A talented and eclectic group of honorees comprise the 2019 Daily Texan Hall of Fame class, including a former staffer who made his career in medicine and broke the racial barrier at The Texan in the 1960s, an expert on climate change, space coverage, environmental and science journalism, a veteran sports editor recognized as an expert on the Olympics games, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer honored for her work on violent human rights abuses against women worldwide, one of the nation’s premier medical malpractice attorneys, a beloved Houston TV journalist and a veteran TV producer who has won 17 Emmys and other awards producing top news shows.

In addition, a Rising Star winner was selected, representing the best and brightest of today’s generation of journalists, and a veteran professor who contributed significantly to The Texan will be honored.

Also at the dinner, the new Becky and Jerry Conn Scholarship will be awarded to a Texan staffer, plus the Friends of The Daily Texan scholarship for staff members.

The awards will be presented by Friends of The Daily Texan, Inc., at a dinner Oct. 4 in the Shirley Bird Perry Ballroom of The Texas Union, on the University of Texas campus in Austin.

You may register by going to this link:

https://friendsdailytexan.wildapricot.org/event-3409008

“Please read the bios of the honorees, and join us Oct. 4 to celebrate their work, and journalism ,” said Friends President John Reetz. “Now, more than ever, in a time when the press faces challenges from every quarter, understanding what these journalists have done, and all journalists are doing today, makes you appreciate the contribution of journalism to our society, and the importance of The Daily Texan as their launching pad.”

The list of earlier inductees includes Walter Cronkite, Lady Bird Johnson, Richard Elam, Bill Moyers, Liz Carpenter, Ronnie Dugger, Dewitt C. Reddick, Berkeley Breathed, Robert Rodriguez, Sen. Judith Zaffirini, Tex Schramm, Liz Smith and other Texan “graduates”.

This year’s honorees:

Hartley Hampton, who started out as an assistant sports editor for The Daily Texan from 1970 to 1972, is regarded as one of the top medical malpractice attorneys in the country.   After graduation, he worked as a reporter, mostly for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. He went to law school, hoping to return to journalism as the next Fred Graham, but he made a few wrong turns and became a lawyer.  For the past three decades, he has primarily represented patients in medical malpractice cases.  He has been listed in Texas Monthly Super Lawyers and U.S. News and World Reports Best Lawyers in America for Medical Malpractice since those designations were begun and was selected Texas Medical Malpractice Lawyer of the Year by Best Lawyers in 2015. He is past president of the Texas Trial Lawyers Association, the Houston Trial Lawyers Association and the American Board of Trial Advocates, Houston Chapter, and is a member of the International Society of Barristers. He practices in Houston with the firm of Hampton & King

Randy Harvey is long-time Sports Editor at the Los Angeles Times and Houston Chronicle. After 30 years at the Los Angeles Times, Randy Harvey returned to his native Texas in July 2012, starting a new assignment as a featured sports columnist at the Houston Chronicle. He became sports editor in May 2015 and retired in March 2018. His first beat in L.A. was to cover the Showtime Lakers with Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. After the 1984 Summer Olympics, he covered primarily international sports, including 15 Summer and Winter Games and four soccer World Cups. On the domestic front, he also has covered 12 Super Bowls. Randy moved into management as senior assistant sports editor in 2000, left in 2004 as assistant managing editor/sports for the Baltimore Sun and returned to the LA Times in 2006 as sports editor. He spent three years from 2009 to 2012 as associate editor before deciding to return to writing sports. Randy is a 1973 graduate of The University of Texas at Austin and has worked at newspapers in the state in Tyler, Austin and Dallas. He also has worked for the Chicago Sun-Times and the New York Daily News. Randy was twice named California sportswriter of the year. He was honored seven times in the annual Associated Press Sports Editors writing contest and won several other sports writing awards. He has appeared four times in the “Best Sports Stories of the Year” anthologies. In the golden era of sports writing by Sherrod, Shrake, Cartwright and Jenkins, Sherrod spoke on the future of sports writing, and said “Got a kid named Randy Harvey with all the earmarks if he’ll stick with it.”

Dr. Leon McNealy was a 1963 journalism graduate of UT and now is a radiation oncologist living in Wisconsin. His interest in journalism came from his father and grandfather, who were passionate about the news. They read The Houston Post and The Houston Chronicle every day plus the twice a week Houston Informer. The roots of his later satirical writing started in their living room. “The floor was covered with board games and electric trains. We role played the politicians of the day.” He attended segregated public schools in Houston and remembers fondly the influence of his journalism teacher at Wheatley High School. George McElroy helped him write his first public speech at the school and encouraged him to apply to the University of Texas at Austin, which earlier had turned down his own application for graduate school because of his race. McElroy later was the first African-American journalist hired by the Houston Post. “He was an inspiration for me,” McNealy said. McNealy said when he arrived at UT in 1958 he found the work hard and he suffered from grinding isolation and loneliness. There was one very bright spot – The Ranger Magazine had a column on the editorial page of The Daily Texan every month called “Hairy Tales” by Harry Ranger. The opportunity to write for this column caused him to change his major from Latin American Politics to Journalism, which opened up many vistas. He could write regular news stories and stories for the campus humor magazine. He had his own monthly column called “Dear Momma.” He became wire editor for the Texan, handled international news for the campus TV station and briefly had a jazz show on the departmental radio station. As a campus journalist he wrote as Huey McNealy using another of his given names. “The most important thing I took away from my Texan experience was the wonderful people that I met,” he said. “I made longtime friendships.” UT was newly integrated at that time but area businesses were segregated. McNealy participated in integration activities such as sit-ins at downtown lunch counters and the famous Stand-Ins on the Drag that led to integration not only at movie theaters in Austin but also around the South. The Daily Texan gave serious coverage to integration activities at a time when many Southern newspapers were giving them scant or no coverage. “I found that inspiring,” he said. After graduation in 1963, he moved to California and, after getting graduate degrees in creative writing and psychology, entered medical school. Two years ago, in recognition of his educational and professional accomplishments, McNealy was inducted into the new Wheatley High School’s Hall of Fame. When his work demands have allowed, McNealy has been a frequent attendee at the Mary Alice Davis Distinguished Lecture in Journalism. It was at one of these lectures that he met Dr. Kathleen McElroy, daughter of his high school inspiration. She is Director of the School of Journalism at UT.

Sylvan Rodriguez was a veteran of ABC’s West Coast Bureau, and a longtime Houston television journalist and KHOU-TV Anchor. He passed away  in 2000, after a 15-month battle with pancreatic cancer. Rodriguez was very active in the Houston community, and an elementary school and a city park are named after him. He was a founding member of the  I Have a Dream Foundation. Memorials in his honor include:

— The Sylvan Rodriguez Foundation

— The Sylvan Rodriguez Elementary School in Houston was named after Rodriguez.

— The Sylvan Rodriguez Scholarship Banquet was held in 2005 by the Houston Association Hispanic Media Professionals.

— The  111-acre Sylvan Rodriguez Park in Clear Lake near Ellington Field.

John Schwartz  was born in Galveston, Texas, and is proud of being a BOI (“Born on the Island”) and of being the son of former state senator A.R. “Babe” Schwartz and Marilyn Schwartz. He attended The University of Texas at Austin, where he got a liberal arts degree through the Plan II program. He met his wife, Jeanne Mixon of Houston, just before classes started in their freshman year in 1975. After graduating in 1979, John went on to UT Law School for lack of a better plan. While he was in law school, he became editor of The Daily Texan in an unusual way. At the time, he was editor of the campus magazine, UTMost, but when the editor of The Texan resigned in the fall of 1981, the Texas Student Publications Board appointed John to fill the remainder of the 1981-82 term. He went on to finish law school and even pass the bar, though he never practiced, which is probably a good thing for the clients he might have had. He has worked at Newsweek, The Washington Post and The New York Times, which recruited him in 2000. Since then, he has covered a wide range of topics that includes climate change, the space program, technology, business, law and infrastructure; his reporting for the Times has sent him to much of the United States, as well as Russia and China. He has flown in a jetpack, climbed to the top of a 300-foot wind tower and been zapped with a million volts of electricity (safely). John is author of several books, including “Oddly Normal,” a memoir about raising a gay son, and “This Is the Year I Put My Financial Life in Order,” a memoir and personal finance guide. John and Jeanne have three children and two grandchildren, and live in New Jersey.

Janice Tomlin spent 20 years at ABC News New York, traveling around the world as a 20/20 producer , launching the documentary series Turning Point, and working as Executive Producer on ABC Specials with Barbara Walters, Diane Sawyer and Peter Jennings. She moved on to CBS News 60 Minutes, producing investigative reports for Mike Wallace (cross “fearless” off the list), Steve Kroft and Bob Simon. Next, Janice checked Oprah off her bucket list, producing hour specials for Harpo Productions. She later helped launch Dan Rather Reports, worked as Managing Editor at KDAF-TV in Dallas, and is under contract as Co-Producer of a Disney film, based on a story she produced for Nightline.
Janice has booked hundreds of interviews – from Presidents to warlords, chartered planes in the middle of nowhere, and crossed uninvited into Burma on a burro. She has been shot at, detained, deported, and sprayed with pesticide in an opium field. She is perhaps best known for a series of reports that revealed thousands of children were being warehoused in Romanian state-run institutions.
Her work has been recognized by 17 National Emmys, 2 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University awards, 3 Overseas Press Club awards, and 2 Robert F. Kennedy Journalism awards. Janice is also the recipient of a “Lifetime Achievement” Emmy.
A 1975 UT graduate, Janice was the weekend News Editor when the Daily Texan published its mostly blank front page to protest “We do not fund anything that we don’t control.” Her best assignment was handling the logistics of Walter Cronkite’s visit as the keynote speaker when the Communications Complex, now the Moody College of Communication, was opened – and making sure he had the address to the Daily Texan keg party that night. Best Night Ever when he showed up.

Judy Walgren is a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist, photo editor, executive producer, writer, curator and professor. She graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a degree in Journalism and worked on the Daily Texan staff as a photojournalist and photo editor. Walgren led the award-winning visuals team at the San Francisco Chronicle to earn four regional Emmys as the director of photography and has worked on other newspaper staffs at the Odessa American, the Dallas Morning News, the Rocky Mountain News and the Denver Post. She received her MFA in Visual Art from the Vermont College of Fine Arts in 2016. After teaching photography part-time for colleges around the Bay Area, Walgren recently transitioned into a full-time faculty position in Michigan State University’s School of Journalism, where she teaches photojournalism and the integration of immersive media into non-fiction visual storytelling. She lives Williamston, Michigan.

Griff Singer Award

Olin Hinkle is recipient of the Griff Singer Award, which honors someone who did not work on The Texan, but contributed to the success of its staffers and the student newspaper. Professor Hinkle (1902-1982) was an editor of several dailies in Missouri, Kansas and Texas before he began teaching, first at West Texas State University, and then for 26 years at the University of Texas. Prior to teaching, he worked on the Sweetwater Reporter, Blackwell (Okla.) Tribune-News and the Lexington (Ky.) Herald. He helped to establish the Pampa Daily News and served as its first editor for a tenure of 11 years.A native of Lawrence, Missouri, he held a bachelor of journalism degree from West Texas State University and a master’s of journalism from the University of Missouri. A teaching excellence award winner, he taught hundreds of students in his editing classes and influenced other journalists through his work judging newspaper contests across the country and working with the University Interscholastic League (UIL).  He was author of the book “Printed Forms for Newspapers” and co-author of “How to Write Columns.” A frequent contributor to the Texas Press Messenger, Professor Hinkle did extensive research in typography, photography and small-city newspaper editing and management. He retired from teaching at UT in 1972 when he was awarded TPA’s Golden 50 Award. He died in 1982 in Austin.  The UT chapter of Kappa Tau Alpha, the national honor society for students in journalism and mass communication was established in 1961, and is named in honor of Hinkle. He was a recipient of the Moody College Teaching Excellence Award in 1972. Among his other achievements, Hinkle was instrumental in developing what was then a state-of -the-art Texan composing room in the early 1950s.

Rising Star

Demi Adejuyigbe is the recipient of the Rising Star Award, recognizing outstanding young professionals just getting their start. He is an accomplished writer, podcaster, comedian, and digital producer. He is currently a writer for the CBS talk show, The Late Late Show with James Corden, and he was named one of Vulture magazine’s “Comedians You Should and Will Know” in 2018. He has also written for hit shows, “The Good Place” and “New Warriors”. His writing has also appeared in The New Yorker, The Guardian, Thought Catalog, College Humor, and The Hairpin. He was the co-host of the podcast, “Gilmore Guys”, which attracted a massive audience and was downloaded close to 200,000 times per episode, with cast members coming on to the podcast and Demi and his co-host making a cameo on the renewal of the show. Additionally, his musical parodies raised tens of thousands for charities and got him named “the Weird Al of his generation” by Pitchfork.