Halls of Fame

Rick Hummell – 2016

Rick Hummel, affectionately nicknamed The Commish by his fellow writers, was the go-to man for baseball news on the Post-Dispatch staff. He joined the paper in 1971, having graduated from the Mizzou Journalism School in 1968. In his early years there, he covered all sports, becoming the Cardinals’ beat writer in 1978. Rick worked every All-Star Game beginning in 1980 and every World Series since 1977. In 2002 He was promoted to the position of baseball columnist. Rick is in the Writers’ Wing on the National Baseball Hall of Fame and is a member of the Missouri Sports Hall of Fame.

Clarissa Start – 2016

There were few women working in the newsroom of the Post-Dispatch when Clarissa Start started her career there in 1938. That career gave her the opportunity to interview celebrities for the paper’s feature-laden Everyday Magazine section. She began writing her column, “The Little Woman,” in 1955, sharing with her large female audience her own perspective on family life. When she retired from the paper in 1972, that column ended, but her Post-Dispatch writing career continued with “The Happy Gardener” until she was 85, for a total of 64 years in the paper. During her long career she also found time to write ten books.

Jim Fox – 2013

A newspaper career that spans 65 years is an accomplishment in itself, but Jim Fox did it by writing a column even after he retired from the Post-Dispatch. After a stroke destroyed his ability to type, he dictated the columns to his wife and daughter.

He began his work in St. Louis at the Star-Times, moving to the Post and, after retirement, the Suburban Journals. He often joked that his variety of jobs, including that of the Post’s readers’ advocate, “indicate they never knew what to do with me.”

While many journalists appreciated him for his advocate’s work, it was the folksiness of his columns that endeared Jim Fox to his legions of readers.

Eugene Field – 2013

Born in St. Louis, Eugene Field lived in an era in which newspaper reporters dreamed of becoming poets and fiction writers. He reversed that process for a while. Having written his first poem at age 9, he held jobs at several newspapers following college, including city editor of the St. Joseph, Mo., Gazette, before landing a high-profile position writing a humorous column for the Chicago Daily News.

Finding success there with his “Sharps and Flats” column, he began dabbling in poetry again, publishing over a dozen volumes. Many of those works were for children, including his most-famous work, “Wynken, Blynken and Nod.”

Sally Bixby Defty – 2013

She joined the Post-Dispatch staff in January 1965, but with no newspaper experience, she started out in the women’s section. After three years there, two as editor, she achieved her goal, becoming the first permanent female member of the city desk staff.

She was a proud general assignment reporter, relishing the variety in doing straight news, features and investigative reporting. For her work on arson-for insurance in St. Louis she received the first of several Pulitzer Prize nominations and was a finalist. She spent a summer in the paper’s Washington Bureau and covered several national political conventions.  She was named executive city editor but stepped down after a year, citing the demands on a divorced mother of three children. She worked several years on the copy desk, enabling her to spend her final three years on the Post-Dispatch going to night school at Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, getting a master’s in English, specializing in teaching English as a second language. She took an incentive offer for early retirement in the fall of 1995.

Frank X. Bick – 2014

Frank X. Bick was a firm believer in providing neighborhood news to South St. Louis readers. The founder of the Southside Journal, he later merged his paper with the Neighborhood News. After his death, his son, Frank C. Bick, expanded even more into what became the Suburban Journals. The Journals included the Southside Journal and nine other weekly community newspapers that were delivered on every lawn from Spanish Lake to Jefferson County. The Suburban Journal chain was sold in 1984 to Ralph Ingersoll, who sold them to Pulitzer Inc. in 2000.