‘Denny O’Grady was one of my heroes,’ small-town newspaper publisher says of beloved late Carroll, Iowa sports editor
CARROLL, Iowa —
If a poll were put into the field asking readers of the Carroll Times Herald to select their favorite writer over the last century the emerging result would be as overwhelming as it is predictable.
Denny O’Grady.
The former 30-year sportswriter’s charisma and kindness, community-mindedness and reliable accuracy, blended to create his singular brand of Carroll conviviality.
You knew you’d earned something when you made Denny’s annual Christmas card, which graced pages of our newspaper during the holidays.
I can’t imagine Carroll without Denny O’Grady having spent three decades here, and similarly, it’s hard to think of Denny without Carroll. He is our all-time cultural ambassador.
No one meant more to the Times Herald in the 93 years of our family’s involvement and ownership, from 1929 to 2022, than O’Grady whose colorful presence and precise writing, and unapologetic Carroll boosterism, lifted the sports, schools, culture and economic development of Carroll — helping to mint us as a regional force.
O’Grady’s dogged reporting and deep knowledge and affection for Carroll-area sports — the kids, the people, the schools — formed the heart of our family’s newspaper from 1971 to 2001, his magical 30-year career in Carroll.
I worked hundreds of nights in the Carroll Times Herald newsroom with Denny and had thousands of conversations with him through the years.
He connected us to the community with stories that took kids seriously. He always got the facts the right. And he wrote with kindness, never cruelly pointed fingers, when it came to student-athletes, because they are, after all, kids.
Our paper’s brand of spotlighting success, of never taking the cheap dip into the green rivers of envy, is largely a result of Denny’s approach to community journalism.
Denny was loved in the community as much as journalists collectively are hated in the nation. There are abundant lessons in that to endlessly ponder.
“Words I would use to describe Denny are dependable, friendly — and, yes, loud. You knew his booming voice from a long ways away,” said former Carroll Times Herald publisher Ann Wilson, my mother. “Denny loved sports, but more importantly, he loved the kids that played those games.”
Often, on Saturday mornings, mom would head to the office to check on the mail, get a head start on the next week’s payroll and bills. And she’d chat with O’Grady who was there, too, working on sports stories from the night before.
One sports season, when Carroll High School and Kuemper Catholic High School were both faring poorly, mom asked Denny how he found ways to write positively about the games, considering the bleak numbers on the scoreboards.
“That’s easy, Ann,” Denny said. “It’s because they are good kids.”
O’Grady came from the old school of American journalists — a time of single-minded focus, an almost maniacal pursuit of facts and quotes and stories. He was an unforgettable character in the newsroom, often smoking two cigarettes at once — one burning in his desk ashtray, another just yards away in the composing room as he anxiously oversaw the day’s sports pages layout as if he were editing the Bible itself.
The newspaper was at once O’Grady’s sandbox and sacred place.
A force of nature like I’ve rarely encountered, O’Grady deserved a place on the Periodic Table of the Elements, somewhere near plutonium, such was the whirling wake of his energy.
A storyteller with an Irishman’s gift for the hooks and the laughs, O’Grady’s greatest gift to me was a story he told me dozens of times, always with a new twist or nugget, on how my late grandfather James W. Wilson, the former publisher of the newspaper, hired O’Grady at the Hotel Fort Des Moines as Denny graduated from the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota.
My grandfather knew O’Grady’s dad, Thomas, a respected figure at the hotel who’d told grandpa about this eager sportswriter who’d graduated from Des Moines Dowling High School before college.
Grandpa, who was in Des Moines for newspaper and political business, told O’Grady’s father to send the kid up to the suite where O’Grady quickly noticed the briefcase on my grandfather’s desk with several bottles of Scotch and a carton of cigarettes. At least a carton.
Grandpa knew talent when he saw it, so he hired O’Grady on the spot, and told him to get on the road to Carroll. We needed a sportswriter.
One of the great misfortunes in my life is that I never worked with my grandfather. He died early, and I was born late, I guess. But working with O’Grady gave me a cosmic tie to my grandfather as O’Grady so respected the fact that he worked at a three-generation family-owned newspaper. I worked harder at my own reporting to earn the respect Denny had for my grandfather, and my late uncle, the former publisher James B. Wilson.
In talking about Denny in the last few weeks, my mom used a word to describe him I’ve never heard her employ about anyone — hero.
Denny stopped drinking alcohol in his final years at the paper — and remained sober after leaving for his hometown and later years of life.
O’Grady was open about his inspiring recovery story. At a luncheon, following the funeral of the late Carroll schools educator and Drake basketball star Bill Evans at Carroll’s First United Methodist Church, O’Grady told a table of us that my mom saved his life, that he wouldn’t have been to the 2015 service for Evans, had mom not intervened and driven a nervously chain-smoking Denny to treatment for alcohol in Des Moines years earlier with the assurance that his job was here in Carroll when he returned.
“Denny O’Grady was one of my heroes,” his old boss, and my mom, Ann Wilson, 83, said today. “I watched as he conquered his addiction one day at a time. It was a struggle, but he did it. Denny loved life, loved sports, loved helping kids. He loved what he did at the paper in the community and with his alma mater, Dowling. That love made so many people respond positively to him.”
(Douglas Burns, founder of The Iowa Mercury and a fourth-generation Iowa journalist from Carroll, is a member of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative. Read dozens of the most talented writers in Iowa in just one place. The Iowa Writers' Collaborative spans the full state. It’s one of the biggest things going in Iowa journalism and writing now — and you don’t want to miss. This collaborative is — as the outstanding Quad Cities journalist Ed Tibbetts says — YOUR SUNDAY IOWA newspaper. )
God work Doug
Thanks for sharing about your friend and his connection to your family.