Cumberland's Suter Kegg Elected to MDDC Newspaper Hall of Fame

When he is inducted in March, Kegg will join 34 other newspaper men and women who have been similarly honored over the years and whose careers span nearly three centuries.

Kegg was sports editor for the Cumberland Evening Times and the Cumberland Sunday Times from 1946 until 1981. In those 35 years, he wrote approximately 8,000 sports columns and has continued to write a weekly column and periodical feature stories for the Times-News since his retirement.

"What Suter Kegg meant to the Cumberland Times-News and its readers cannot be overstated," said Jan Alderton, managing editor of the newspaper.

"For six decades, sport was his life. And it didn’t matter if it was a game down the street, downstate or on the West Coast. He was a brilliant story-teller who loved covering everything from Little League to the Baltimore Orioles playing in the World Series," he said.

"Over the years persons have been chosen for the Hall of Fame for various sets of reasons, all having to do with their personal contributions to the field of journalism in the various niches they represent," said MDDC Hall of Fame Committee Chair Jim Flood, Sr., publisher and chairman of the Dover Post Company. "This year the committee, and the press association’s Board of Directors, thought that Suter Kegg was especially worthy of being recognized for his special blend and lengthy record of sports writing and community leadership."

Kegg began his newspaper career selling papers in downtown Cumberland at age nine. At age 11, he was a part-time inserter in the mail room where he later became a full-time copy boy and extra proofreader. He became a full-time member of the sports staff in 1941, and after returning from service in the Army Air Corp he was promoted to sports editor in 1947.

"Suter Kegg’s career in sports writing is a long and distinguished one," said Mike Burke, sports editor of the Cumberland Times-News. "He is loved in his community and respected in many others."

In addition to covering local sports, Kegg covered the Baltimore Orioles, Pittsburgh Pirates, University of Maryland athletics, the Baltimore Colts, Washington Redskins and Pittsburgh Steelers. For decades he served as state chairman for Heisman Trophy voters in Maryland.

In 1956, Kegg broke the story nationwide that Wilt Chamberlain, as a junior in high school, had played pro basketball in Cumberland against the Cumberland Dukes under the name of George Marcus. Chamberlain finally admitted in his 1974 autobiography that Kegg had the story right.

Kegg was an example for sportswriters and fans in the Cumberland area, said Burke. "No matter the story he covered, he covered it with an enjoyment and a sense of fair play that came through to his reader, even if the reader’s favorite team had lost the game Suter was covering."

The MDDC Newspaper Hall of Fame is located in the Journalism Building at the University of Maryland College Park. Its honorees come from rural weekly papers and big-city dailies – from William Parks who published Maryland’s first newspaper, the Maryland Gazette of Annapolis, before the Revolutionary War, to H.L. Mencken of the Baltimore Evening Sun, to the Association’s first female president, Gertrude Poe, former editor of the Laurel Leader, to Sam Lacy, the longtime sports editor of the Afro-American Newspapers, to Washington Post former editor Ben Bradlee and former publisher Katharine Graham.