Backstory: In the sweet bye and bye

By Michael Green

A sportswriter named Frank Graham once came up with the ultimate insult for an anti-social baseball player who mellowed as his skills diminished: He learned to say hello just when it was time to say goodbye.

So, I was working on a column explaining how Rep. Jim Gibbons' stupidity fits into Nevada history when Geoff Schumacher called to say the Mercury was saying goodbye, only four years after saying hello. As you can read elsewhere, Stephens Media Group bought Wick Communications' local publications, including CityLife. CityLife will continue, with parts of the Mercury absorbed into it. Let's say goodbye to the Mercury and hello to some history.

Mergers long have been a part of Las Vegas journalism, and believe it or not, Kirk Kerkorian had nothing to do with them. The Review-Journal claims to be celebrating its 100th birthday, and it is...sort of. It was born on Sept. 18, 1909, which technically would make the R-J 96 this year. But the Age came out of the chute on April 7, 1905, more than a month before the land auction that marks the town's birthdate. R-J owners Frank Garside and Al Cahlan bought the Age, kept it going weekly for a couple of years and then folded it into their daily in 1947, so the R-J's claims to centenarianism aren't without foundation.

But before it was the R-J, it was just the Review. In 1929, just after the Review went daily, former Gov. James Scrugham started the weekly Journal. He owned the Nevada State Journal in Reno and still had political ambitions, so it seemed like a good idea. But it didn't work. Scrugham gave up and sold. On July 19, 1929, the Las Vegas Evening Review-Journal debuted.

That wasn't the last merger. North Las Vegas had its own newspaper, the News, owned by Hank Greenspun. In 1959, Greenspun's former editor, Adam Yacenda, started the North Las Vegas and Moapa Valley Times. The two merged soon after Yacenda's paper started. For a while, it was the Times-News, but the News soon disappeared from the masthead.

This led to a few historical oddities. One was a debate over who actually owned the paper. Yacenda wound up with the paper and turned it into the tri-weekly North Las Vegas Valley Times. Greenspun competed with weeklies that usually were weakly.

The next oddity came after Yacenda sold the paper in 1973 to Bob Brown, who once edited the R-J. Brown felt North Las Vegas couldn't and wouldn't support him unless he reduced it to a weekly. In 1975, he decided to try publishing daily and competing with Greenspun's Sun for second place behind the R-J. Brown called it the Valley Times. Las Vegas was the only city other than New York with more than 100,000 residents and three dailies.

Journalistically, it was great. The Valley Times assembled a marvelous staff, including legendary reporter Ned Day. Financially, it was disastrous. The Times was losing money. So was the Sun. Greenspun and Brown reportedly discussed a merger, but not too seriously. Brown wound up $2 million in the hole. Soon after discovering the extent of the debt, he died, on June 8, 1984. The Times died two weeks later.

I had the pleasure, if you could call it that, of being one of the undertakers performing the burial service. I worked at the Valley Times for its last two years. I was a teenage reporter and editor. Green wasn't only my last name; it also described me, and not in terms of envy or illness. So I wasn't all that aware at the time of how bad things were financially.

Now I realize that while the experience was fun, and changed my life in profoundly important ways, it was a little like watching your own funeral--and the planning of it. Then, after Brown died, we kept at it knowing that his family wanted to continue. But the debt was too great.

When Brown died, we published a tribute issue. Those who had worked for him contributed their memories, both sweet and bittersweet. Then, on the night of June 21, managing editor Bruce Hasley designed the news section, I put together the sports section and wrote the editorial, we finished the paper and went home. The next day, Bankruptcy Court trustee Berkeley Bunker found too little money to cover the payroll and shut us down.

We never had the chance to say goodbye. Many newspapers, in folding, have published farewell issues. Who knows what we would have done? Hasley, who is very funny for a conservative ex-Marine, wanted the top line of our banner headline to read: "Times to Las Vegas." As for the second line, well...no, we probably wouldn't have done that.

The Mercury cannot have claimed to have had the effects on Las Vegas journalism that the Age and the Valley Times had. But each week, it--we--tried to provide you with a different way of looking at things. It also gave me the chance to say hello to you each week, for which I am grateful even if you are not, and an opportunity we didn't get at the Valley Times: to say goodbye.