D.J. Leary, a 'live line' if ever there was one

When I was a young lad I got a red transistor radio as a birthday present. The Twin Cities had two AM top 40 stations in the 1960s: KDWB and WDGY. They played the same music, and all of us teenagers would flip back and forth to avoid the commercials. My favorite by a wide margin, though, was KDWB because they had better DJs — at the time called "the seven swinging gentleman."

But perhaps my favorite KDWB offering that came through the tiny speaker on my transistor was a brief feature tagged on to the station's sports report. A mildly angry voice would report on something in the sports world, usually with the reporter's caustic opinion at the end. Sometimes he'd get so worked up — it seemed like he was almost spitting into the microphone.

And then he'd stridently say: "This is D.J. Leary with your live line to the world of sports."

Fast forward 20 years, and now I'm the editor of the Hibbing Daily Tribune. The editor of a small daily newspaper in those days saw a steady stream of office holders, would-be office holders and others hoping to get their message to our 10,000 subscribers. At some point, the regular visitors to my little office came to include two guys named D.J. Leary and Wy Spano. They wrote a highly popular insider newspaper called Politics in Minnesota.

The first time I met D.J. I had to ask him if he was the same guy who had earned a living at KDWB a couple of decades earlier. He was surprised and amused that I remembered him, and he even did his famous closing, "This is D.J. Leary …" for me. I was ecstatic.

But now he was into a new gig, and he and Spano were considered the chroniclers of politics in the state. Their writing was breezy and full of stuff that nobody else knew or, if they knew it, were afraid to report. They visited me because they assumed I might have some insight into Iron Range politics which commanded an oversized influence in Minnesota culture at the time. Rudy Perpich, a ranger, was governor at the time.

I looked forward to their visits, and most of our time was spent trading stories about our fearless leaders.

As I think back, our lunch was about D.J. encouraging me to be creative in how I made a living. And, indeed, after an hour with D.J. I was fired up, ready to try anything. At that time his main source of income was a one-man company helping corporations in trouble. He had a list of about 20 clients, each paying a hefty retainer, who expected him to be on call to ameliorate any crisis in bad publicity the company was experiencing. D.J. would work with the company and with the media, using his creativity and expertise to make mole hills out of mountains.

Flying by the seat of his pants was D.J.'s preferred method of travel, and he told me of harrowing days when he used his energy, wit and knowledge to avert disaster for some Minnesota corporation. He told me, "Often I'd get home after a 20-hour day, sit back in my chair and think, 'Well, we fooled them again.' "

D.J. spent a lifetime fooling them again, except that he really wasn't fooling anybody. Think of a career that started out with convincing somebody at a teen record station that a snarly sports reporter was what they really needed. And then evolving into one of the great political mavens in the state. And then to make a living rescuing companies from PR disasters. There's a common thread there and it might be that D.J. found niches in the world that nobody else had thought of, and he made them work through his own brand of humor, diligence and genius.

And in the midst of that hectic life, he found time to reach out to people down on their luck.

With his passing last week, Minnesota lost one of its treasures. There will never be another D.J. Leary and his live line to the world of possibilities.