Woltman received his early education in York schools before moving to Pittsburgh. His father and grandfather were involved in the real estate and insurance business in York.

Frederick graduated from the University of Pittsburgh, taught philosophy for a year and then worked for the New York Telegram.

According to a yellow clipping at the York County Heritage Trust, Woltman collaborated with Joseph Lily toward winning the Pulitzer in 1931 in a series of stories exposing a real estate mortgage bond racket.

He came close in 1933 with an honorable mention for his reporting on the status of banks in suburban areas after President Roosevelt proclaimed a mandatory bank holiday.

He won his 1947 prize for reporting on "The Infiltration of Communism into the United States." http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,854746,00.html

At least two other journalists with York County links have won the Pulitzer.

Los Angeles Times photographer Clarence Williams, who interned with the York Daily Record in the early 1990s, won for feature photography. He documented the plight of children whose parents were addicted to drugs and alcohol.

Bruce Ritter, a York native and former artist with the York Daily Record, was part of a team from Knight-Ridder newspapers who covered critical flooding in Sioux Falls, S.D.

How did Woltman do it?

Time magazine provided insight in 1947:

Freddy Woltman gets most of the stories he writes by sitting at his desk in the city room. Other reporters usually develop the tips. A carefully cultivated army of tipsters, many of them disgruntled ex-Communists, keep his two phones humming all day long. Woltman checks the tips in a four-decker steel filing case, which bulges with clippings, speeches, articles, manifestoes, bulletins and letters from Communist sources, files of Woltman's "favorite morning newspaper": the Daily Worker. His steel filing case helped Woltman put the finger last year on Gerhart Eisler as the No. 1 Communist agent in the U.S. Says Freddy Woltman: "Simple enough. I just put two & two together"— from the filing case, that is.