Buffalo Speaker Dave Lieber Adds Playwright to His Long Résumé

By Dave Astor
NSNC Archivist

Dave Lieber will talk about TED at our annual conference, but Amon is also on his mind.

When Dave speaks at our Buffalo conference June 22, the Dallas Morning News “Watchdog” columnist will tell attendees what a TED talk is, why they should do one, and how to make that happen.

And when I interviewed Dave on May 13, the prominent NSNC member discussed “Amon! The Ultimate Texan” – his new play about Amon Carter (1879-1955), known for his Fort Worth Star-Telegram newspaper and many other endeavors that helped shape his slice of the Lone Star State.

The one-man show opened May 9 to sold-out performances, and how it came to be offers some lessons for columnists, bloggers, and other writers – including the importance of the connections that many journalists make.

Dave became fascinated with Carter soon after being hired as a Star-Telegram columnist in 1993 (two decades before he joined the Morning News in 2013). But Dave didn’t start writing his “Amon!” play until about three years ago, and spent 30 or so months working on it during his small amount of free time.

Other than the time crunch, creating a play wasn’t TOO hard, Dave recalled. “It almost felt like magazine-article writing – moving from one scene to the next,” he said. “And all the journalism training paid off, because I was used to writing dialogue, doing storytelling, and conveying drama.” Not to mention conducting plenty of research.

Dave sent the play to more than a dozen area theater companies and college drama departments, but didn’t hear a peep. Then the head of a theater company that had benefited from a 2003 story Dave wrote asked Dave if he could provide a bundle of newspapers as a prop for a production of “Newsies.” Dave replied that he had sent that theater company his play without getting a response. “Amon!” was quickly fished from the slush pile, the company loved it, and the production was on – with lots of subsequent marketing help from Dave.

“It’s 75% comedy and 25% intense drama,” he said. “A good combination of laughter and tears.” Dave added that the play is a sort of local “Hamilton” because Carter was an important regional figure (as Alexander Hamilton was an important national figure) not posthumously remembered as much as he should’ve been (as was also the case with Alexander Hamilton, pre-“Hamilton”). Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical skyrocketed Hamilton to uber-fame, and Dave’s play is greatly increasing awareness of Carter on a local level.

Interestingly, Carter is getting a bump in renown courtesy of a playwright (Dave) who grew up geographically and psychologically far from Texas – on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

Joining Dave in the “Amon!” effort are actor Kelvin Dilks, director Connie Sanchez, and producer Rick Blair, among others

Dave also authored an “Amon! The Ultimate Texan” companion book, published May 3, with 128 pages of text and photos. It’s his eighth book, all of which he has sold at his many speaking engagements – 75 to 175 a year (a number that includes the TED talk he did and several NSNC conference sessions). In 2014, Dave became a “Certified Professional Speaker” – one of only about 1,000 around the globe.

“Just writing a column isn’t enough anymore,” he said. “Speaking puts you out in the real world. And when people meet you and like you, they’ll probably read your column for the rest of their lives.”

Dave joined the NSNC in the early 1990s, and attended his first conference (in Portland, Oregon) in 1993. He was a Philadelphia Inquirer reporter at the time, and received a phone call offering him the Star-Telegram column literally while at the NSNC meeting! “It was like the greatest moment ever,” Dave said.

He began “The Watchdog” column for the Star-Telegram in 2005, was laid off in 2013 (economic decision), and brought the same consumer-rights feature to the Dallas Morning News later that year.

Dave – who has also done many videos and TV appearances related to his column – has a huge history with the NSNC. He co-created National Columnists Day (April 18) with former NSNC President Bill Tammeus. (NCD officially started in 1995 and marks the date in 1945 that columnist legend Ernie Pyle died while covering World War II.) Dave served on the NSNC board from 1995 to 2005 (the year he hosted our annual conference in Grapevine, Texas) and founded the NSNC Education Foundation in the early 2000s. In addition, he received our Will Rogers Humanitarian Award in 2002 for founding the Summer Santa program, which has raised more than $1 million to send kids to summer camp and help them in other ways.