John Dunbrack Ewing, Sr., was a Louisianajournalist who served as editor and publisher of both the Shreveport Times and the Monroe News-Star-World from 1931 until his death. He was also affiliated with radio station KWKH in Shreveport, the seat of Caddo Parish in northwestern Louisiana. KWKH was founded in 1922 and named in 1925 for its founder, W. K. Henderson. Ewing was born in New Orleans to Robert W. Ewing, I, and the former Catherine May Dunbrack, originally from Meaghers Grant, Nova Scotia, Canada. Ewing's mother died December 30, 1904, when he was 12 years old. He was educated at Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, from which he obtained his bachelor's degree in 1913. He was a captain in the 32nd Division in France during World War I. He was awarded the Croix de Guerre with Star and the Purple Heart. After two years as the circulation manager of the former New Orleans Daily States, he moved to Shreveport in 1915 to become associate publisher of the Shreveport Times. In 1927, Ewing and former Shreveport mayor and businessman Andrew Querbes co-chaired a committee of prominent Shreveport citizens that began correspondence with the United States Department of War in Washington D. C. to sell Shreveport as the sight for a planned Army airfield that would serve as an expansion of the Third Attack Group, then located in Galveston, Texas. The group originally proposed land adjacent to Cross Lake but this location was deemed unsuitable by the War Department. Instead, approval was given for unincorporated land located in nearby Bossier Parish, which the City of Shreveport annexed through a municipal bond and donated to the federal government for construction of the facility, now known as Barksdale Air Force Base. When his father died in 1931, Ewing became publisher of both The Times and the two Monroe newspapers. The three newspapers were known for their conservative editorials. Ewing was a delegate to the 1940 Democratic National Convention, which met in Chicago to nominate U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt for a third term. From 1938 to 1939, Ewing was president of the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association. He headed the International Broadcasting Corp., the owners and operators of KWKH. He was a director of the Kansas City Southern and the Louisiana and Arkansas railroads. Ewing married the former Helen Hamilton Gray on December 27, 1919. They had two children, John D. Ewing, Jr., and Helen May Ewing Clay. One of Ewing's nephews, Robert Ewing, III, was a nature photographer and a board member of the Monroe News-Star, formerly owned by the Ewing family. Another relative was Edmund Graves Brown, an executive at the Monroe News-Star from 1952 until the paper was sold in 1977 to the Gannett Company.
