Luther Register’s Dawn Shelton Among 2025 Oklahoma Journalism Hall of Fame Inductees

Twenty longtime journalists and a prominent broadcast family will be among those honored at the 55th annual induction ceremony of the Oklahoma Journalism Hall of Fame.

The induction ceremony will begin at 6 pm on Friday, May 9, 2025, in the grand ballroom of the Nigh University Center at the University of Central Oklahoma. A reception toasting the honorees will occur at 5 pm in the University Center’s Heritage Room.

The 2025 Classes of the Oklahoma Journalism Hall of Fame

• The 2025 Class of Dean Blevins, Owen Canfield, David Christy, David Fallis, Thomas C. Maupin, Vicki Monks, Oscar Pea, Dawn Shelton, Marshall L. Stewart and Mike Strain.
• A special 55th Anniversary Posthumous Class of Frederick Barde, Nolen Bulloch, Louisa McCune, Dayle McGaha, Johnny McMahan, Ora Eddleman Reed, Louise Earthman Rucks, Ellie Sutter, Jack Stamper and Bill Teegins.
• Lifetime Achievement induction of the late Jack Ogle and his sons, Kevin, Kent, and Kelly.
• The dedication of the Oklahoma Journalism Hall of Fame Museum in the Liberal Arts building on the UCO campus. The dedication of the new museum will be at 4 pm on May 9. The ceremony will include a special film on the museum’s content and is being produced by Hall of Fame members Tony Stizza and Galen Culver with special assistance from OJHF intern/scholarship winner Jake Ramsey.

“We decided to move the induction ceremony to an evening event this year because of the 55th anniversary and the large number of honorees this year,” said Director Joe Hight, who is also UCO’s Edith Kinney Gaylord Endowed Chair of Journalism Ethics and an OJHF member since 2013. “As with the 50th anniversary, we wanted to make this one special while focusing on the journalists who have excelled both in this state and the country. This year’s honorees are exceptional in many ways.

All 24 honorees will become members of the Oklahoma Journalism Hall of Fame, which now has inducted more than 525 members since its beginning. Read their biographies below.

The Selection Process

They were chosen from among more than 100 nominations submitted to the Hall of Fame. They were first selected by a 15-member Finalist Committee and then a 12-member Selection Committee via a balloting process. All on the committees were Hall of Fame members and representatives of diverse types of media and journalism organizations.

 Invitations to the induction luncheon will be sent by the first of March, and reservations at $75 each must be made by April. More information can be found by going to the Hall of Fame website at okjournalismhalloffame.com. Sponsorship tables can be purchased starting at $1,000 per table. 

The Oklahoma Journalism Hall of Fame was founded in 1971 by former UCO Journalism Chair Dr. Ray Tassin and Dennie Hall, with both serving as directors. Hight is the fourth director and succeeded Dr. Terry Clark. All members are featured on the Hall of Fame website. Past honoree plaques are on display at the Hall of Fame gallery on the third floor of UCO’s Nigh University Center.

OKLAHOMA JOURNALISM HALL OF FAME 55th ANNIVERSARY CLASSES

 DEAN BLEVINS (1955- ) is the preeminent sports media personality in Oklahoma after being a highly decorated athlete and sportscaster for over 40 years. Dean began in TV co-hosting Sportscene for Tulsa cable 1986-88. He anchored sports at KWTV since 1997, serving as sports director since 2001. He was lead anchor 1988-1993 for KOCO-TV and did college football with ABC, CBS and ESPN 1989-2001. He worked 40 years in radio – KRMG Tulsa, KATT-FM OKC and the Sports Animal since 1988. A two-time Emmy Award winner, Dean is an eight-time Oklahoma Sportscaster of the Year. A former University of Oklahoma starting quarterback, he played on national championship teams in 1974 and 1975 and earned the Jay Meyer Top Scholar Athlete Award. Dean also received the Gaylord College Distinguished Alumni Award in 2014.

OWEN CANFIELD (1959- ) covered hard news to sports for a small newspaper, The Duncan Banner, to the state’s largest, The Oklahoman. He spent nearly 20 years with The Associated Press and was APs first reporter at the Edmond post office massacre in 1986. He helped with the Oklahoma City bombing coverage in 1995, witnessed two executions and assisted with coverage of major weather stories and trials. He was named AP-Oklahoma sports editor in 1985. Responsibilities included OU and OSU, but he also covered major golf tournaments, NCAA Final Fours and five Olympic Games. He became The Oklahoman’s editorial writer in 2003 and was named chief editorial writer in 2011. Four years later, he was named opinion editor until he left the newspaper in 2021.

DAVID CHRISTY (1949- ) is a third-generation Oklahoma journalist who began his career at age 12 as an after-school and summer printer’s devil at the family’s weekly in Waukomis, The Oklahoma Hornet. He has worked in every facet of the newspaper industry — back shop to newsroom. He was a Linotype operator at 16 and attended the University of Oklahoma School of Journalism, where he worked on the Oklahoma Daily sports staff and OU Sports Information. He worked as sports editor at the daily Sherman (Texas) Democrat, returning to Waukomis to serve as editor, reporter, columnist and photographer. He currently is news desk editor and columnist at the Enid News & Eagle. He has been part of eight Sequoyah Awards over a still ongoing 63-year career.

DAVID FALLIS (1964- ) is deputy editor for investigations at The Washington Post. He grew up in Tulsa and graduated from the University of Oklahoma, starting his career in 1991 at the Tulsa Tribune as a police reporter. When the Tribune folded in 1992, he began reporting for the Tulsa World and eventually became an editor, leading a criminal justice team and running investigative projects that won regional awards. In 1999, he joined The Washington Post as an investigative reporter and became an editor in 2014. The following year, he helped lead an investigation of fatal shootings by police that won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting. He also has been an editor or reporter on five other Post investigations that were recognized as Pulitzer Prize finalists. 

THOMAS “TOM” C. MAUPIN (1950- ) is a University of Missouri graduate. He worked as a reporter/photographer for two Missouri papers and as a copy editor in Kansas before joining OPUBCO in 1982. He became copy chief in 1989. He insisted on maintaining a high standard of style and accuracy.  Tom helped write The Oklahoman’s Style Manual. Tom was a finalist for the American Society of Copy Editors’ Copy Editor of the Year Award in 2009.  In 2010, he won first in Newspaper Headline Portfolio – Great Plains Journalism Competition and first in Headlines in the AP/ONE Competition.  After retiring in 2016, he did freelance writing and photography for The Oklahoman until early 2018. He also did freelance work for the Moore Monthly and Moore Parks Department.

VICKI MONKS(1952- ) is among Oklahoma’s pioneering women journalists. As a reporter/photographer for KWTV in the 1970s, she won state and national awards, including for her women’s prisons documentary. She then won a Peabody Award at Dallas’ KDFW. After serving as the Center for Investigative Reporting’s managing editor, she traveled worldwide, freelancing for NPR, BBC, CBS, National Geographic TV, Rolling Stone, Vogue, and American Journalism Review. “Carbon Black,” a radio documentary about failures to address industrial pollution of Ponca Indian land in Oklahoma, won a Society of Environmental Journalists award. An OU journalism graduate and journalism fellow at Stanford University and the University of Colorado, she is an enrolled Chickasaw Nation member. She began her career in Tahlequah as a 13-year-old “Teen Reporter” for the local newspaper.

OSCAR PEA (1963- ) has been a photojournalist for nearly 40 years. Pea was inspired by his father, a principal and hobbyist photographer who gave him his first 35mm camera at age 12. He earned his Communication Degree from Southern University, Baton Rouge, LA, in 1985. He has worked at WAFB-TV in Baton Rouge and then KFDA-TV in Amarillo, Texas. He joined News on 6 in Tulsa in 1988. Pea covered the Oklahoma City bombing and its subsequent trials, the Moore tornado, Hurricane Katrina and the Summer Olympics bombing in Atlanta. Pea has also covered stories internationally, from Bosnia to other countries where Oklahoma soldiers were sent. His focus was also covering all types of crime in Green Country. Pea has served as chief photojournalist and director of operations at News 6.

DAWN SHELTON (1968- ) founded the online Luther Register News in 2015, addressing a critical need for local coverage in a rural news desert. A Michigan native, Dawn wrote a weekly column about her high school for her hometown newspaper before earning a mass communications degree from Oklahoma Christian University in 1990. She began her career as a reporter and producer for KTOK and the Oklahoma News Network. Settling with her family outside Luther, OK, Dawn combined her diverse career experiences to create a vital community resource. Her efforts extend beyond reporting—she launched the popular Luther Pecan Festival in 2017. A member of LION Publishers, Dawn is nationally recognized for her tenacity in championing community journalism and the ongoing challenge to make it sustainable.

MARSHALL L. STEWART (1949-   ) had his first radio “gig”  on a Northern Oklahoma College campus station in 1970. Following four years in the Air Force during the Vietnam War, he worked at both campus stations at OSU in Stillwater, KVRO and KOSU. Then KLOR Ponca City 1977-1980, KVOO Tulsa 1980-1982, KRMG 1982-2009, and KWGS, NPR affiliate at Tulsa University 2010-2020. He won numerous awards, including UPI, AP, OAB, RTNDA, and an Edward R. Murrow Award. He also won a Keep Oklahoma Beautiful Award for his series on poultry farm pollution. His 40-plus-year career highlights include covering the Oklahoma City bombing, the trial of Timothy McVeigh in Denver, the Tar Creek superfund site, and national political conventions in San Francisco and New York. He spent his entire career in Oklahoma.

MIKE STRAIN (1967- ) worked at Oklahoma’s two largest newspapers for 31 years. He joined the Tulsa World in 2005 as sports editor, became news editor in 2011 and managing editor in 2014. At the World, he covered topics ranging from high school sports to a protest-filled presidential campaign stop in Tulsa during the height of COVID-19. His career started in the Shawnee News-Star’s sports department in 1989. He joined The Oklahoman as a sports agate clerk in 1990 and left 15 years later as deputy sports editor. Strain was the Oklahoma Press Association president in 2020. He is a Bray-Doyle Donkey (Class of ‘85) and a University of Oklahoma graduate. He retired from journalism in 2020 to run his family’s farm in Bray.

SPECIAL 55TH ANNIVERSARY POSTHUMOUS CLASS:

FREDERICK BARDE (1869-1916) helped establish journalism as a profession in Oklahoma Territory and early Oklahoma statehood from 1894 until 1916. He wrote as a “stringer” in Guthrie from 1894 until 1910. He wrote for publications such as the Oklahoma City Times, Sturm’s Magazine, The Daily Oklahoman, New York Sun, and Philadelphia Ledger. Barde was considered “the dean of Oklahoma journalism” at the turn of the 20th century. He wrote on Oklahoma and Indian territories and the statehood movement. He dabbled in writing poetry but is best known as the author of Field, Forest, and Stream in Oklahoma (1912) and Outdoor Oklahoma (1914). In 1917, the state Legislature authorized $5,000 to purchase his papers and photographs, now at the Oklahoma Historical Society in Oklahoma City. 

NOLEN BULLOCH (1906-1971) was a political and criminal reporter for the Tulsa Tribune.  He typified the fearless spirit, the crusading drive, and absolute integrity. The Tulsa city commission adopted a resolution praising Bulloch’s “outstanding ability and service as a newspaper reporter.”  KTUL-TV (Tulsa) aired a feature profile of Bulloch in which he told viewers that “the truth is a reporter’s greatest reward.”  Also, a fighter for the rights of others, Bulloch wrote an article on “Kansas City Fats.” Kansas City Fats was a McAlester prison inmate.  He had been sentenced to life for armed robbery for a 15-cent Tulsa robbery.  Largely due to Bulloch’s efforts, Kansas City Fats (whose real name was George O. Jones) became a free man with a productive life.

LOUISA McCUNE (1970-2024) was first and foremost a journalist. A 1988 Enid High School graduate, she earned her bachelor’s degree from San Francisco State University in 1992. Louisa began as a general assignment reporter for her hometown newspaper, the Enid News & Eagle, in 1994. She became editor of the Oklahoma Today Magazine in 1997. Initially, she had accepted an advertising position with that publication. Earlier, she wrote for several prominent New York magazines and used that experience to make the Oklahoma Today editorial content “sparkle.” She planned themes and recruited writers who could produce what she envisioned. She joined the Kirkpatrick Foundation in 2011 as executive director and, in 2013, founded ArtDesk, a quarterly publication.

DAYLE McGAHA (1934-2023) served as publisher of the Blackwell Journal-Tribune for 20 years and held various positions during his decades-long career. He was proudest of having the unofficial job title of “mentor” to young journalists and in helping women obtain leadership roles. He started as the newspaper’s mailroom attendant and also worked in the classified advertising department. After college and the U.S. Army, he returned to the Journal-Tribune. He worked briefly at the McAlester and Pryor newspapers before permanently staying in Blackwell. He was advertising manager until publisher Warren Bickford III died in 1980. He was then named general manager and later publisher, a position he held until retirement in 2000. McGaha’s primary focus was to support the Blackwell community with quality news and information.

JOHNNY McMAHAN (1957-2024) arrived in Woodward at the Woodward Daily Press in 1979, just three weeks after graduating from Central State University. McMahan was a photographer, news editor, and sports editor until his death. In 1985, the Woodward Daily Press became the Woodward News. He helped guide the hometown paper through changes in technology, political upheaval, and cultural changes. With rarely seen commitment, he met challenges that included putting out a newspaper with no electricity, the 2012 tornado, and the fires of 2017 and 2018. McMahan’s awards for journalism include news, sports, and photography while simultaneously leading his team to numerous awards over the years, including the Sequoyah Award. He was inducted into the Woodward Hall of Fame during the 101 Classic Bowl in June 2021.

ORA EDDLEMAN REED (1880-1968) grew up in the newsroom, noting, “There is nothing like a newspaper newsroom to give you a well-rounded education.” She attended Kendall College, later the University of Tulsa. Her family bought the Muskogee Morning Times and the Twin Territories: The Indian Magazine in 1898. She wrote of white people who arrived in the late 1880s and the Indian people struggling to make sense of this new world. Her fiction work under the name Mignon Schreiber — “Little Writer” — found its themes, characters, and tensions in the coming together of cultures. She was remembered in a Muskogee Daily Phoenix column for recording Indian history at the turn of the 20th century, a time of great transition in Indian Territory.

LOUISE EARTHMAN RUCKS (1904-1990) was known for her weekly column “Hound Hill,” which was published in The Daily Oklahoman for 36 years. A story in The Oklahoman featured “Kue,” her nickname. Rucks’ work was recognized when she was named National Dog Writer of the Year by the Dog Writers Association of America in the 1950s at the Waldorf Astoria the night before the Westminster Dog Show. She also wrote for ZOO Sounds, a publication of the Oklahoma City Zoo. In addition, as a young woman she was a registered nurse, having received her degree from St. Thomas/Vanderbilt University Hospitals in Nashville.

ELLIE SUTTER (1933 – 2020) was a dedicated and enthusiastic reporter who put her all into every story she wrote, from biggest to smallest.  Her print news career began in 1977 at the Billings Gazette and then TheNorman Transcript.  In 1983, she joined The Oklahoman and stayed for “22 years, 7 months and 12 days,” retiring in 2004. She reported on many events of historical significance, including the Oklahoma City bombing and tornado outbreaks. She was the only reporting byline on the front page of The Oklahoman’s extra edition on the Edmond post office massacre in 1986. One of her passions was the Gridiron Club, where she enjoyed poking fun at the famous and infamous alike — for a good cause.   

JACK STAMPER (1918-2009) received a call on Oct. 1, 1951, from his former OU Journalism School classmates, J. Leland Gourley, and Charles Engleman, to become their partner in the acquisition of the Hugo Daily News and become its publisher. A decade later, he and his wife, Marie, bought out the partners and continued to grow their newspaper footprint through the acquisition of The Antlers American and the McCurtain Gazette in Idabel. Stamper was appointed by Gov. David Boren to the Oklahoma Wildlife Commission and served as director of the Department of Charities and Corrections as it morphed into the Department of Corrections. Throughout his career, he supported journalism initiatives through OU and the Oklahoma Press Association. 

BILL TEEGINS (1952-2001) parlayed his intense interest in sports into an award-winning journalism career. After starting in Amarillo, Texas, where he did both news and sports, Bill returned to his hometown of Tulsa as the sports director of KOTV 6 in 1981. Bill moved to Oklahoma City in 1987 as KWTV 9 sports director, where he was named Sports Director of the Year for seven years by the Oklahoma Association of Broadcasters. Bill also was the radio play-by-play voice of Oklahoma State University football and basketball games from 1990-2001 until his untimely death in a plane crash returning from an OSU basketball game. He was inducted into the Oklahoma Association of Broadcasters Hall of Fame in 2002 and the Oklahoma Sports Hall of Fame in 2001.

LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD: THE OGLE FAMILY

JACK OGLE (1930-1999) started in Norman radio in the 1950s and joined WKY-TV 4 in 1963 as a reporter and anchor. Simultaneously, he was the color commentator for University of Oklahoma football from 1961 to 1973 and Oklahoma State University football from 1974-1980, along with Bob Barry Sr. (an Oklahoma Journalism Hall of Fame member). Jack Ogle retired from day-to-day reporting in 1978, and for the next 12 years, he produced commentaries, “A Real Oklahoman” for WKY-TV 4, KOCO-TV 5, and KWTV-TV 9 in Oklahoma City. Jack dominated the TV ratings for years and retired to eastern Oklahoma in 1990. Jack died in October 1999.

 KEVIN OGLE (1958- ) is the oldest son of Jack Ogle. After college at Kansas State and OSU, Kevin worked in the newsrooms at KSWO-TV 7 in Lawton, OK, KFSM-TV in Fort Smith, Ark., and for the past 27 years has been the principal anchor at KFOR-TV 4 in Oklahoma City.

 KENT OGLE (1960- ) is the middle son of Jack Ogle. Kent attended Central State University and then followed the tradition of his father, Jack, and brother, Kevin, with early career stints in local radio and then OETA. Kent joined KFOR-TV 4 in 1994 where he has anchored the morning news program for 30 years.

 KELLY OGLE (1961- ) is the youngest son of Jack Ogle. Kelly graduated from OSU in 1984 and then worked for three years at WKY Radio, a year at OETA, a year at KFOR-TV, and from 1990 to 2022, was the principal anchor at KWTV 9 in Oklahoma City. Kelly currently teaches broadcast journalism at Oklahoma State University.

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