Si Burick

Si Burick received the Red Smith Award in 1986 and died that December, at seventy-seven, so the honor arrived at the very end, as it often does. What made his case unusual was where the career had been spent. He was not a New York or Chicago columnist. He was the sports editor and lead columnist of the Dayton Daily News, and he stayed there for fifty-eight years. The Associated Press Sports Editors were recognizing something the baseball writers had already noticed: a national reputation could be built from a mid-sized Ohio city if the column was good enough and the writer kept at it long enough.

Simon Burick was born on June 14, 1909. The public record on his early life is thin, and this archive does not fill the gaps with guesses. What is documented is the run at the Daily News, which began when he was a young man and ended only with his death, and a parallel career in broadcasting that made him one of the first voices Dayton heard talking about sports on the air.

In 1935 Burick became the first sportscaster at WHIO, the Dayton radio station, and he kept a fifteen-minute daily program there until 1961. When WHIO-TV went on the air in 1949 he moved in front of the camera as well and remained a featured personality for a decade. He also hosted the pregame show before Cincinnati Reds home games, which put a Dayton newspaperman in the ears of Reds fans across the region.

Newspaper columnists who also broadcast were not rare in the postwar years, but few managed both for as long. The radio work explains part of his reach. A column in Dayton travelled only so far; a voice on WHIO carried through southwestern Ohio and beyond, and by the time the baseball writers voted on him decades later, the name was known well past the Miami Valley.

Fifty-eight years, one masthead, one city.

Burick's books were about baseball men he had watched closely. Alston and the Dodgers (1966) profiled Walter Alston, the quiet Ohioan who managed the Dodgers for more than two decades; Alston came from Darrtown, not far from Dayton, which made him a natural subject for a Daily News columnist. The Main Spark (1978) took on Sparky Anderson, then in the middle of his run with the Big Red Machine in Cincinnati. A column collection, Byline, followed in 1982.

The choice of subjects says something about how he worked. Both were managers rather than stars, and both were within reach of his own beat. He wrote about what he could see from his own press box and his own drive down to Cincinnati, and the baseball establishment eventually noticed.

In late 1982 the Baseball Writers' Association of America voted Burick the J. G. Taylor Spink Award, and he was honored at the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown in July 1983. He was the first writer from a city without a major league club to receive it. Dayton had never had big-league baseball; its writer had been covering someone else's teams, principally the Reds, for half a century, and the award said the coverage was of the first rank regardless of the dateline.

The National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Association added him to its Hall of Fame in 1985. The Associated Press Sports Editors followed with the Red Smith Award in 1986. Three national honors in four years, all for work done from Dayton, and all arriving after he had turned seventy-three.

The public record on Burick is shorter than his career deserves. Wikipedia gives the dates, the paper, the broadcasts, the books and the honors, and not much else. There is no reliable account online of his birthplace, his schooling, or the individual columns that made his name locally, and no cause of death is recorded. Readers with access to the Dayton Daily News archive will find the rest. This page stays with what can be checked.

What can be checked is enough. A writer who holds one job for fifty-eight years, pioneers sports radio in his market, writes two books on managers and is voted into Cooperstown by his peers has done the work. The 1986 award was the sports editors' way of saying so while he could still hear it.