By RANDY GONZALES
Special to Hays Post
Another Kansas state high school wrestling season is in the books, and postseason basketball is in full swing.
This is the time of year that Dick Boyd lived for.
“Absolutely, he looked forward to covering these events,” said Lisa Pasilas, a former writer for Norton’s newspaper. “It didn’t matter how far away a game or tournament was being held, he was there.”
In a few months, it will be five years since Boyd’s passing. He is gone, but not forgotten.
Boyd, who owned the Norton Daily Telegram for 32 years and covered Norton and area sports for 50 years, died June 25, 2020.
“Athletics,” as Boyd liked to call all sports, will never be the same after his passing, said co-workers, coaches and athletes who knew him.
Pasilas worked with Boyd for 10 years before leaving the paper a year ago.
As a child, she was a paper carrier and later helped out with the printing press as a teenager. Her family had newspaper ink in its blood. Her father was the press man until he retired, and her mother is still working at the paper after almost 54 years.
Pasilas said Boyd was one of a kind.
“There’s never going to be another Dick Boyd,” Pasilas said. “There’s never going to be anyone who is going to be like he was to this community for so many years.”
Boyd graduated from Mankato High School in 1955 and earned a football scholarship to Kansas State University. He was a two-year letterman for the Wildcats and was voted the team’s most inspirational player his senior year.
The old-school way
After serving in the U.S. Army and then working at the paper in Phillipsburg for eight years, Boyd and his wife, Mary Beth, bought the Telegram.
Boyd spent the next five decades covering not only sports, but also community activities in Norton and surrounding towns. He seemed to show up everywhere, with notebook in hand and an old camera hanging at his waist.
Boyd was old school, scribbling notes and writing his stories on a manual Underwood typewriter while taking photos with his old camera, looking head down at the view
finder before snapping a picture
On the return trip home from away games, Boyd would sometimes have his wife drive while he pecked away on the typewriter.
Coach Lucas Melvin said after the Bluejay football team’s game on a Friday night, Boyd would make his way over to the coach’s house the next morning. They could talk for hours, going over the game.
“He would come to my house every Saturday – unless there was a K-State game he was going to, then it was Sunday – just go over the stats and make sure he had everything right and ask me things about the game,” Melvin said.
As Boyd’s health began to decline, he still managed to make the trip to Melvin’s home.
“There were times he wasn’t feeling very well, and we prayed together,” Melvin said. “Dick said nobody ever did that for him.”
“Dick always did stuff for other people,” he added. “He didn’t (want) people (to take time) doing things for him.”
No such thing as “can’t”
Boyd and his wife did take the time to instill his core beliefs in their children, Larry and Becky. The word “can’t”
was so antithetical to Boyd that he had it crossed out of the dictionary at home.
“I think the legacy he would want to leave behind is one of encouraging others to always strive to reach their goals, to never give up,” Pasilas said. “Dick didn’t believe in the word, ‘can’t.’ That kind of was a rule for his children growing up.”
Larry Boyd said he was around 10 years old when his dad gathered him and his sister around the family dictionary and crossed out the word.
“He sat us down and said the word ‘can’t’ is not to be used in our household,” Larry Boyd said. “That was part of his positive thinking.”
That can-do spirit led to Boyd starting a pigskin pick-em contest at the paper. After his death, the contest was renamed the Dick Boyd Memorial Pigskin Pick-em Contest in his honor.
“We felt that was what Dick would have wanted,” Pasilas said. “To me, looking back, it wouldn’t have felt right to do it any other way.”
The pick-em contest was part of Boyd’s enthusiasm for the Friday Night Lights. Sometimes, too much enthusiasm.
Getting close to the action
Boyd wanted to be close to the action, whether that be on the sideline at a football game or near the mat at a wrestling meet, or any other sport.
That enthusiasm led to an accident on the sideline during the 2019 state championship football game for the Bluejays. A jumble of players crashed into Boyd, and the injuries he sustained then along with his already failing health was too much to overcome.
“After that, he kind of went downhill with his health,” Melvin said. “That was the last Bluejay football game he was at.”
Former Norton wrestling coach Bill Johnson said Boyd could be “boisterous” in his coverage of Bluejay sports.
Johnson remembered one time at the state wrestling tournament that Boyd approached the referee after a Bluejay wrestler lost a close match, and one of the tournament officials took Boyd’s press pass away for the rest of the day. He managed to get it back the next day.
At the team banquet at the end of the season, Johnson teased Boyd by presenting him with a get-out-of-jail card.
It was all in good fun, coming from the respect Boyd enjoyed with Norton coaches, players and fans. Like he did with Melvin, Boyd would get together with Johnson following a tournament to gather information and show the coach photos for him to identify.
“It was a good bonding time and I really do miss those
times,” Johnson said, adding that Boyd treated all sports the same.
“He tried to treat them equally,” Johnson said. “Dick tried to treat all athletes in Norton the same.”
Pasilas remembers firsthand that equal treatment. She competed as a baton twirler as a youth, and Boyd covered her as if she were the starting quarterback on the football team.
“He wanted to be there to capture those moments,” Pasilas said. “I’m thankful for that.”
“Everything is becoming online, social media,” she added. “We’re falling away from getting a newspaper, searching for your child’s picture, cutting it out, putting it in a scrapbook. I’m thankful I had that in my childhood.”
‘Athletics’ coverage after Boyd
Scott Sansom had what could have been the thankless task of taking over reporting sports for the newspaper after Boyd’s death. Wanting to be a photographer, he also ended up writing as well as taking pictures at the paper a few months before Boyd died.
“I had very limited journalism experience,” Sansom said. “Luckily, I got great advice from the other employees at the Telegram and from Dick.”
Still, Sansom admitted to a case of nerves taking over for Boyd.
“I was a little scared stepping into that position after him,” Sansom said. “I can’t say enough about the community and the support I received.”
Boyd not only covered Norton sports, he was a big booster of everything Bluejay.
“He was a diehard Bluejay supporter,” said Jeff Boyle, a 1997 Norton High graduate who played football, wrestled and was on the track and field team. “He was good to everybody he was around.”
“I think if it was somebody different than Dick, it would have been a totally different vibe, different attitude,” he added. “He always wanted to be there, be a part of it, see it with his own eyes. That was pretty cool.”
Boyd would do whatever it took to get a photo.
“He was fearless at times the way he took pictures,” said Neal Philpot, a 2000 Norton graduate and another three-sport athlete. “He got right in the middle of the action.”
“He’s sitting right there in the hot spot in the discus ring,” he added. “He got great action shots.”
After the sideline accident at the football game in 2019, Boyd died seven months later.
At the height of COVID-19 in the summer of 2020, there was an outdoor memorial service a few weeks later at the football field. Among those speaking at the three-hour service were coaches and former Bluejay players.
“Ultimately fitting,” Melvin said of having the service at Travis Field. “Dick loved football.”
Johnson remembers speaking at the service.
“It was a great honor to speak about Dick, how he impacted me as a young coach,” Johnson said. “He treated me like a Super Bowl champion coach the first year I got here.”
Notebooks were handed out at the memorial service with a photo of Boyd in his ever-present shirt and tie on the front cover along with three rules he lived by: always carry a notepad; remove the word “can’t” from the dictionary; and report on the positives.
“I can’t imagine how many notepads he went through in his lifetime,” Pasilas said.
Football stadium named after Boyd
Two years after his death, the booster club was instrumental in making Dick Boyd Stadium become a reality at Travis Field. Before a football game in 2022, a sign in Boyd’s honor was unveiled on the wall of the press box.
“It’s a great tribute to him,” Johnson said. “We were very fortunate and blessed to have him for all those years.”
“Dick Boyd was one of a kind,” he added. “I don’t know if we’ll see anyone with the passion and work ethic again.”
Boyd was known for showing up late, perhaps from having too many irons in the fire.
“Usually he was speeding to get there,” Pasilas said. “He was notoriously late for things.”
But once he was at a game, Boyd was there to chronicle it for the Telegram’s readers for five decades.
“Dick touched more lives,” Pasilas said, “than we could possibly know.”