Sports
editor and featured columnist for the Dayton Daily News for
58 years, Si Burick received
the G. Taylor Spink
Award on July 23, 1983, and was inducted
into the writers section of the
Baseball Hall of Fame. He is the only
writer from a city without a Major
League baseball team to be enshrined
in Cooperstown.
The son of a rabbi, Burick saw his
first byline in the Daily News (the Dayton
Journal Herald later merged with the
Daily News) on August 26, 1925, two
months past his sixteenth birthday. In
November 1928, he became sports editor
of the Cox-published newspaper,
and on November 16, his first daily column “Si-ings,” appeared.
He was active as both Daily News editor and
columnist until his death. He was the
last of a major American newspaper
tradition whereby the featured sports
columnist was also its sports editor.
Burick was also an Ohio radio personality
as early as 1935, when he became
WHIO’s first sportscaster. His
daily 15-minute programs aired until
1961. For a period during the earlier
years, he hosted the Cincinnati Reds
pre-game show before home games. In
1949, when WHIO-TV went on the air,
Burick was one of its featured personalities
and continued to be so for the next
ten years.
Burick covered virtually every type
of sporting event—from the Kentucky
Derby (all but six in 56 years) to local
high school sports, from the Olympic
Games to regional college football,
from Major League baseball to professional
football, and most everything
else in between.
Sixteen times—the first in 1954—one
of Burick’s feature columns was included
in The Sporting News’ Best Sports Stories
of the Year (from 1954 to 1965, from
1969 to 1971, and 1979). In 1971, he was
elected president of the National Sportswriters
and Sportscasters Association; in 1972, elected president of
the Football
Writers Association of America; and in
1973, elected director of the Turf Writers
Association of America.
In 1984, Burick was recipient of the
Bert McGrane Award from the Football
Writers’ Association of America. One
year later, he was inducted into the National
Sportswriters and Sportscasters
Hall of Fame. In 1986, Burick was honored
by the National College Football
Hall of Fame and the Associated Press
Sports Editors, who awarded him the
Red Smith Award—America’s most
prestigious sports writing honor.
Si Burick authored three books, Alston
and the Dodgers in 1966, The Main
Spark, a biography of Sparky Anderson,
in 1978, and Byline, a collection of his
columns, in 1982.
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