Longtime newsman Kingery dies at 90
Published 7:41 am Monday, November 17, 2014
HOUSTON — American Press newsman Don Kingery, who covered the events of Southwest Louisiana for some 50 years, then reminisced about them in his “Timeline” column after retiring, has died at his home in Texas. He was 90.
Kingery died peacefully with family at his side Saturday in the rural suburb of Dayton, according to his daughter, Kathryn Kingery-Benvegnu.
He had moved to Texas from his Lake Charles hometown in recent years, but continued to write his local nostalgia column for the American Press until his death.
Kingery won boxfuls of news, features and commentary awards from the Associated Press, Louisiana Press Association and other competitions — and never hung them — during a newspaper career that crossed eight decades.
During times of his life spent away from his native Lake Charles, he was a World War II serviceman, a professional football player and, as a South Carolina police-beat reporter, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He also wrote novels, worked in the oilfields and edited and published other newspapers in Southwest Louisiana.
A banker’s son who liked to write and play sports — and did both with the same competitive verve — Kingery was a graduate of Lake Charles High School. He enrolled at LSU, where he was a tailback for the 1943 Tigers football team before entering war service.
In 1956, while working as a reporter for the Evening Herald of Rock Hill, S.C., Kingery’s nonstop coverage of a multiple-fatality downtown shootout made him a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in journalism.
He later went on to edit the Lafayette Daily Advertiser.
It was at the American Press, however — which he left in 1951 but returned to years later — where Kingery was best-known and spent most of his career.
He was part of a triumvirate — the point man for Editor Jim Beam and Managing Editor Ward “Buddy” Threatt — that ran the newsroom for much of the 1980s and ‘90s.
“Don had a distinguished journalism career,” Beam said Sunday. “I benefited from his experience, wisdom and determination to continue pursuing a passion all of us have for our profession.”
Kingery served as features and photo editor, wrote editorials and ran the daytime news desk. He continued to write investigative and extended coverage pieces of his own, however — and won national and state awards on topics ranging from union violence to poorly run reform schools.
For decades, reporters at the American Press were on the receiving end of Kingery’s editing, advice and coaching — and of a hand rested on the shoulder for work done well.
Kingery, whose first submissions to the paper were as a schoolboy in the 1940s as a sports stringer, was inducted in the Louisiana Press Association’s “50-Year Club” in 2002 for service to journalism.
Final arrangements have not been announced by the family.
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