BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH — Carl Jón Denbow, Ph.D.
In 2009 Dr. Denbow retired from the Ohio University Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine. During his tenure at the medical school, he held the positions of director of communication and director of special media programs. In the latter capacity he worked with the Family Health® radio series and the Family Medicine® newspaper column. Family Health® radio is a 2.5-minute program that was heard daily on nearly 300 stations from coast to coast — as well as on the U.S. Armed Forces Radio Network — and had an estimated 12 million listeners each weekday. The Family Medicine® column appeared weekly in about 150 newspapers, mainly in the Buckeye State.
As director of communication Dr. Denbow supervised a staff of seven full-time employees and was responsible for the public relations and publications efforts of the college. This included media relations, marketing for the CORE system, the Ohio Research and Clinical Review, The Ohio D.O. magazine, the Rounds employee newsletter, admissions publications, several cooperative publications with the Ohio Osteopathic Association, and all college publications in support of special events and programs.
Dr. Denbow received his B.S.J. in the broadcast sequence from Ohio University in 1968. A year later, in 1969, he was granted an M.A. (field of specialization journalism) from Ohio State University. He then returned to Ohio University where he received a Ph.D. in mass communication/journalism in 1973. He was on the faculty at Marshall University, 1970-74, and Murray State University, 1974-77. He attained the rank of associate professor at Murray State and was granted tenure at both institutions. At Marshall he was advisor to The Parthenon, the student newspaper, in 1970-71 when it won several national awards, and he established the broadcast journalism sequence. At Murray State he served as graduate coordinator and was a founding member of the MSU Faculty Senate. Before joining OU-COM in the fall of 1978, Dr. Denbow served a year (1977-78) as the director of public relations at the Kirksville College of Osteopathic Medicine.
His academic areas of expertise, in which he has taught courses, include survey research methodology, readability, journalism law, mass media and society, reporting and broadcast journalism. Professionally, he has extensive experience in medical writing, magazine journalism, public opinion polling, event planning, and office management. He is a U.S. Navy veteran, having served on active duty for two years from the fall of 1964 to fall of 1966. Among other duties, he served as the co-editor of The Thunderbolt, the at-sea daily newspaper aboard the USS Newport News (CA-148), the world’s heaviest all-gun cruiser.
Dr. Denbow has published a number of articles in both refereed professional journals and trade publications. The articles have appeared in such diverse publications as Journalism Quarterly, Osteopathic Annals, Public Relations Review, Medical Dimensions, The D.O., The Ohio D.O., and Kirksville Magazine. His article, “Osteopathy: Packing More Professional Punch,” in the May 1977 issue of Medical Dimensions (which he wrote while teaching at Murray State) won the first-place award in the American Osteopathic Association’s journalism contest that year. For several years starting in mid-1980s, he served on the Editorial Board of the Journal of the American Osteopathic Association. He also co-authored a chapter entitled “David and Goliath Coexist: The Story of Osteopathic Public Relations,” in Social, Political and Economic Contexts in Public Relations: Theory and Cases, a public relations textbook published in 1993. More recently, in 2006, he co-authored two chapters in Stories of Medicine in Athens County, Ohio — one on pioneer African American physicians and the other about the first D.O. to practice in Athens County.
On a personal level Dr. Denbow has been active in local community and civic affairs. He is a past member of the Board of Trustees of the Athens County Historical Society and Museum (ACHS&M), where he served as chairman of the Cornwell Lecture Committee and was responsible for bringing in several nationally known speakers, including Edwin Bearss, chief historian emeritus of the National Park Service, and David Zang, biographer of Moses Fleetwood Walker, the first African American to play major league baseball. He has been a board member-at-large for a number of years for the annual Emancipation Celebration in Gallipolis, Ohio; in that capacity he has secured the services of seven keynote speakers, including Barbara Ross-Lee, sister of Diana Ross and then dean of OU-HCOM, William Anderson, past president of the American Osteopathic Association and founder of the Albany Movement during the 1960s Civil Right Era, and Ken Blackwell, who at that time was the secretary of state of Ohio.
Since 2008 Dr. Denbow has been involved in a leadership capacity in several historical marker projects. These include: Booker T. Washington-Olivia Davidson wedding site, Washington Street, Athens, 2008; site where Milton Holland raised Co. C of the 5th United States Colored Infantry, Athens County Fairgrounds, 2013; boyhood home of Albion Tourgée, author, Civil War soldier, lead attorney for Homer Plessy in Plessy v. Ferguson, coined the expression “color-blind justice, Ohio Rt. 193, Kingsville, 2015; and honoring three remarkable patriots from Chauncey who served in the Civil War, Dover Twp. Park, Chauncey, 2022.
In 2019, Dr. Denbow was elected the commander of the John S. Townsend Camp 108 of the Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War. He is also a member of the Lt. George Ewing Chapter of the Sons of the American Revolution.