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March 2015 TAFWA Says Goodbye James O. Dunaway Index P. 3 President’s Message: March 2015 P. 6 Jim Dunaway’s Fantastic Voyage to the 1956 Olympic Games in Melbourne P. 12 Remembering Jim Dunaway: Walter Murphy and Many Others P. 18 Remembering JOD: Chris Kuykendall P. 19 August 2, 1965 - Sports Illustrated Visits James O. Dunaway P. 21 Let’s Run Weighs In: The Stephanie Hightower Controversy P. 22 Lionel A. Leach’s Letter to Hightower P. 23 Hightower’s Rebuttal Letter to Leach P. 24 Let’s Run Publishes Excerpt of Tim Baker’s Response to the Hightower Controversy P. 25 Ask Lauren Fleshman: The “Cropped” USATF Commercial P. 28 2015 TAFWA Awards - Nomination Guidelines P. 29 2015 Membership Renewal Reminder P. 30 USATF Votes to Keep Hightower as IAAF Nominee. Others Seem To Agree P. 33 Partial Fixtures List TAFWA Newsletter Page 2 - March 2015 President’s Message | March 2015 Jim Dunaway Jim Dunaway passed away in his sleep on Sunday evening March 15 at the Southern Hospitality Center in Aus- tin, Texas. He was 87 and had been writing about track and field for more than 60 years. He also meant a lot to this organi- zation, both as a past president and as a staunch advocate behind the scenes for our independence. Jim had been recuperating from emergency surgery last month in his adopted hometown of Austin, where he moved two decades ago after a career in the advertising business in New York. He was a graduate of Penn State, where he ran cross country, and wrote countless freelance articles for Track & Field News, American Track & Field, The New York Times, the Austin American-Statesman, the Kansas City Star and numerous other publica- tions. He began that career in 1956 when he took a leave of absence from his profession and went to Melbourne, Aus- tralia, on a steamer ship across the Pacific. To pay his way, Dunaway wrote to medium-size newspapers across the country, persuading them to let him cover the Olympic Games for them. He went to the next 13 Summer Olympics, his streak finally ending after 2008. That included the Moscow Games of 1980, despite the absence of the American team, in which he famously uncovered the cheating by the hometown judges in the horizontal jumps. Jim was a taskmaster, a stickler for the right turn of phrase, an old-fashioned devotee of the facts, a storyteller and a writer. He knew how to meet a deadline and how to be a thorn in the side of his editors on the other end of the phone. He was still a working track writer as recently as last summer, when he attended the USATF Na- tionals in Sacramento. Jim made a rare concession to attend that meet by traveling by air. For most meets he traveled by automobile, alone, driving 18-hour days from Austin to the New York City Marathon, to Des Moines for the Drake Relays and to Eugene – by way of Idaho to visit friends -- for the NCAA and other meets. Finally he stopped going to Hayward Field because, without an elevator, he said he could no longer climb to the press area at the top of the stands without pausing repeatedly to catch his breath. Jim was determined, but not loony, though some might dispute that. Dunaway is one of a handful of writers who have been named to the U.S. Track & Field Hall of Fame, along with his good friends Bert and Cordner Nelson. He knew all of the lions of American track writing – Neil Amdur and Frank Litsky of The Times, Mal Florence of the L.A. Times, Leo Davis of The Oregonian, Carl Cluff of the Oregon Journal, Ed Chay of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Garry Hill (T&FN), Ron Reid (San Jose and Philadelphia), Blaine Newnham (Eugene and Seattle), Bob Payne (Spokane and Tacoma), Georg Meyers (Seattle), Elliott Denman (NJ), Ed Grant (NJ), Bob Fachet (DC), Scott Davis, Marc Bloom, Bill Miller, Dave Johnson, Larry Byrne, the list is endless. Dunaway was part of the immediate postwar generation of writers who reported on track and field in its boom years of the ‘40s, ‘50s and ‘60s, linking him with the namesake of our writing award, Jesse Abramson of the New York Herald-Tribune, and his contemporary, Arthur Daley of The Times. In more recent years, Dunaway championed writers of a younger era, including the New Yorkers Peter Gambac- cini and Merrell Noden. Before leaving the East Coast, he was a mainstay of the media section at the Penn Relays, where he teamed up with Litsky, Amdur and Miller to cover the meet for The Times. That era also produced the legendary New York “Gang of Four” – Walt Murphy, Bob Hersh, Peter Diamond and Dunaway. TAFWA Newsletter -Page 3 - March 2015 Jim had a mixed love affair with Eugene, a place he loved to visit and also loved to skewer for its fans’ excessive devotion. In the 1970s he was an essential part of the inspiration for that decade’s two famous T-shirts created by his group of out-of-town critics, the yellow-and-green one that said Eugene: Track Capital of Lane County, surrounding a small outline of the county, and the infamous bright red STOP PRE shirt famously worn by Steve himself after winning the 5,000 at the ’72 Olympic Trials. Dunaway was a raconteur of the old school and a man of letters and the arts. No one knew more than JOD about jazz, for example. He told the story of his early years in Manhattan, when he worked at one of the top ad agencies on Madison Avenue, staying late to crank out an important job, at which point he and his colleagues would make their way to 52nd Street, between 5th and 6th, for dinner, a few beverages and the latest bebop at the 3 Deuces, Jimmy Ryan’s, the Club Downbeat or The Famous Door. Long after midnight, he’d find his way back to his small apartment where Dunaway, a lapsed Catholic, lived across the street from St. Patrick’s Cathe- dral, an irony he cherished. Dues & FAST Annual Yes there’s linkage. Membership dues are due for 2015 by the end of the month. Pay by Paypal, or by check, made out to TAFWA, through the mail to our treasurer, Tom Casacky. It’s $30. If you are not paid up by the end of March, you will no longer receive the monthly TAFWA Newsletter – this thing you’re reading right now – nor will you receive your free copy in the mail of the 2015 FAST Annual. So please remember to pay your dues in a timely manner. TAFWA Newsletter - Page 4 - March 2015 The Annual, also under Tom Casacky’s guiding hand, is expected to go to the printer later this month. We have an agreement to have USATF again be publisher of the book. The actual arrival date of the book will depend on the speed of USATF and its publishing wing, but we expect to put books in the mail in April. Dave Johnson will handle the mailing from Philadelphia. Awards Nominations are in order for our remaining TAFWA Awards for this year – the Abramson Award for writing, the Sam Skinner Award for media relations, the Pinkie Sober and Scott Davis awards for announcing, the Rich Clarkson Award for photography, the Adam Jacobs Award for blogging, and our new videography award. Our other awards were presented last month in New York. The criteria and deadlines for the remaining awards appear elsewhere in this newsletter. They will be presented at our annual Spring Breakfast, Friday morning, June 12, during the NCAA Champion- ships in Eugene. This year we will be meeting on campus, not at the Hilton. Remember James O. Dunaway. Read on. TAFWA Newsletter - Page 5 March 2015 ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: <[email protected]> Date: Tue, Mar 17, 2015 at 4:53 PM Subject: Jim Dunaway’s Fantastic Voyage(to the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne) Walt Murphy’s News and Results Service To coincide with the 50th Anniversary of the 1956 Olympic Games in 2006, I asked Jim Dunaway to share the tale of his trip to the first of what would be 14 consecutive Summer Games (including the 1980 “Boycott” Games in Moscow) he would cover as a journalist. In addition to the Olympics, Jim also covered eleven World Outdoor Championships(Through 2007), almost 50 NCAA Outdoor Championships, all but two or three U.S. Outdoor Championships over the same period, and various World Cups, European Championships, World Indoor Championships -- and literally hundreds of invitationals, relays, and conference championships, indoors and out, far too mamy to count. He had been a contributor to Track and Field News for almost 50 years, written many stories for the NY Times, and had worked tirelessly to improve working conditions for journalists in pressboxes throughout the U.S. I’ve considered Jim my mentor for many years, both as a writer and also as a TV “consultant”, a role he filled with ABC at the 1968-1972-1976-1984 Games and with NBC’s Triplecast at the 1992 Games in Barcelona. His story is a long one, but one well worth reading by any fan of the sport who has traveled some distance to a meet or who shares Jim’s philosophy--“To paraphrase Will Rogers, ‘I never met a track meet I didn’t like’”.) Fantastic Voyage (My Trip to the 1956 Olympics) by Jim Dunaway Early in 1956, I was working as a copywriter at Leo Burnett Company, a Chicago advertising agency.

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