Sunday, March 07, 2004
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

EDITORIAL: Donal 'Mike' O'Callaghan, 1929-2004

Former governor, executive editor of the Las Vegas Sun, was the class of the field

MIKE O'CALLAGHAN

Donal "Mike" O'Callaghan's parents lost their farm in the Great Depression. The family moved to marginal land near Sparta, Wisc., where they struggled to make a living.

Young Mike joined the Marine Corps at age 16 ... but still missed World War II. By the time the Korean War broke out he'd joined the service again -- this time the Air Force -- and was stationed in Alaska.

Mr. O'Callaghan's chances of seeing combat were slim. Many men would have thanked their lucky stars. Those men do not turn out to be this world's Mike O'Callaghans.

He volunteered to transfer to the Army. "I wanted to get into combat," he said later. "I'd been trained for it, and I thought, why send some kid over when I had that training?"

On Feb. 13, 1953, according to an official Army account, "While his company was being subjected to a barrage of heavy artillery from Chinese Communist forces during a night attack, Sgt. O'Callaghan was informed that men on an out-guard post had been cut off by this enemy action. Immediately ... he voluntarily exposed himself to enemy fire, located the men and brought them, together with a wounded member, safely back to the trenches."

O'Callaghan took a direct hit to the leg from an 82 mm mortar round. He rigged a tourniquet out of telephone wire, twisted it tight with a bayonet, and continued to direct the firefight for three hours. His mangled left leg was amputated below the knee. He was awarded the Silver Star.

Mike O'Callaghan came to Nevada to teach high school. His students included Harry Reid.

Those who thought he didn't stand a chance in his underdog race for Nevada's governorship in 1970 must not have been paying attention to who they were up against.

Roy Vanett, the late city editor of the Review-Journal, recalled seeing Mr. O'Callaghan on the corner of Main and Bonanza on a blistering hot day, greeting motorists at the stop light. "When I came back from my errand he was still there," said Mr. Vanett. That was when it dawned on him Mr. O'Callaghan might win.

"He pulled one of the great upsets," recalls former U.S. Sen. Dick Bryan. "He had one of those infectious personalties."

Many consider Mr. O'Callaghan to have been Nevada's most effective, hands-on governor in living memory.

"You learn little things" by showing up unannounced at state-run facilities, he later explained. He would eat the same food inmates ate, at the same tables they used every day. Once, when he was having breakfast at a state-run mental institution, an inmate asked the new guy what he did for a living. "I'm the governor," said Mr. O'Callaghan.

"You stop right there," the inmate told him. "We've had two or three other guys in here said that, and if you keep on they'll never let you out."

Retiring from politics, he accepted a job from the late publisher Hank Greenspun as an executive at the Las Vegas Sun, where he became known as a tough taskmaster but a paragon of integrity.

Which wouldn't have surprised any of those cut-off GIs he helped drag to safety in the snows of Korea.

Mike O'Callaghan, 74, collapsed and died of an apparent heart attack Friday.

Many a politician gets his picture taken sitting on a hay bale and thinks it makes him a "man of the people." Mike O'Callaghan was the real thing. In everything he did, he was the class of the field -- the benchmark against whom others measured themselves. Nevada has lost a great one.Mike O'Callaghan