The Walk of Fame is a collection of engraved stones installed in the sidewalks along West Third Street between Shannon and Broadway Streets in the historic Wright Dunbar Business District.
The inductees are selected based on their impactful contributions locally, nationally and internationally. Each individual has made a significant impact on the greater Dayton community and beyond,
Tom and other inductees will be recognized at the annual Dayton Region Walk of Fame luncheon which will be held on Oct. 11 at Sinclair Community College.
Here is a list of other Dayton Daily News-connected journalists staff members on the Walk of Fame.
Erma Bombeck
Erma Bombeck became popular for her newspaper column describing suburban home life in a humorous way.
Bombeck’s first job at the Dayton Journal was as a “copy girl” in 1944. After graduating from the University of Dayton in 1949, she worked at the Journal Herald, writing obituaries and woman’s page stories.
After a stint at the Kettering-Oakwood Times, she was hired as a column writer by the Journal Herald in 1965. Her first column for the Journal Herald was called, “Our Girl in Centerville,” which is where she was living at the time.
Her column became syndicated within weeks, publishing under the name “At Wit’s End,” also the name of her first book. The column continued until her death in 1996. At one point, about 900 newspapers were running it weekly.
Bombeck went on to write for several magazines, appear on television shows including “Good Morning America” and also published 15 books over her career, many becoming bestsellers.
Si Burick
Credit: STAFF/FILE
Credit: STAFF/FILE
Si Burick was a nationally known sportswriter for 61 years and was the sports editor for the Dayton Daily News for 58 of those years. He was promoted to sports editor when he was just 19 years old.
For more than 20 years, he also did a sports broadcast on WHIO radio at 6 p.m. Mondays through Fridays.
Si covered his first major league baseball game in 1929. He won the BBWAA Career Excellence Award, voted by the Baseball Writers Association of America and presented by the National Baseball Hall of Fame.
Ritter Collett
Ritter Collett was a sports editor and columnist for the Dayton Journal-Herald and Dayton Daily News for over 50 years.
During his career, he covered 44 consecutive World Series from 1946-1990.
Collett started at the Dayton Journal in 1946 and became the sports editor of the Journal-Herald from 1948 until 1991. Although retired as sports editor, Collett continued to write columns for the paper until his death in 2001.
Collett was the winner of the 1991 J.G. Taylor Spink Award, voted by the Baseball Writers Association of America and presented by the National Baseball Hall of Fame.
The Hall of Fame honors contributions to baseball through three awards. The annual winners of the Museum’s Ford C. Frick Award for broadcasters and the BBWAA’s Career Excellence Award for writers are honored at the Awards Presentation on Hall of Fame Weekend. The Museum’s Buck O’Neil Lifetime Achievement Award is presented not more than once every three years by the Hall of Fame’s Board of Directors.
James M. Cox
James M. Cox bought the Dayton Evening News in August 1898 and promptly renamed it the Dayton Daily News, and from there built Cox Enterprises, a large media enterprise which included the Springfield Press Republic (now the Springfield News Sun), and Atlanta Journal (now the Atlanta Journal-Constitution).
Cox was the 46th and 48th governor of Ohio, serving three terms. Before becoming Governor, Cox serving as the state’s U.S. Representative from 1909 to 1913. His progressive and reformist policies aided him to the Democratic nomination for the presidency in 1920, in which he lost to then-U.S. Senator Warren G. Harding. His running mate was Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Dale Huffman
Credit: Teesha McClam
Credit: Teesha McClam
Dale Huffman’s columns and stories forged an enduring bond with Dayton Daily News readers during a career that spanned 45 years.
Huffman covered several high-profile stories as a reporter in the late 1960s and early ‘70s, but it was his work as a metro columnist in the latter two-thirds of his career that captured the loyalty of a community and prompted a remarkable level of reader devotion.
In 1999, Huffman started writing a daily column that highlighted everyday life throughout the region. The column ran every day for more than eight years. When he was hospitalized with a serious illness, he was forced to stop writing the daily column. By then, he had written more than 3,000 consecutively.
President George H.W. Bush named Huffman the nation’s 1,001st “Point of Light” in 1993, for his recurring series that followed 100 kindergarten students to their high school graduation in 2000.
In 1998, he published a book, “Dayton: The Cradle of Creativity” and, in 2008, he was inducted to the Dayton Walk of Fame.
William Preston Mayfield
There was no better chronicler of Dayton’s visual history than William Preston Mayfield, who spent six decades photographing the city’s most important events. He started working for the Dayton Daily News at the age of 12.
Mayfield, who lived from 1896 to 1974, made history in 1910 when, as a staff photographer for the Dayton Daily News at the age of 14, he convinced Orville Wright to take him on a flight. The photo that resulted, taken 300 feet in the air aboard an “Exhibition B” Flyer, is believed to be the first aerial image from a plane in America.
Mayfield had a serious sense of history and enjoyed documenting the changes in the area including history, building development and street scenes.
Hal McCoy
Hal McCoy has been a baseball writer for the Dayton Daily News for over 50 years.
McCoy was in the forefront of the Pete Rose investigation, breaking many stories during the 1989 season while also covering the Reds on a daily basis.
According to the Baseball Hall of Fame website, during one stretch, McCoy covered more than 5,500 games, 900 spring training games and 500 postseason games, missing only one assigned game due to illness.
McCoy won the 2002 BBWAA Career Excellence Award voted by the Baseball Writers Association of America and presented by the National Baseball Hall of Fame.
Mike Peters
Mike Peters started as an editorial cartoonist at the Dayton Daily News in 1969.
In 1981, Peters won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning. At the time, his cartoons were syndicated to about 250 newspapers.
In 1984, he launched the cartoon “Mother Goose and Grimm.” The strip was published in 500 newspapers.
Rosamond “Roz” Young
Roz Young started at the Dayton Daily News in 1944, writing freelance features and columns. She was hired as a full-time columnist for the Dayton Journal Herald in 1970, replacing the also legendary Marj Heyduck.
Young’s daily column appeared on the Opinion page at a time when women didn’t often received bylines outside of the Women’s Pages.
Her most popular columns were about her cat, Edith, and local history.
Young semi-retired from the Dayton Daily News in 1982 but continued to write a weekly column until her death in 2005.
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