Sunday, April 03, 2005
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION: A Century of Journalism

Newspaper that became R-J's earliest direct ancestor born 100 years ago this week

Click image for enlargement. Illustration by David Stroud. Click image for enlargement. Click image for enlargement. John Cahlan, former managing editor of the Review-Journal, hand-sets a headline the old-fashioned way at the Clark County Museum in 1987. The museum's print shop, named after the Review-Journal's former owner Donald W. Reynolds, does not represent any particular newspaper but is typical of small-town shops in the first few years of the 20th century. Photo by RENE GERMANIER/REVIEW-JOURNAL FILE PHOTO Frank Garside was an experienced boomtown editor who bought the Clark County Review in 1926, renaming it the Las Vegas Review. REVIEW-JOURNAL FILE PHOTO Mary Garside rocked her son's cradle while working a typesetting machine at the Central Nevada newspapers which the Garsides owned before buying the Clark County Review. The son grew up to be a successful hot-type printer nicknamed "Scoop." REVIEW-JOURNAL FILE PHOTO In 1986, the year before he died, former Review-Journal Managing Editor John Cahlan was recognized by the Las Vegas Press Club for his contributions to the community and the newspaper. Photo by RUSSELL YIP/REVIEW-JOURNAL FILE PHOTO Donald W. Reynolds, right, the newspaper tycoon who financed the modernization of the Review-Journal from a hometown sheet to a big-city daily, joins Earl Johnson, then general manager of the Review-Journal, on a tour of the pressroom in December 1985. Reynolds wears a folded paper hat used by pressmen. Photo by Jeff Scheid/REVIEW-JOURNAL FILE PHOTO Review- Journal pressmen in 1951 check early copies for print quality as a run starts. The press is a Duplex brand. REVIEW-JOURNAL FILE PHOTO Managing Editor Don Digilio, center, and other employees visited local schools to explain newspapers' role in civic life. Others in the photo are unidentified. REVIEW-JOURNAL FILE PHOTO

"This is the first issue of The Age and to the citizens and pioneers of Las Vegas and Southern Nevada the publishers desire to pay their humble respects. There exists little need for a more formal introduction; neither is it necessary to exhaust time and patience with an extensive review of our plans and purposes. We are all strangers in a strange land, come out from the more commonplace abodes of civilization for a common purpose -- to seek prosperity in the development of a virgin country.

"Therefore, let us dispose with useless formalities and proceed with mutual good will to the task before us. The Age has been established as a business proposition upon a purely business basis."

With those words, 100 years ago this week, a frontier journalist named C.W. Nicklin launched the Las Vegas Age, the newspaper that became the Review-Journal's earliest direct ancestor and one of its most illustrious. The thin, six-page sheet would evolve into the modern daily which, on Sundays approaching Christmas, when retailers advertise heavily, may weigh nearly 5 pounds and be read by more than half a million people.

The 100-year history has been marked by feuds with rivals, reconciliations and friendly mergers, and a couple of marriages by capture. It's also been marked by a technological revolution unlike that of any other industry. Houses are still nailed together on frameworks of wood, restaurants still serve meals cooked on gas stoves, but, except for being still printed on a relatively inexpensive paper called newsprint, very little about newspapers is done the same way Nicklin and his peers did it.

Nicklin had at least two irons in the fire, also owning a newspaper in Beatty, the "heart of the Bullfrog Mining District" whose fate, he thought, was closely entwined with that of Las Vegas. His Las Vegas newspaper was first printed in a tent on Clark Street, now Bonanza Road, the same street where the Review-Journal is now located.

He lasted three years before seeking greener pastures and selling his newspaper to C.P. Squires. Squires had no newspaper experience, but did have the confidence to hurl himself into any venture, from banking to lumber yards to founding power and telephone companies, with other people's money or his own.

He had adequate nerve, even during the financial panic of 1908, to buy the Age for $2,300. Squires turned the newspaper into a serviceable small-town weekly, a newspaper of record for the new county of Clark, established in 1909, and a "bully pulpit" from which he preached, for some 30 years, the virtues of Republican politics and his almost-fanatic belief in the economic future of Las Vegas.

Squires did much more than preach; he was one of the authors of Las Vegas' city charter, and perhaps most important, one of the political engineers who made it possible to build Hoover Dam. He lived to see his dreams come true, surviving until 1958, by which time Las Vegas had become rich and world-famous.

In 1909 Charles C. Corkhill, who had managed the Age for Nicklin, founded his own newspaper, the Clark County Review, at about the same time he was appointed Clark County's first sheriff. Corkhill served only 18 months as sheriff before being defeated for re-election by his former deputy, Sam Gay.

Corkhill later became Las Vegas' postmaster during the administration of President Woodrow Wilson. His Democratic newspaper survived and became a rival of the Republican Age. But both struggled in the one-horse economy of Las Vegas.

In 1921, Corkhill hired a new editor, T.S. Trebell, to whom he leased the paper a year later. Trebell got into a bitter feud with the town's main industry, the railroad, and shortly gave up the fight. Corkhill resumed his role as publisher. But in 1924, Corkhill got a divorce and left town; his ex-wife, May, took over as editor and publisher.

Frank and Mary Garside were intimately but unwillingly familiar with one-horse economies. The couple had spent their careers Ñ beginning in 1904 in Frank's case -- working for and owning small newspapers in central Nevada mining camps. Frank Garside already had won himself a minor place in Nevada lore with the editorial he ran in 1910 in the first issue of the Manhattan Post. "The editor will print what he pleases," he wrote. "He has been in the newspaper business long enough to know that it is utterly impossible to please everybody."

The Garsides tended to build good newspapers in promising boomtowns, only to watch the mines play out and leave them owning the most important media in unimportant places. But in 1926, Frank thought plans to build Boulder Dam on the Colorado River promised a longer-lasting boom in Las Vegas. That year, the Garsides bought the Clark County Review from May Corkhill and renamed it the Las Vegas Review. They also brought in A.E. "Al" Cahlan as a partner and editor.

Cahlan, from Reno, had taught math and science at Las Vegas High School before drifting into journalism. By April 1928, Las Vegans could get a local paper every day except Sunday: The Review was publishing Monday, Wednesday and Friday, while the Age was publishing Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.

The partners initially operated on a shoestring, but Cahlan found creative ways to improve news coverage. At the time, the outcome of Nevada elections usually remained uncertain for several days because rural precincts sometimes "went to bed" before all votes were counted. Cahlan persuaded county commissioners to pay overtime so officials would stay until all the work was done. Then he organized a system of volunteers who got to the nearest phone by auto, bicycle or even horseback and called in results to his newspaper.

By 1929, Al Cahlan hired his brother, John, as managing editor. John later would recall, "We had the smallest office of a newspaper that I've ever seen. We had very few tools to work with. ... They did put a typewriter on the desk ... but we had no direct connection with any news service."

John Cahlan talked his brother into subscribing to a syndicate for editorial cartoons and features. He also convinced him to subscribe to a teletype wire service. On Jan. 28, 1929, the Las Vegas Review went daily.

Two months later, a former Nevada governor, Democrat James G. Scrugham, started a competing newspaper called the Las Vegas Journal. In July, he sold it to the Garside-Cahlan operation, which folded it into their existing daily and named the hybrid The Las Vegas Evening Review-Journal.

It would not be until the early 1940s that the Garside-Cahlan group would purchase the Las Vegas Age, which they continued to publish through 1947. Yet by 1929, only three years after entering the market, the Garside-Cahlan operation dominated news coverage in Southern Nevada.

How did it happen so quickly? Michael Green, a history professor at the Community College of Southern Nevada, offered an explanation in a 1988 article for the Nevada Historical Society Journal. "The Las Vegas Evening Review-Journal prospered because it was staunchly Democratic in a predominately Democratic city." The Age was Republican. Furthermore, the Cahlans were better at keeping their political opinions on the editorial page and out of the news columns, an ethic that was not necessarily expected by most readers when the Cahlans got into the business, but came to be the central commandment of journalism.

Later, when both the Nevada congressional delegation and the White House were controlled by Democrats, the paper's owners were wired "into the national administration better," Green explained. The Cahlans, reared in Reno when it was still the seat of state power, had contacts in state government, while Garside knew everything worth knowing about rural Nevada.

"Pop Squires knew the ruling elite of Las Vegas just as well as they did," explained Green. "But his competitors were better connected to the world beyond Las Vegas." And Al Cahlan soon became part of the Las Vegas elite, serving in the Nevada Assembly and on the Colorado River Commission, and participating in every important decision in the community's growth.

The Cahlans were hands-on community activists. In 1935, they helped found Helldorado, an Old West-themed community celebration that for decades would remain Las Vegas' biggest annual party and one of its major tourist attractions.

As World War II approached, the U.S. Army established an airfield here to train airplane machine gunners, but Congress left the effort badly underfunded, without even enough money to buy guns. Training for each gunner, John Cahlan explained in an oral history, "started with BB guns, then .22s, then shotguns, and finally .50-caliber machine guns." Because the first three kinds of weapons were commonly owned by civilians, the Evening Review-Journal orchestrated a drive to get Las Vegans to donate them.

According to Green, the Cahlans joined Squires in his successful crusade for Hoover Dam. "Their paper heavily influenced the passage or creation of such public works measures as a park, a golf course, an airport, and better sewers."

The Cahlans cultivated personal images to match their jobs; John's lifelong trademark was a dashing fedora, even if he never wore a press card in it. Don Digilio, who joined the newspaper in 1960 as a reporter, recalled in a 1999 interview: "Al actually wore a green eyeshade around the office. He wore suspenders, and garters around his shirtsleeves. This was in 1960, and I never knew anybody else in the news business who was still doing that."

Eventually, Al Cahlan and Garside began to disagree about how to run the newspaper. "Al needed a new press," explained John Cahlan in his oral history. "But Garside thought the town would blow away because Hoover Dam was already built. ... He had been in so many communities where it was a boom and bust, and he thought Las Vegas was the same thing." Garside wouldn't risk the investment needed to expand the newspaper.

Neither would sell his interest to the other, but Garside did agree to sell his controlling interest to a third party Ñ newspaper tycoon Donald W. Reynolds. Reynolds shortened the paper's name to the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Al Cahlan continued to run the paper for more than a decade before selling his interest to Reynolds in 1960.

After the Cahlan era, the newspaper gradually asserted its independence from the Democratic Party and now endorses candidates and supports issues according to their merits as perceived by the editorial board.

Reynolds was a self-made man in the Horatio Alger style. He started his newspaper career at rock-bottom, peddling papers on the street for a penny each. The son of a door-to-door salesman, he worked at backbreaking manual jobs to pay his way through the University of Missouri, Columbia, a college noted for its journalism program.

He was fired from his first three jobs, but at the fourth, one of the owners was so impressed he offered Reynolds the opportunity to become his partner.

He bought his first newspaper in 1935, and by the time of his death in 1993, the company he founded, Donrey Media Group, owned 53 papers Ñ of which, the Review-Journal was the flagship -- besides 11 outdoor advertising companies, five cable television companies and one TV station. He had become one of America's richest men. Reynolds kept close tabs on the financial performance of his newspapers, but almost never involved himself in editorial policy or decisions.

Reynolds avoided publicity, but in private had a flamboyant streak. His office was stocked with a personal brand of cola; his mansion on Frenchman Mountain, overlooking Las Vegas, included his modest boyhood home Ñ not a reproduction, but the actual home, disassembled, transported and reconstructed.

The mansion was built of brick matching the state-of-the-art newspaper plant the company opened on Bonanza Road in 1971. Although it has been expanded since, this is still the newspaper's headquarters.

The move to the new plant also marked revolutionary changes in newspaper technology. For centuries, newspapers had been printed with some variation of the movable-type technique created by Johann Gutenberg, a German who began building printing presses in the 15th century and printed the famous Gutenberg Bible. Though there were numerous versions of the process, all involved physically pressing paper against the raised images of letters, covered with ink.

In the 1970s and '80s, most newspapers converted to systems in which type was created either photographically or, later, electronically. They also switched to the offset printing process, in which smooth, photographically developed plates replaced the cast raised-letter plates. The darker portions of an offset plate, representing letters, attract ink and transfer the resulting image to a rubber roller, that in turn transfers it to the paper.

The revolution quickly spread into the newsroom, where electronic computer files replaced the reams of cheap typing paper that had to be transported physically from the manual typewriters of reporters to the desks of editors, who corrected them with pencils and sent them to technicians who set the words into type.

Another trend that gathered strength in the middle of the century, and continues to the present, is the domination of most cities by a single daily newspaper. One newspaper would find more favor with the public and with advertisers, and it would plow at least some of the increased revenues back into the product, which would then become even more popular. Most advertisers would put most of their money into the newspaper that reached the most subscribers, leaving so little for the competing newspapers that some of them starved to death.

Las Vegas has benefited from lively competition through most of its history. The Review-Journal's most important competitor was the Las Vegas Sun, established in 1953 by H.M. "Hank" Greenspun.

Like many others, Digilio polished his craft at one of the dailies and was hired away by the other. A former reporter for the military newspaper "Stars and Stripes," he joined the Sun in 1958 and in 1960 moved to the Review-Journal, where he rose from reporter to become one of the newspaper's more famous editors, remembered especially for his humorous columns.

In competing for stories, reporters from the two newspapers "were real aggressive," Digilio said. "You'd try to throw somebody off, make him think you were working on something other than what you were really doing."

Reporters for both newspapers had desks in the same press rooms at police stations and government buildings. Digilio chuckled, remembering how he bested an ace Sun reporter. "Poor old Joe McClain. I would leave phony notes out, and got him calling Ray Gubser, the captain. He'd yell, ÔDigilio's working on a story, and I don't know a damn thing about it!'Ê"

In an era when television news-gathering was not as sophisticated as it is today, newspapers could cover breaking news more thoroughly, and many newspapers were still sold on the street. Although the Review-Journal was mainly an afternoon paper and the Sun a morning one, both published morning editions, including a very early street edition that sold largely to people out and about as employees or patrons of Las Vegas nightlife.

"In those years, at least in that edition, we were more into the Police Gazette-style stories," remembered Digilio. "The street edition always had a more exciting headline, usually in red, sometimes blue, big type. Then for the home delivery editions, we would change at least the headline to something more reserved."

Al Cahlan's regular column was named "From Where I Sit," remembered Digilio. "So Hank named his, ÔWhere I Stand,' and they blasted each other for years."

In the early 1960s, the Sun's circulation came within striking distance of the Review-Journal's, but in 1963, a fire destroyed the Sun's offices and printing plant. The Sun fell behind in circulation and revenue, and by 1989, seemed in such trouble that the two newspapers agreed to establish a joint operating agreement.

Under the federal Newspaper Preservation Act, if the financially weaker of two competing dailies seems otherwise doomed to close down, the two managements may apply for limited exemptions to anti-trust laws, permitting them to combine certain functions. Under the agreement approved by the Justice Department, the Las Vegas newspapers combined advertising, circulation and production functions.

On Saturdays, Sundays and holidays, the Review-Journal and Sun publish a combined newspaper. On all other days, the Review-Journal publishes a morning newspaper and the Sun an afternoon paper. The first combined edition was published July 1, 1990.

Competition still thrives where it counts. The editorial departments of each newspaper remain separate, competitive and sometimes adversarial. Since 1990, the Greenspun family and Review-Journal ownership have each extended their holdings into magazines and weekly newspapers that compete head-to-head, outside the JOA, for both circulation and advertising.

After Reynolds' death in 1993, controlling interest in Donrey Media Group was acquired by Stephens Group, a company formerly involved mostly in finance, and headed by one of Reynolds' personal friends, Jackson T. Stephens.

The Review-Journal's publisher today is Sherman R. Frederick, who is also chairman of the company now known as Stephens Media Group.