Kansan David Dary had a passion for telling great western stories

One of Kansas' best storytellers has died.

The funeral service for David Dary — longtime journalist, professor, storyteller and historian — will be at 2 p.m. Wednesday at St. John's Episcopal Church, 235 W. Duffy, in Norman, Okla. He died Thursday in Norman at age 83.

"During his years in Kansas, David Dary produced a vast body of what he called 'stories of old-time Kansans.' Those stories were wide-ranging and entertaining," said Ramon Powers, former director of the Kansas State Historical Society. "His publications on Kansas history and the history of the American West leave an enduring legacy for future generations."

Mr. Dary was born on Aug. 21, 1934, in Manhattan. He was a fourth-generation Kansan. He received his bachelor's degree from Kansas State University and his master's from the University of Kansas in Lawrence.

He began his journalism career as a broadcast journalist at WIBW radio and television in Topeka, then moved to Texas before joining the staff at CBS News in Washington, D.C., according to papers in the Morse Department of Special Collections at Kansas State University.

He covered the last months of the Eisenhower administration and then the Kennedy administration. He introduced President Kennedy on CBS for the president's Cuban Missile Crisis speech and reported on Soviet ships carrying missiles out-bound from Cuba.

In 1963, he became the NBC local manager of news in Washington., D.C. In the late 1960s, he was asked by NBC News to move to New York. But he turned down the job and returned to Kansas, where he helped build a new NBC station in Topeka before accepting a faculty job at the William Allen White School of Journalism at KU. He was there for 20 years before he was recruited to become head of the Gaylord College of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, where he rebuilt the program from a $22 million gift from the Gaylord family. He retired in 2000.

It was his history books that earned him the most praise. He earned two Wrangler Awards from the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum and received two Spur Awards and the Owen Wister Lifetime Achievement Award from the Western Writers of America. He was inducted into the Oklahoma Journalism Hall of Fame and the Oklahoma Higher Education Hall of Fame. And, in 2010, he was inducted into the Kansas Cowboy Hall of Fame at Dodge City for his literary contributions to the history of the cowboy.

"He took history to real people and made history accessible to real people," said Deb Goodrich, a Kansas historian and author. "His books will never go out of print because his stories are so well told. He saw what was unique in our story and shared it in a way that was intriguing and got generations into studying history."

Mr. Dary is the author of more than 20 books, many focused on Kansas, Oklahoma and American West history. Some of the more notable include "The Buffalo Book," "Cowboy Culture," "True Tales of Old-Time Kansas," and "More True Tales of Old Time Kansas."

"History is all about the storytelling," said Jay Price, Wichita State University history department chairman. "And that's where the journalist side comes in. They are better at storytelling and stitching that all together, certainly the beloved parts of the Old West part of Kansas. That's where our rootedness comes in. He is of that generation of folk that include historians like Craig Miner and Bill Unrau and who set the stage of how we think of the Kansas story."

In an interview with The Eagle in April 1997, Mr. Dary told a reporter he began collecting historic materials, including maps and books, in the early 1960s. His family's Kansas ties date back to the 1860s, when his great-grandfather, Carl Engel, settled in Manhattan as a printer.

"I grew up listening to my great aunts and uncles telling stories," he said.

For a time, as a young man, he lived in Texas.

"As a working journalist, I observed the people down there take pride in history. People in Kansas don't. And, after I studied the situation, I decided the people in Texas had less to be thankful for than those in Kansas.," he told The Eagle.

Mr. Dary is survived by his wife, Sue, four daughters and seven grandchildren.

This story was originally published March 20, 2018 at 10:54 AM with the headline "Kansan David Dary had a passion for telling great western stories."