- January 11, 2026
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Aimless and apathetic, David Beliles made a big life decision one day in September 1948 while riding a streetcar through his native Louisville, Kentucky, alongside two fellow bored high school buddies: They were going to join the U.S. Marines.
A short time later, Beliles found himself in a Marine barracks at Parris Island, South Carolina. His spontaneous decision to join the Marines, three years after World War II, was underway.
And it worked. The Marines turned Beliles from an empty-inside teen to an eager-for-life young man. “David would tell me over and over, ‘the Marines turned my life around,'” said Matt Walsh, Beliles’ son-in-law.
Beliles also turned what the Marines made him into a long career in media and newspapers. That career had two acts, first in the Midwest, and later in Sarasota, where he was chairman of the Observer Media Group. Beliles and his wife, Ruth, along with Walsh and his wife, Lisa, bought the Longboat Observer in 1995. That purchase launched what’s now one of the largest independent family-owned news media companies in Florida, with more than a dozen print publications and websites stretching from Naples to Jacksonville.
And the Marines also kickstarted a life well-lived, where Beliles blended a sense of travel and adventure with a sense of humor, and above all else, a sense of caring for the many people in his orbit. That included being the patriarch of his large network of family and friends. It also included being something of an unofficial mayor of Plymouth Harbor, the Sarasota retirement community where he lived for 15 years.
Beliles died Sunday, Jan. 11, at Sarasota Memorial Hospital with his family. He was 95.
Longboat Key Town Commissioner B.J. Bishop, who sat behind Beliles and his wife for more than 20 years at All Angels Episcopal Church on Longboat Key, said her friend was the “epitome of a gentleman. He was just gracious and kind.”
Many who knew Beliles echoed those words.
Bishop visited Beliles in the hospital a day before he died and noted he had stopped working so hard to breathe. “I said I know you’re a proud Marine, but even Marines are allowed to rest, and he smiled,” she said. “So I knew that he could still hear.”
Gracious and kind were only some of the words used to describe Beliles.
Others called him smart, wise and intelligent — so much so his son, Buck Beliles, was stunned to learn his dad dropped out of high school to join the Marines. “He sat me down the night before I graduated high school and told me,” Buck said. “He was so intelligent and such a great writer. I had no idea. It came as quite a shock.”
David Beliles eventually earned a high school diploma, in 2003, from the Florida Department of Education, due to his service in the Marines during the Korean War. Beliles hung the diploma proudly in his Plymouth Harbor apartment, and education was something he preached often with his children and grandchildren. “He was always very proud I went on to get my Ph.D,” says Buck, who lives in Lincoln, Nebraska.
The oldest of three children born to Neal and Mary Catherine Beliles, David grew up at the end of the Great Depression. His father sold life insurance door to door for a time during the day, earning 25 cents a week, and worked in a factory at night, fabricating cigar boxes. Neal Beliles would later go on to work in the newspaper business, forging a path for David.
Neal Beliles worked in circulation and promotions for newspapers, with a stop at the Cincinnati Enquirer from 1941 to 1945. That meant David, along with his brother, Richard, worked there too — as paperboys. They got up every day at 4:15 a.m., and loaded two bags of papers on their bicycle handlebars, according to a presentation the family wrote for David’s 80th birthday celebration. The brothers delivered 400 newspapers a day, placing the papers on porches instead of tossing them, David recalled.
Beliles’ newspaper career wasn’t a straight line after his paperboy stint. He moved to Chicago after being discharged from the Marines. He took a few classes at Columbia College there, but school wasn't a fit. He wanted to work.
He found a job at ABC-TV in Chicago, where he worked on scripts for the then-popular “Super Circus” TV show. Then he got a break: a general manager of radio station WEDC in Chicago heard Beliles’ baritone voice. That GM hired Beliles, then 23, for the coveted role of Midnight Flyer, the DJ and "rip-and-read" news reader from midnight to 6 a.m.
The big break came with challenges. Like the times Beliles would butcher the names of the musicians and songs, he told the Observer for his 80th birthday party story. “People would call in and give ‘em hell,” he said.
There was also the grind: he was taking classes during the day, working at ABC and then the six-hour Midnight Flyer shift. Then he took the last L train and walked two miles home.
With some help from his dad, Beliles got a job in newspaper circulation, starting with the Champaign-Urbana Courier in Illinois in 1952. While just a start in the field, the paper was important in Beliles’ life for another reason: the newspaper’s social editor, Ruth Dearing.
The pair began dating and after a short courtship, were married, on Valentine’s Day in 1953. (An old family joke has it Ruth took David “out of circulation.”) The couple were married for 67 years, until Ruth died Nov. 24, 2020.
A short time later, David Beliles received two job offers on the same day: news director of a radio station in Champaign or assistant circulation director of the Independence, Missouri, Examiner. He chose the Examiner.
That led to a position as manager with Stauffer Publications. In 1961 he was given his first assignment as the boss of his own newspaper, when he was named editor and general manager of the York News-Times in Nebraska.
Beliles was successful there, which led to a string of other management roles in the company, with stops over 30 years in Arkansas City, Kansas; Hannibal, Missouri; and Grand Island, Nebraska.
David and Ruth Beliles raised their two children — Lisa was born in 1954 and Buck came a year and a half later, in December 1955 — along with becoming community fixtures in the towns in which they worked. “My dad was kind of a public figure in any place we lived,” said Buck. “People always knew who I was.”
Buck remembers the time the family lived in Nebraska as the same time he was learning to read as a young boy. It was the 1960s, and the civil rights movement was heating up. David Beliles would sit with Buck and read the paper every day together — a lesson in reading and civics. “It’s where he taught me that judging people by the color of their skin is wrong,” Buck said.
Buck says he learned another lesson, this one in unconditional love, from his dad a few years later. This was when Buck was 16, hanging out with some bad kids, using drugs and widely “getting into trouble,” he said.
“I thought he was going to throw me out of the house,” Buck said. “Instead he just gave me a hug and said ‘I’m worried about you.’”
Caring for others was a hallmark of Beliles’ life.
Consider his four grandchildren: One, Emily Walsh — the oldest of Matt and Lisa Walsh’s three children — is the president of the Observer Media Group and, like Beliles was in Nebraska, is an active leader in the Florida media industry. Kate Walsh is the artistic director of the Colorado Ballet Society, while Brian, the youngest, is a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Marines. Another granddaughter is Jessica Beliles. Kate Walsh says Beliles — they called him Poppy — doted on all four of the grandkids.
Kate Walsh, a professional dancer for the Sarasota Ballet for 19 years, 10 as principal dancer, says Beliles came to nearly every one of her performances. Poppy, she says, was an unconditional supporter. “He was the biggest critic of my critics,” she said. “Anyone who wrote anything bad about me, he would tell me to not worry about it. He was my biggest fan.”
Beliles was a determined fan, too. Kate Walsh said his trip to Colorado in 2023 to see her perform in a production of "Don Quixote" proved that. The trip from Sarasota was delayed — snow in Colorado — to the point where Beliles and his companion got stuck overnight in the Dallas airport. At 93, Beliles slept on airport chairs. “The fact that Poppy came out here to see one of his granddaughters perform during a snowstorm is pretty amazing,” she said.
Beliles flew to Colorado with Susan Weick, a Sarasota resident he had been dating after Ruth Beliles died. They met when Beliles stopped by the gift shop in Plymouth Harbor, where she worked. “He was such a nice person and a gentleman through and through,” Weick said. “I’m going to miss him very much.”
That sentiment carried from family members to Plymouth Harbor residents to friends at All Angels Episcopal Church. The Rev. Dave Marshall at All Angels said Beliles always dressed smartly and treated fellow congregation members with respect, kindness and a genuine curiosity to hear their stories. That last part, Marshall believed, was a trait Beliles carried over from his newspaper days.
Those newspaper days inspired Matt Walsh — decades before he and his father-in-law teamed up with their spouses and some partners to buy the Longboat Observer.
Walsh recalls he’d been dating Lisa for a little bit — they were students at the University of Missouri — when she invited him to come meet her parents back in her hometown, Hannibal, Missouri. Walsh recalls his first impression of David Beliles. There was the dark gray Brooks Brothers suit. The blue Brooks Brothers shirt. The penny loafers. And the stories. David Beliles, then the editor and publisher of the local newspaper, talked of meeting the governor of Missouri one day, a CEO of a major corporation the next.
“I’m listening to this and thinking this is what I want to be when I grow up,” Walsh said. “I want this life. This sounds pretty cool.”
As Walsh grew in his media career — from South Dakota to Miami and Florida Trend to Forbes magazine in Florida — and he and Lisa started a family of their own, he and Beliles would often dream: Wouldn’t it be amazing to buy a newspaper of our own someday? “We talked about it a lot,” Walsh said. “It just never happened.”
Then came the opportunity to buy the Longboat Observer.
Beliles had been retired for less than two years, Walsh said, and was generally risk-averse. And there was a hiccup in the process of buying the Longboat Observer, when a banker financing the deal looked across the table at Walsh and Beliles and said, "Who is going to guarantee the note?"
“David turned white,” Walsh recalled, prompting him to go find some outside partners to help finance the deal.
Beliles became a key mentor for Walsh. The father-in-law working with son-in-law, a dynamic known to get dicey in some businesses, wasn’t an issue. “We were never at nasty odds,” Walsh said.
Walsh said his lessons from Beliles were practical and philosophical.
The philosophical? Do what you say you are going to do. Always be honest.
The practical? Nothing gets done in any company without a sale — obvious as that might sound.
For that lesson, Walsh goes back to the early days of the Longboat Observer in 1995. Back then, the paper, which was essentially the entire company, was based out of a two-story building on 5570 Gulf of Mexico Drive on Longboat.
Walsh was feeling pretty good about the content side of the paper. Then this, as the day to pay employees grew closer on the calendar. “David,” said Walsh, “said to everyone, ‘You know, payroll is in two days. It might be a good idea if someone went out and sold an ad.’”
Lesson learned. Walsh kept that front and center in leading the Observer’s expansion. “David was a mentor for 50 years,” Walsh said. “He had a great sense of humor and was a really great guy. He was so enjoyable to be with.”
One final lesson Walsh learned from Beliles was the power of unheralded generosity, both with family and the community. Buck Beliles noted he saw that in his dad, as did Bishop, his longtime All Angels friend. “He was one of those quiet presences at our church,” Bishop said. “If we needed something, no one ever knew who took care of it. But in a lot of cases, it was David.”
Dana Kampa and S.T. Cardinal contributed to this story.
