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,’” says 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…