Douglas Everett Nye

COLUMBIA - A celebration of life for Douglas Everett Nye will be held 2 p.m. Thursday at Spring Valley Baptist Church. Nye, former sports editor of The Columbia Record, former TV writer/editor for The State and syndicated TV/movies writer for McClatchy Tribune Syndicate, died Sunday after a nearly year-long battle with cancer. He was 69. Kornegay & Moseley Funeral Home & Cremation Service is in charge.

Mr. Nye is survived by his wife of nearly 48 years, Wilma B. Nye; son, Christopher Douglas Nye, of Atlanta, Ga.; daughter, Hope Elaine Nye, of Columbia; grandchildren Jessica, Kyle and Kristen; and a sister, Nell N. Brown (Kenneth R.) of Charlotte.

Pallbearers will be Roy Neville, Bertram Rantin, Jim McLean, Bob Gillespie, Julian Gibbons and Bud Tibshrany. Honorary pallbearers will be members of his men's Sunday School class. The Rev. Robert Wilburn will conduct the service. The family will meet guests following the service at the church atrium.

Born July 19, 1941, in Augusta, the son of the late Everett and Nell Nye, Doug Nye moved to Columbia at age 4 and, except for when he attended and graduated from Furman University and newspaper jobs in Charleston and Sumter, lived in Columbia his entire life. He played football at Brookland-Cayce High School, where he graduated in 1959, and where family members say he whetted his lifelong love of sports.

Nye, who considered a career as a cartoonist before settling on writing, was sports editor of the Furman campus newspaper, and served as sports editor of the Sumter Item from 1965-68. After a brief stop at the Charleston News & Courier, he returned to Columbia in 1969 as a sports writer for The Columbia Record. He served as sports editor from 1970-73 and 1978-87, working during the intervening five years as TV/entertainment writer.

Shortly before The Record ceased publication in 1988, he moved to The State to write about TV, movies and Hollywood, especially anything dealing with his beloved Westerns. In 2004, he retired after a 35-year career at The State and The Record, but continued to write about movies, as well as reviewing DVD and Blue-Ray releases for newspapers in the McClatchy Tribune chain. Even after being diagnosed with cancer, he kept producing articles that received nationwide exposure.

In 1982, Nye's 10-year book project, "Those Six-Gun Heroes: 25 Great Movie Cowboys," was published by the ETV Endowment and adapted for an ETV series, "Six-Gun Heroes," which aired on more than 90 public TV stations nationwide. Twenty years later, he traveled to Hollywood with a History Channel film crew to shoot the documentary "When Cowboys Were King," meeting actors John Ritter (son of cowboy star Tex Ritter), Ernest Borgnine and Tom Selleck, among others.

After his retirement from The State, Nye continued a busy schedule working with South Carolina ETV. In 2004-05, he was producer and host of "Doug Nye's Time Machine," a series covering popular culture in the TV age, and interviewed entertainers Fess Parker, Dennis Weaver and Frank Capra Jr., author John Jakes, baseball's Bobby Richardson and former S.C. Gov. James Edwards. In 2006, he was producer/writer for ETV's "Drive Ins and Soda Shops," and in 2007 he was producer/writer of a Carolina Stories program, "The Last Ride: Memories of the Myrtle Beach Pavilion."

Nye also used his sports history expertise in 2007 when he and other sports writers were part of ETV's "Just a Game," tracing the history of the South Carolina-Clemson football rivalry, and again in 2010 when he hosted a three-part ETV seminar on the instate rivalry called "Back to Big Thursday."

As a TV writer for The State, Nye traveled to Hollywood for studio press events, meeting and becoming friends with such stars as Bob Hope, Charlton Heston and Sidney Poitier. A lifelong fan of comic books, he twice interviewed Stan Lee, founder of the Marvel Comics (Spider-Man, Iron Man, the Fantastic Four, X-Men) franchise, and Roy Thomas, another major figure in the comics industry.

As a sports columnist, Nye covered all sports in South Carolina, and became friends with such figures as USC basketball coach Frank McGuire, Clemson football coach Danny Ford and the late USC football coach Joe Morrison. Though he always maintained his journalistic distance in his writing, Nye admitted to being an unabashed fan of all South Carolina teams and their accomplishments.

He reveled in George Rogers' 1980 Heisman Trophy, Clemson's 1981 football championship, McGuire's 1971 ACC basketball title, the 1988 national title won by Furman, and most recently South Carolina's national baseball title in 2010. During his illness, Nye enjoyed listening to the Gamecocks' baseball team's games on radio, whether in the hospital or at home.

Nye also was a history buff, and in 1981 while covering USC's football and basketball teams in Hawaii, he wrote a story about the 40th anniversary of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. He later told his family the visit to Pearl Harbor was one of the most moving moments of his newspaper career.

Besides his family, Nye leaves behind countless friends in the newspaper business, at ETV, in the entertainment industry and South Carolina sports.

The family would like to thank Dr. Leland J. McElveen, Kim DeWhitt and the entire staff at the South Carolina Oncology Center, Dr. Tony Lowman and Dr. Melton Stuckey, who was not only his doctor, but also a very good friend.

Memorials may be made to Spring Valley Baptist Church, 91 Polo Road, Columbia, SC 29223 or South Carolina Oncology Center, 166 Stoneridge Drive, Columbia, SC 29210.

Please sign the online guest book at www.kornegayandmoseley.com.