Where I Stand -- Lee Fisher: Hank Greenspun went up against anybody and everybody

JULY 22, 1989, was a sad day in Las Vegas. It was the day Hank Greenspun died.

Twelve years earlier, in his commencement address at UNLV, Hank had nailed down his remarkable career by telling the graduating students, "My own life has been devoted to journalism. If there is any comfort I can take from that, it has been a recent compliment in a magazine devoted to our profession that I am among the last of the professional-journalism, fearless, crusading editors."

Hank concluded his remarks by quoting Henry Thoreau: "I would not talk about myself if there were anyone who I knew as well ... the purest science is still biographical."

Just this past week, a Review-Journal news report characterized Hank Greenspun as a "firebrand" publisher. Hank must have chuckled at the compliment since it came from, as he referred to it at that time, "the little afternoon paper down the street." From the time he started the Sun in 1950, he got his jollies taking editorial potshots at the R-J.

His daily Where I Stand column was a fast-firing weapon for his witticisms, barbs and blistering attacks on devious politicos. Locals stirred their morning coffee cups to the martial music of his gleeful tirades. Boy, was he a troublemaker! He took on the headline giants of the day at a time when Vegas was just starting to grow as the nation's new boomtown. Among his targets: the bilious Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin and the distinguished Sen. Patrick McCarran of Nevada. McCarran used his considerable political muscle in an ill-fated campaign to run Hank's fledgling newspaper out of town. Friends, I will spare you the gory details of his attempted conspiracy except to note that, as I have been told, it cost Sen. Pat $80,000 to settle out of court with Hank. Maybe some of that boodle was defrayed a few years later to pay part of my weekly $25 paycheck as a Sun columnist. I like to think so.

You can bet all the tea in China that if Hank were alive today, he would glory the town's explosive growth and at the same time blast the lethargic and myopic public servants for countenancing air and water pollution, contaminated landfills, the leisurely completion of the beltway system, the paucity of parks, playgrounds and schoolrooms, the city and county's ethical cesspools, the gangs, the dope, the nuke-dump threat, the pitiful state of our "west side," the traffic nightmare and, of course, the periodic chemical explosions at the Timet plant which one day may necessitate the immediate evacuation of residents from Mesquite to Phoenix.

He would revel in such current civic enterprises as the Bellagio, Paris, Mandalay Bay and Venetian resorts, as well as the magnificently enlarged McCarran International Airport.

I have no idea how Hank would view the $72 million Fremont Street Experience ... whether this "game was worth the candle." Personally, from its concept until its completion, I felt it would be a total flop, a costly invention that would do little to mend downtown's deterioration both in tourist acceptance and gaming grosses. If you disagree, send me a fax. I plan to install one of these machines come the exciting year 2000.

A check of my clairvoyant X-file established that Hank would lay out the dire consequences if Las Vegas failed to make a timely turnaround and solve the negative infrastructure negatives I have delineated above. Hank would agree with me that we are a city that could be described metaphorically as "A Crap Game in Progress" -- a unique and thriving community betting the bankroll that the billions invested in the immediate future by the followers of the Steve Wynn proliferation syndrome will ensure the growth that we need in the immediate years ahead. The gaming gentry calls it "bodies."

Our gaming industry is being fairly well supported these days with an annual tourist count of 30 million to 35 million. Wouldn't it be logical to assume that by the year 2000 our resorts will need 50 million to 60 million? Ah, there's the rub! Sort of an economical massage ingredient with lethal implications should the leisure class start to turn its back on us. It has happened many times before to major tourist destinations that in their complacency have shown their contempt for the masses.

Hank would fondly recount the half-century days of 10-cent craps downtown at the Boulder Club, and the original Golden Nugget which was slot heaven with 5-cent one-armed bandits and plenty of space to park ... how everyone knew everyone and the town had about 35,000 inhabitants instead of a million or more. Those were the days when the big hotels, such as the El Rancho Vegas, Last Frontier, Desert Inn, Thunderbird and Sands, offered 200 or 300 rooms. Today, it's more like 105,000 rooms total. Tomorrow, 125,000. By 2005 -- just seven years away -- somewhere near 200,000.

Traffic forecast? Forget about it ... double what we have today.

Listen, friends. Don't lay the mantle of gloom in my lap. I didn't invent these conditions. I am just reporting them from the times we early "natives" now extol as the good old days -- like 1952 when I had just wandered into town by way of Columbus, Ohio, as a lonesome World War II ex-GI looking for work and a place to sit down.

When I found out that Hank Greenspun, publisher of the Sun, was a major under the command of Gen. George S. Patton at the same time I was a GI in the Staff Judge Advocate headquarters in Paris during World War II, I made a beeline into his Sun office, which in those days was on South Main Street close to Tinch's Furniture Store.

I didn't even have to get by Hank's secretary. Fact is, he didn't have one -- couldn't afford one. It was 1954, his fourth year since his Sun debut, and money was still tight. I managed to duck his assistant, Ruthe Deskin, who was out to lunch. So I walked right into his plush executive suite, which looked as if it had been furnished by Tinch's used-furniture department in the middle of a tornado.

But Hank hired me. I was to do a daily column titled Talk of the Town. Salary: $25 per week. During the months that followed, I got to know my boss from close up. If you think Bill Clinton has been taking a beating since he was elected six years ago, you should have been around to witness the punishment visited on the upstart Sun publisher. His daily doses of vilification from the good-old-boys, politicos, racial bigots and assorted wannabes of all description was something to behold.

To be continued tomorrow ...

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