Meet Wes:
WES WISE is another pioneer of sports broadcasting. In the 1940s and 1950s, he was a well-known baseball play-by-play announcer for the nationwide Liberty Broadcasting System. He was Southwest Correspondent for Sports Illustrated, and his writing appeared in Time and Life.
Wise served the U.S. Army as instructor in Psychological Warfare Schools at Fort Riley, Kansas, and Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
As a journalist, he won numerous awards including three Press Club of Dallas "Katies" and the Southwest Journalism Forum award from Southern Methodist University for "continued excellence in journalism."
Wes Wise was elected Mayor of Dallas in 1971, serving five years in that office after four as a city councilman. He was President of the Texas Municipal League and a board member of the US Conference of Mayors. At book signings and author appearances, his co-authors introduce Wes as "the former mayor of Dallas. Naturally, we refer to him as 'His Former Honor.'"
Wise continues to lecture at universities, including the University of Texas at Austin, Southern Methodist University, and Grambling University, as well as high schools in Texas and surrounding states.
He lives with his wife, Sally, on Cedar Creek Lake and divides time between there and Dallas, where he remains active in civic and political affairs.
Wes Wise touched more important developments of the assassination story than most reporters. As president of the Dallas Press Club, he greeted and escorted Adlai Stevenson at the day's press conference before covering that night's fateful attacks upon the UN Ambassador. After capturing the only newsfilm of that fiasco, Wise helped federal agents prepare JFK's Dallas security for the next month's visit. He covered the presidential motorcade, played a double role at the president's aborted luncheon, encountered Jack Ruby the day before he shot Oswald, waited at the county jail for the Oswald transfer that went wrong, and testified for both sides in the Ruby trial.
In his five years as Dallas' mayor, Wes Wise helped the city overcome its tarnished reputation. He not only reported this segment of history; he made some of it himself. As a reporter, he set records straight; as Dallas' first independent mayor in decades, he helped the city toward racial equity, guided it through desegregation and the uneasy Sixties, fought to memorialize JFK's life and death, and with support of Dallasites, pulled the city up from international disgrace.
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