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Washington Evening Journal
111 North Marion Avenue
Washington, IA 52353
319-653-2191
Remembering my friend Dana
When I first moved into Mt. Pleasant at the end of 2014, I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t have any real experience in writing for a newspaper and, maybe more importantly, had rarely ever even held a camera.
As I checked into the sports email for the first time, I had a small handful of emails from people who just decided to reach out to help me transition into the new role, and one of them was Dana (Kellogg) Royer. Dana graduated from Morning Sun High School in 1974 and started working for Louisa Publishing just two years later. Last week, on Aug. 5, she passed away from pancreatic cancer, which she was diagnosed with earlier this year.
If you never had the chance to meet Dana, you probably at least recognized her name. You’ve probably noticed that the best of the sports pictures to appear in the Southeast Iowa Union, or many other local papers, always came from her.
Dana worked for the Louisa Publishing Company, a group of papers that have crossover with the Union, thanks in large part to covering teams from the Southeast Iowa Super Conference. From the moment I started working at the Union newspapers, then just the Mt. Pleasant News, Dana and I “traded” pictures back and forth, so we could get a better variety of photos on the sports pages.
I put “traded” in parenthesis, because it was never a fair trade. At the time, I covered four high schools, in Mt. Pleasant, New London, WACO and Winfield-Mount Union. Then, and even more so now taking over the sports editor role for all three areas, it was never a fair trade.
Not only was Dana far more diligent in sending pictures our way, but she simply was much better at it than me, or any other sports guy who has been here since I have. Always crisp, always a big variety to choose from, and she always made sure to get one of every kid she could, that way everybody could have some time to shine.
Throughout the week, Dana and I would text each other about which games we were going to, to see if we needed to send each other any photos. The best times, though, were when we both ended up at the same time.
When you spend a lot of time standing around on the sidelines of high school sports events, you’re bound to make friends with photographers, writers or broadcasters from other newspapers, radio stations or TV stations. In 10 years working in Southeast Iowa, I’ve made plenty, but Dana, by a long shot, was my number one.
Dana and I would gravitate toward each other every time we were in the same area. It didn’t matter how long or short the event was, I’d spend the majority of time joking and goofing around with her.
In 10 years of chatting with her at games, I can’t recall many serious conversations we had with each other. She was always in a happy mood, and the only thing I really ever heard her complain about was why they don’t have jersey numbers for cross-country and track and field, something she vowed to change “when she was in charge.”
One of my oldest memories of hanging out with Dana was at a New London-Winfield-Mount Union football game. A WMU player intercepted a ball in the end zone and turned up the field the other way, and a New London player shoved him out of bounds, directly into her, causing her to crash to the ground, and as I recall, end up doing a backward somersault.
Dana, then around age 60, jumped right up to let everyone know she was OK. Not a big surprise if you ever heard stories about her playing basketball in school, although she’d always point out to me that her sisters were the real stars.
I remember being concerned over the fall and winter, when Dana would have spats of being sick or hurt enough to miss out on a few games. She didn’t know what was wrong for quite a while, and eventually got the bad news of a cancer diagnosis in early spring.
While I was on vacation last week, I got a couple of texts saying Dana had passed away. I knew it was coming sooner rather than later, but it was still a huge gut-punch, and it had nothing to do with how much our local papers will miss her taking photos.
I’ll miss all the times we had laughing together on the sidelines. I’ll miss her texting me asking to get some good gossip on why a kid isn’t playing anymore, or what happened to this coach or that coach. You know, the kind of stuff we all wonder, but don’t want to plaster in the papers.
One thing we can take solace in is that in her last couple of years, Dana got to see her favorite team, Winfield-Mount Union, reach unbelievable heights on both the football field and basketball court, and we all know she would have kept tabs with every single game, whether they won the state title or had zero wins.
After she passed, I learned a bit more about her, just by reading things people said online. She apparently published a book on Morning Sun wrestling in 1990. She never told me that, and in fact, she liked to pretend like she wasn’t a very good writer!
I’ll miss getting a text on my phone in the middle of the game and realizing it’s a picture of me that Dana took when she saw me first and knew I had no idea she was in the building.
I’ll of course, miss seeing, and using, the pictures she takes of our local schools. I’ve been trying to copy the types of pictures she gets for 10 years now and won’t stop trying to be that good. Although, it might take another few decades before the snapshots on the sports page will ever catch up to where they were when Dana was here.
