen from her in that moment,” Porter said.

More than 56 years later, they made sure she got it back.

A queen-sized mattress takes up most of the living room floor. It’s the first thing you see when you walk in the front door. It’s draped with blue sheets and surrounded by the larger furniture on three sides, creating an island in the middle of the room. Plush toys sit next to remotes. Pillows are scattered throughout the space, and medical supplies are stacked on the sides of the mattress.

Kyle, 37, and Indy Walsh, 39, have lived out of this room for the past year. Their 4-year-old son, Kyler, has a brand-new nursery in their three-bedroom ranch house in St. Charles.

It’s never been used.

Indy had noticed seizures when Kyler was 3 or 4 months old. When he was 6 months old, doctors diagnosed him with a rare genetic disorder called FOXG1 syndrome, in which a genetic mutation causes brain abnormalities and severely impairs development. Kyler is nonverbal, unable to lift his head or support his own weight, and likely has the cognitive function of a 6-month-old. He is fed through a gastrostomy tube and requires 24-hour care. He has spent months in the hospital, since even a cold can turn life-threatening for him. About 260 people have this mutation worldwide.

One of his parents sleeps on the mattress on the floor with him every night. He used to sleep in the bed with one of them, until they worried he might roll over and fall off. On this icy night in November, it’s his grandmother, Cindy Ryon, staying with him on the mattress, waiting for his parents to return from the hospital.

Indy was shocked to learn in April that she had gotten pregnant again. She has a variation of the gene mutation that affects her ability to carry a baby to term. She had three miscarriages before Kyler was born, and two miscarriages after him.

Her oldest child, 17-year-old Ashlynn, has a different form of the genetic mutation that doesn’t cause the syndrome her brother has. When Ashlynn heard about her mother’s pregnancy, her first thought was, “Oh gosh, we’re gonna be under stress again that I’m going to have to deal with.”

The family operates under high levels of stress. Indy was fired from her job as a manager at Walmart after Kyler was diagnosed. Kyle runs his own painting business with his brother. They don’t qualify for state aid for Kyler’s medical expenses, so they are constantly juggling bills and negotiating with insurance companies. Once, the electricity was cut off during one of his extended hospital stays.

Indy, whose days and nights are spent caring for her severely disabled son, was on pins and needles during her pregnancy, wondering if their next baby would have the same mutation. Ashlynn and Kyler share the same October birth date, but Kameron wasn’t due until Dec. 9.

Then at 33 weeks, she went into preterm labor. The doctors stopped the labor, kept her in the hospital for four days and sent her home on bed rest. The next day, Indy started bleeding. She called her husband and said he needed to come home right away.

Painful contractions hit every two to three minutes during the car ride to the hospital. She was bleeding profusely. Doctors discovered her placenta was breaking away from uterine wall. She was hemorrhaging, and too unstable to transfer to a larger, better-equipped facility in St. Louis.

An ambulance whisked Kameron to St. Louis Children’s Hospital soon after he was born. He would spend 23 days in the neonatal intensive care unit while his parents waited for the results of the medical tests. It was too risky to bring Kyler to the hospital to meet his new brother.

Tonight, the Walshes were going to bring their baby home, and the brothers would meet.

Kyle laid Kameron down next to Kyler. Ashlynn stayed on the top of the mattress, above the 6-pound infant in a fuzzy bodysuit covered with blue and gray snowflakes.

“Look at him. Look at him, babe,” Kyle said to his wife. “He’s talking to him.” Indy was busy unpacking newborn diapers the size of an adult hand. “That can all wait,” her husband said. “You should watch this.”

The brothers lay face-to-face on the mattress. Kyler gurgled and made eye contact with the baby for a brief moment.

Kyle recorded a video on his phone.

Indy started talking to her older son.

“Who is that, Kyler? Is that your little baby brother? Mommy’s been telling you about him.”

She reached over to put lip balm on Kyler’s dry lips.

They are hoping the new baby will help Kyler learn and develop.

Kameron’s test results were clear. He didn’t share either genetic mutation that his siblings have.

He does, however, share one thing with Ashlynn and Kyler: the same Oct. 23 birthday.