Teresa, Nelson and Walter walk into a kennel

(Editor’s Note: For many years, the late Topeka Capital-Journal Outdoor Editor Jim Ramberg and his good friend columnist Dick Snider covered the newspaper’s fiercely competitive “Dog of the Year Contest” with equally competitive annual newsprint faceoffs. Here is the 1990 version.)

Quality canine shines over Topeka … again

By Jim Ramberg
July 8, 1990

Let’s face it. Everyone gets old. Some do it more gracefully than others.

Look at Nolan Ryan, for instance. A class act, still throwing a 90-mph fastball.

George Foreman, that roly-poly fighter, isn’t going around singing “Yesterday.” He’s knocking the stuffing out of fighters half his age.

And Mick Jagger, the little English wimp, is still cavorting around on stage at the age of 50.

Of course, you have people who old age effects in a negative way.

They become mean spirited, cranky, vindictive. What’s worse, they get confused and often get their facts wrong.

Let me give you an example.

There’s this guy who writes a column here at the paper. This columnist. (his name sort of rhymes with Back Slider) lashes out at everyone and everything. He has attacked the legislative pension fund, the Expocentre, even (I’m not kidding) his own family. Continue reading

Post-Thanksgiving Potpourri

Topeka Capital-Journal
Nov. 25, 1998

Herewith, in the interest of a fat-free America, some stories designed to dull your Thanksgiving Day appetite, discourage second and third helpings, and keep your belt buckle in the same notch:

– Father O’Flaherty was hearing the confessions of some schoolboys, and noted that all of them, after listing more familiar sins, asked forgiveness for throwing peanuts into the river. He thought they must be repenting for wasting food.

But his curiosity grew as it went on, and he decided to get to the bottom of it. But the last boy in a confessional said nothing about peanuts. So the priest asked him, “what about throwing peanuts in the river?”

“Father,” the boy said, “I’m peanuts.”

Continue reading

A few nice words about Dick Snider

(In March 2001, Topeka Capital-Journal outdoor writer Jim Ramberg penned this birthday bouquet. Ramberg, a friend of my Dad’s and a regular visitor in the final days, passed in 2007. To read writer Rick Dean’s excellent obit in the C-J, click here.)

Outdoor notes compiled while coming up with a tribute to fellow columnist Dick Snider, who celebrated his 80th birthday a couple days ago.

Let’s see. Dick Snider is …

Well, let’s start off first with some outdoor notes while I think about this. Continue reading

Columnist Dick Snider dies at 83

Image

With Will Snider

By Rick Dean, Topeka Capital-Journal

It once was said that the mark of a good newspaper columnist was the ability to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

By that criteria alone, as well as several others, Dick Snider was a great newspaper columnist.

Snider, the longtime Topeka Capital-Journal columnist and former sports editor, died Saturday after a short battle with cancer. He was 83.

A former oil industry executive, he worked briefly in the Kennedy administration before producing “College Football” — a long- running highlights show for the ABC network in the 1960s.

A man who walked comfortably in the world of sports, politics and business, Snider’s ability to apply a sharply pointed needle to people in power, as well as to himself and those he loved, made him as popular with readers as he was pilloried by politicians. Continue reading