David Dick (journalist)

David Barrow Dick (February 18, 1930 – July 16, 2010), was a journalist from Kentucky who was a correspondent for CBS News from 1966 to 1985 and thereafter a professor at his alma mater, the University of Kentucky in Lexington, a book author, and publisher.

Background

Born and reared in Cincinnati, Ohio, Dick was one of three children—he had two sisters—of Dr. Samuel Stevens Dick, I, and the former Lucile Crouch. After the death of his father, he moved to Kentucky as an older teenager with his mother.^[1] He graduated from North Middletown High School in North Middletown in his adopted Bourbon County in central Kentucky and subsequently received both Bachelor of Arts (1956) and Master of Arts (1964) degrees in English literature from the University of Kentucky. Dick's studies at UK were interrupted by a stint in the United States Navy during the Korean War.^[2]

Career

Dick began his journalism career at WHAS (AM) radio and WHAS-TV in Louisville, Kentucky. Moving on to CBS at the age of thirty-six, he was assigned to the Southeast Bureau in Atlanta, Georgia. Then he was moved to Latin American Bureau chief in Caracas, Venezuela. He finished his career at the CBS Southwest Bureau covering Texas, Mexico, and Latin America.^[1]

Bernard Goldberg, a colleague at CBS, said that "David Dick was a CBS news correspondent when that really meant something. His colleagues were Walter Cronkite, Eric Sevareid, Roger Mudd. ... These were people who made CBS ... the Tiffany network, and David Dick was part of that."^[2] Mudd recalled that "television was almost secondary to Dick's desire to get it [the story] right and to do it well."^[2]

Dick won an Emmy Award for his coverage on May 15, 1972, of the attempted assassination of then Governor George Wallace of Alabama, by Arthur Bremer in Laurel, Maryland. At the time, Wallace was a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, which eventually went to U.S. Senator George S. McGovern of South Dakota.^[1] In 1978, Dick covered the cult mass suicides in the jungle of Guyana engineered by the Reverend Jim Jones. Some nine hundred followers of Jones consumed a cyanide-laced drink. In 2002, Dick penned Follow the Storm, a study of his work as the South American bureau chief for CBS News from 1978 to 1979, when he covered civil wars in El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua,^[2] and later Beirut.^[1]

In 1978, at the age of forty-eight, Dick married his second wife, the former Eulalie "Lalie" Cumbey (born 1945), a native of New Orleans, Louisiana, who was reared in her father's hometown of Woodville in Wilkinson County in southwestern Mississippi. The couple wed in Woodville and left thereafter for Caracas, where Dick was on assignment for CBS. A graduate of Mississippi College for Women, Mrs. Dick was an employee of the Revlon company, based at one time in Columbus, Ohio, and then Dallas, Texas.^[3] From the second marriage was born a daughter, Ravy Bradford Dick Luschek (born 1983), who with her husband John lived in Alexandria in Campbell County in northern Kentucky at the time of her father's death.^[4]

After retiring from CBS, Dick became an associate professor and director of the UK School of Journalism.

His wife, Lalie Dick, became a life-style reporter for the The Montgomery Times in Mt. Sterling in Montgomery County, Kentucky in 1987. In 1988, she became general manager of The Bourbon Times in the county seat of Paris, Kentucky. For fifteen years, she penned a column for the Kentucky Farm Bureau publication, All Around Kentucky. Dick himself wrote a column for twenty-two years, "The View from Plum Lick" for Kentucky Living, the magazine of the Rural electrical cooperatives.^[3]

Dick left UK in 1996 and continued to work as a farmer, shepherd, author, and publisher. He and Lalie had already launched Plum Lick Publishing in 1992, when his first book, The View From Plum Lick, was released.^[3]

Books

Some dozen other books followed:

• A Journal for Lalie: Living Through Prostate Cancer
• Peace at the Center
• A Conversation with Peter P. Pence
• The Quiet Kentuckians
• The Scourges of Heaven
• Follow the Storm: A Long Way Home
• Jesse Stuart – The Heritage, a look at the Kentucky author Jesse Stuart

With Lalie, the two co-authored:

• Home Sweet Kentucky
• Rivers of Kentucky
• Kentucky: A State of Mind.^[2]

David and Lalie Dick attended the Kentucky Book Fair held each autumn in the capital city of Frankfort.^[2]

Death and legacy

Dick had four children from a first marriage, Samuel Stephens (Noelle) Dick, II, a broadcaster in Lexington, Kentucky, Deborah Ann Farr of Las Vegas, Nevada, Catherine D. (Rusty) O'Shields of Suwanee, Georgia, and Nell D. (Tim) Blankenship of Paris, Kentucky. He died of prostate cancer at the age of eighty. His funeral was at St. Peter's Episcopal Church in Paris, Kentucky, of which he was a member. Interment is at North Middletown Cemetery.^[4]

In addition to his Emmy Award, Dick in 1987 was inducted into the Kentucky Journalism Hall of Fame.^[2] In 2000, he was inducted into the University of Kentucky Hall of Distinguished Alumni.^[5] In 2003, he received the Distinguished Rural Kentuckians Award.^[2] He was a Paul Harris Fellow of Rotary International and a Kentucky colonel.^[4]

After Dick's death, Kentucky Educational Television re-aired a 2003 program with host Dave Shuffet in which Dick discusses milestones of his long career. To honor Dick, KET also aired an episode of One to One with Bill Goodman, which features a 2007 interview about both his career and the prostate cancer that plagued him for seventeen years prior to his death from the disease.^[2]

References