BEYER, Carl W.
Carl W. Beyer, who died May 15, 2022, spent 42 of his 92 years as a professional newsman. It was a career that took him from a high school journalist in Eaton, Ohio, to nearly 30 years as news editor of Dayton Daily News.
Born in Hamilton in 1930, the son of Charles and Alma (Geisler) Beyer, Carl graduated from Eaton High School, where he is a member of the athletic hall of fame and attended Kent State University majoring in journalism.
After serving in the Air Force during the Korean War, Carl became city editor of the Daily News in Independence, Missouri, and later was news editor of Alva (Oklahoma) Review-Courier.
In 1956, he won the United Press award for the best news reporting in Oklahoma for his continuing coverage of the mysterious fire death of a Northwestern Oklahoma State College student. That led to United Press offering him the job as its state capitol reporter in Oklahoma City.
He turned down the offer to return to Ohio in 1957 as assistant state editor of the Dayton Daily News. In that position he took the lead in expanding the paper's regional coverage and establishing news bureaus in Xenia, Troy, Lebanon, Greenville and Sidney.
In 1965, he was named news editor with the responsibility for the selection and presentation of the entire general news
content of the paper. He won numerous awards for his work, including five consecutive years when the Dayton Daily News Page 1 was judged the best of all Ohio metropolitan
newspapers.
Carl's tenure as news editor was the longest in Dayton Daily News history and he directed the paper's presentation of such major news events as the resignation of President Richard
Nixon, the assassination of Robert Kennedy, the Xenia
tornado, the blizzard of 1978, the Kent State shootings, the first lunar landing, and the Challenger disaster.
He was in the first group of newsmen to tour the North American Air Defense Command's top-secret Cheyenne
Mountain underground command post near Colorado Springs and also was among newsmen summoned to the White House by President Lyndon Johnson to hear the President unfold his "Great Society" social and economic program.
He said his favorite job, however, was writing stories about everyday citizens, whom he liked to refer to as "the real Americans."
Carl met his wife, Roberta Trittschuh, in 1959, while she was serving as Versailles correspondent for the Dayton Daily News. They were married December 14, 1960, at Trinity Lutheran Church in Versailles and had three daughters and a son, Carl Jr., who died when he was two and a half years old.
Carl was a member of Dayton's First Lutheran Church for 33 years, serving as secretary and president during his 18 years on its church council. In 1994, he was a founder of Reformation Lutheran Church and served three terms as president of its board of trustees.
He is survived by his wife of 61 years, Roberta, his daughters Dr. Leslie Beyer-Hermsen and husband Terry of Delaware, OH, Bobbi Beyer of Dayton and Carla Higgins of Oakland, CA, grandchildren Noël and Noah Beyer-Hermsen, and Kylie, Lola and Lindsey Higgins, a brother John Neiser of Dayton, and several nieces and nephews.
His body was donated to the Boonshoft School of Medicine.
BEYER, Carl
