Ric Bohy
is a writer, editor, broadcaster and media consultant with a truly multimedia career since his start in Detroit journalism more than 40 years ago. He owns Words & Deeds, Inc., an editorial freelance company, now his fulltime occupation.
Earlier professional adventures included serving as editor of the award-winning city magazine, HOUR Detroit, for nine years. Ric was one of its creators, as well as editorial director for HOUR Media LLC and its varied publications. As with an earlier post as senior editor of Detroit Monthly magazine, Ric also served as HOUR’s chief food and restaurant critic, earning two national gold medals for food writing as well as several local awards for the same work.
Technically, Ric’s first food writing was a prize-winning investigative series for The Detroit News, exposing the spoilage or waste of more than 250 tons of federal surplus food entrusted to the City of Detroit during the administration of Mayor Coleman A. Young. What began with a copyboy’s job at The News turned into nearly 15 years of reporting for the newspaper.
Ric’s assignments included City Hall, where he investigated and covered several corruption scandals; the courts – city, state and federal; crime; and general assignments, specializing in disaster coverage, including the eruption of Mt. St. Helen’s, the Mexico City earthquakes of 1985, and the crash of Northwest Flight 255 at Detroit Metropolitan Airport. He both began and ended his reporting at the newspaper on its investigative projects team.
During his tenure at Detroit Monthly magazine, Ric began a years-long relationship with WDIV-TV, which hired him to be the only broadcast newspaper critic in the country. He later produced and presented weekly on-air food-and-lifestyle features for Local 4, while writing the station’s editorials.
Ric’s newspaper and magazine work has been recognized with more than 40 local, state and national awards, including the James E. Scripps Award for Investigative Reporting, Society of Professional Journalists awards for magazine writing and criticism, the George Pierrot Journalist of the Year Award from Detroit’s Wayne State University, and was twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.
He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in journalism from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor.
Two years ago, Ric and his wife, Vicki, happily of one mind on the decision, moved from an urban lifetime to their five-acre homestead in the hills of Middle Tennessee. He cautions that while this has been a decades-long dream for them both, life on Shuddering Squirrel Acres does not happen dreamily. There are extensive repairs calling from the greenhouse he built less than a year ago. The land is so rocky it once took two hours to dig a posthole by hand. Their chicken coop, also less than a year old, betrayed some serious design flaws and a new coop is in the works. And building an earthbag writing studio in their woods has been delayed at least a year for more pressing demands.
Still, the Bohys of Shuddering Squirrel are content and closer to real peace than at any time in their lives. But nobody ever said it would be easy.
