David Dary was active in instrumental music and worked on The Mentor and Blue M staffs at MHS. His teachers in English, Journalism and Printing helped to shape his interest in writing, while his ham radio hobby guided him to enroll in radio courses at K-State. With his BS, he worked with Topeka’s WIBW and a CBS station in Texas. Then he lived his dream by becoming the youngest newsman on the CBS staff in Washington, D.C. There he covered the White House and Congress, and introduced President Kennedy on CBS in his Cuban missile crisis address. He was then recruited by NBC
News in Washington for management.
Later he returned to Kansas where helped to build Topeka’s NBC channel 27 television. He then joined the KU journalism faculty, obtained his MS, and became a full professor. He also began writing articles for newspapers and magazines and award-winning books about the American West. The Buffalo Book became a Book-of-the-Month
selection; Cowboy Culture: A Saga of Five Centuries was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. His popular True Tales of Old-Time Kansas was published in 1984. After 20 years at KU, Dary was recruited in 1989 by the University of Oklahoma to head what is now the Gaylord College of Journalism. He retired in 2000. In 2007, Dary was inducted into the Oklahoma Journalism Hall of Fame and in 2008 the Oklahoma Higher Education Hall of Fame.