One to One with Bill Goodman:
David Dick
aired December 22 and 24, 2006
Host Bill Goodman speaks with popular Kentucky columnist and author David Dick about his two careers—one as a globe-trotting network news correspondent, the other as the proprietor of his own down-home publishing company—on this edition of One to One.
Over the course of a distinguished journalism career with CBS, Dick was based at various times in Atlanta; Dallas; and Caracas, Venezuela. He rode the presidential campaign trail, winning an Emmy Award along the way for his coverage of the shooting of Alabama governor and presidential candidate George Wallace. He reported from Guyana after the mass suicide of the followers of cult leader Jim Jones, surviving a Jones-ordered massacre of other journalists at the site only because he was a day late arriving, and covered wars in Central and South America and the Middle East. But when it was time to retire from all that globetrotting, he settled down back where he’d started—at Plum Lick, the Bourbon County homeplace a distant ancestor had bought in 1799.
There, with the help of his wife, Lalie, Dick has created a second career that in itself would have been a life’s work for most people. He became a journalism teacher and a sought-after speaker, directed the University of Kentucky School of Journalism for six years, served as publisher of a weekly newspaper for several years, began writing syndicated columns and books, and started Plum Lick Publishing to produce the books.
Dick’s writings reflect his profound attachment to the land and people of Kentucky as well as the wide range of his experiences and interests. They include The Quiet Kentuckians, a tribute to “ordinary” people of the Commonwealth; Rivers of Kentucky, an appreciation co-authored with Lalie (who is herself a columnist for the Kentucky Farm Bureau); a collection of essays entitled Peace at the Center; and the 2002 memoir Follow the Storm, a Long Way Home, about his years with CBS. His research into family history led him to an intriguing female ancestor and even inspired him to try fiction with the historical novel The Scourges of Heaven, set amid the devastating cholera epidemics of the mid-19th century. That book was the September 1999 selection of bookclub@ket.
In the One to One interview, Dick also discusses an upcoming book that may be his most personal yet: It chronicles his 13-year battle with prostate cancer.
