DAVID D. LEAHY
from History of Kansas Newspapers (1916)
 DAVID
D. LEAHY was born in Ballycomane, County Limerick, Ireland, on October
27, 1858, the same day that Roosevelt was born. At the age of twenty
he came to Missouri and wrote his first piece for a German paper, which
caused him trouble. He came to Kansas when he was twenty-one, and joined
the Payne Oklahoma boomers in 1881, at Caldwell, where he edited his
first paper. He also had papers at Kiowa and Medicine Lodge and worked
at Hutchinson and Wellington. He was in the first provisional government
of Kingfisher after the opening of Oklahoma. He began work for the Wichita
Beacon in 1889, and went to the Wichita
Eagle about 1890. He was, at the times mentioned, the only reporter
on these papers, and became editor of each of them. He was Topeka correspondent
for the Kansas City Times in 1907-'08. Went
back to the Wichita Beacon and then to the
Wichita Eagle. He went to Congress with
Victor Murdock, as his secretary, in 1903, and remained with him until
the death of Colonel Murdock, when he became editor of the Eagle.
Two years later he went to Topeka to become private secretary for Governor
Stubbs, and served throughout his administration. He then went to the
Wichita division of the United States marshal's office, and made over
seventy arrests and took many prisoners to the penitentiary without
ever owning or carrying a weapon of any sort. He became editor of the
El Dorado Republican in 1914, and served
one year there, leaving with a view to retiring permanently. Before
he got out of bed next morning he had a call from H. J. Allen to work
on the Beacon, and has been with that paper
ever since. His peculiar claim is that he was never discharged in his
life, that he never has asked an increase in salary, and that he never
has had a libel suit or occasion to make a retraction of anything written
by him, except in the case of something he wrote about the senate of
Kansas in 1911, when he was arrested, the first and only time in his
life, for contempt of that body.
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