Si Burick, Baseball Hall of Fame Member and Longtime Sports Editor, Dies at 77

Si Burick, sports editor of the Dayton Daily News for 58 years and a member of the Baseball Hall of Fame, died late Wednesday after a massive stroke. He was 77.

Burick won this year’s Red Smith Award, in recognition by his peers of a career that took him from the 1929 Kentucky Derby to a tour of Japan with the Cincinnati Reds, to numerous Rose Bowls, Olympic Games and Wimbledon tournaments.

Burick’s honors were many, but the most notable was his 1983 induction into the Writers Section of the Baseball Hall of Fame at Cooperstown, N.Y., the only writer so honored who came from a city with no major league team.

He wrote three books--a 1966 profile of Walter Alston, a 1978 biography of Sparky Anderson and a 1982 collection of columns.

Burick married the former Rachel Siegal in 1935, and the couple had two daughters, Lenore, who lives in Dallas, and Marcia, of Northampton, Mass. Rachel Burick died in 1984. The Buricks had four grandchildren.

Funeral services will be today at the Beth Abraham Synagogue in Dayton, with burial at the Beth Abraham Cemetery.

The family asks that donations be given to the Jewish Federation, Burick Sports Wing Fund, 4501 Demlinger Rd., Dayton, Ohio 45426. The donations will be used for the Si and Rae Sports Wing of the Beit Lazurus Community Center in Holan, a neighborhood outside Tel Aviv.