After graduation from high school and four years in the Navy during the Korean War, the late Henry Parnell put Dan Murr on the newspaper road that led him to places he had never dreamed of working. For eleven years, Dan was an active, award winning sports editor/columnist at The Beacon-News in Aurora, Illinois. During this time, he built one of the best sports sections that newspaper had ever had.
The night the 1990 U.S. Open Golf Championship at Medinah, near Chicago, ended, Dan Murr s forty-two year career also closed with his retirement from The Beacon-News. He moved to southern Illinois for one year and returned to the Morris Daily Herald for a brief stint that was one of his most enjoyable times in Illinois. During his years as a sports columnist, Dan covered high school sports, college football and basketball on campuses of the Southeastern Conference, the Big Ten and Notre Dame during the Dan Devine, Joe Montana, Gerry Faust and Lou Holtz years. He then moved on to the National Football League with the Super Bowl champion Chicago Bears. He covered Major League baseball with the Cubs and White Sox in their championship seasons and the PGA and Senior PGA tours. He also covered boxing in the Chicago area and in 1982-83 was named Boxing Writer of the Year for the state of Illinois by the WBA.
In the middle of it all, he attended summer school briefly at Arizona State to study creative writing. It was a journey I never expected to take, he said about his newspaper career, but one I shall cherish the rest of my life.
Thus a colorful forty-two-year newspaper career, one that traveled through five decades and four states, came to a quiet close the same way it had started in 1952 as a part-time reporter. Now, retired and living in Jacksonville Beach, Florida, Dan Murr has entered into another writing field as a published author.
