Tuesday, July 23, 2002 | 8:22 a.m.
Editor's note: This is the first in an occasional series of Accent stories about longtime Las Vegas personalities:
Myram Borders glanced out the window of the Marie Callender's on the corner of Tropicana and Eastern avenues.
The lunch rush was long over. The restaurant was quiet.
Between sips of iced coffee, the former Las Vegas newswoman of 30 years paused to reflect on her career and share tidbits about the early days of Las Vegas.
As the sole Las Vegas reporter working for United Press International during the 1960s, '70s and '80s, Borders could probably thread together enough stories to write an engaging book about the city she grew up with.
But she doesn't plan to.
"It sounds like an awful lot of hard work to me," the 65-year-old retired journalist said flatly with a smile.
It's a surprising comment coming from someone who aggressively broke into the newspaper industry at a time when women reporters were often relegated to the society page, and battled "The Uniform Syndrome," a phrase that Borders used to describe cops, military and athletes who thought a woman reporter was much too soft to handle hard news.
Astute and forthright, Borders was known as a tough and aggressive reporter. During her 25 years of reporting in Las Vegas, she was chasing every Las Vegas story from mob crime to celebrity antics.
"There was a tremendous amount of things going on," Borders said. "The town was smaller. The events seemed bigger."
But the job didn't come easy.
In 1962 when the UPI had an opening for a bureau manager in Las Vegas, Borders, who was working out of UPI's Los Angeles office, was told, "Don't be silly. No woman can handle Las Vegas."
Grudgingly, she stayed in California while a male colleague was sent to cover Las Vegas.
Borders' turn would come three years later, when the position opened again and she insisted that she had earned the promotion.
Headlines from Vegas
Borders, who had grown up in Las Vegas and graduated from the University of Nevada, Reno with a bachelor's degree in journalism, said that she wanted to return to Las Vegas.
Her parents still lived here and she had connections in town.
Besides, Borders said, she wanted to report news in a city with worldwide appeal.
"A Las Vegas dateline was magic," Borders said. "People had a tendency to be absolutely fascinated in those days by Sin City, movie stars, gangsters and tainted money."
Borders broke the story of Elvis and Priscilla Presley's wedding in 1967 at the Aladdin. Purely by chance, Borders happened to be driving by Tony Roma's on Sahara Avenue when Frank "Lefty" Rosenthal's car exploded in the parking lot between Tony Roma's and Marie Callender's in 1982.
Though Borders was one of the first on the scene, the frazzled and singed Rosenthal still wasn't about to "fink to a reporter" about who was behind the attack, she said.
In the 1970s Borders trailed Esmeralda County bordello operator Beverly Harrell as Harrell ran for state assembly. In the mid-'80s she covered the racketeering trial of Tony Spilotro and his gang.
One of the more interesting characters, she said, was oddball billionaire Howard Hughes, who for years was a mystery.
"He was building one thing after another," Borders said. "Then he disappears, then he dies. Then the Mormon Will Trial (centered on the mysterious Hughes will that surfaced in Salt Lake City)."
Before Hughes died in 1976, she said, "I carried one of those little spy cameras in my purse for three years. I mean, wouldn't you kill yourself if you saw him and didn't have a camera?"
UPI folded in 1990 and Borders went to work in the state's consumer affairs office for 18 months before moving to the Las Vegas News Bureau, where she worked until retiring in January.
Finding a way
Today Borders boasts that during her 25-year tenure with UPI there were 32 different Las Vegas bureau managers for the Associated Press, the wire service that ran head-to-head with UPI.
"They came and went pretty fast," Borders said with a slight smile. "They couldn't stand the heat, I guess, in more ways than one."
Not only could Borders take the heat, she thrived on beating the Associated Press and was regarded as being one of the top reporters in town.
" 'The Uniform Syndrome,' " she said. "It makes you very inventive. You become very, what is it, aggressive? Is that the word? Aggressive and noisy. They would call it bitchy and obnoxious."
When she couldn't get her foot in the same door that her male colleagues sauntered through, she found a way around it.
"There were times when they'd have a title fight and they'd have a news conference in the dressing room," she said. "They wouldn't let me in."
So Borders went to a phone in the hotel and called the boxer in his dressing room. He answered the phone and she got the interview. Other times, she said, "I laid the groundwork in advance to beat the competition. It was usually a logistics thing."
At a time when there were no cell phones or lap tops and reporters working for a wire service had to phone the story to another bureau for dictation, the biggest challenge, Borders said, was getting to the phone first. And often, her competitors could run faster.
"If there was only one phone there was a big fight over it," she said.
Once while working in San Diego the story she was covering required the mass of reporters to head out to sea.
Noticing ahead of time that there only one phone on the dock, she handed $10 to an older man loitering on the dock, told him to pretend that he was talking on the phone and not to give the phone to anyone but her. The plan worked.
"Anyone could have done it," Borders said, referring to her tactics. "But they didn't see the need. AP was competing against a mere stupid woman. Why go to those extremes?"
Changing times
As with other longtime Las Vegans, Borders watched hotels and casinos come and go.
When her family first moved to town they lived in an apartment at Stewart and 13th Street. Stewart was not yet a paved road, she said, and there were private homes on Fremont Street.
"The El Rancho wasn't built when we moved here," Borders said. El Rancho, the first Strip resort, opened with 63 rooms in 1941.
When it arrived, she said, "It was a hotel that was four miles out of town. The thought was, who's going to drive four to five miles going to some hotel somewhere out in the desert."
Borders graduated from Las Vegas High. Initially, she planned to attend Berkeley and study law. But a scholarship came through for the University of Nevada, Reno.
After college, she planned to move to New York City to be in the thick of news reporting. Instead, she stayed out West, worked in Reno, San Diego, then Los Angeles, a decision she never regretted.
"Nothing would have been as dramatic as this town," she said. "Weird things happen in this town.
"Being in Las Vegas is kind of like being in the center of the universe. Everybody comes through at one point or another. Stand in the right corner of Vegas and the whole world passes by."
Borders said that she had no doubt that the town would continue to grow.
"You knew things were going to change," Borders said. "I grew up in one city, I'm living in another.
"One of the first indications (of change) was the arrival of Howard Hughes in the late 1960s," she said. "Then, when the state gaming officials decided corporations could be licensed."
But, Borders said, "I certainly did not foresee the size of the hotels that became destinations in themselves."
Eventually, she said, she'll probably leave Las Vegas and move somewhere in Nevada that's less congested.
"The town, it eats up your time," she said. "You remember when it used to take 10 minutes (to get across town). Now it takes an hour and 10 minutes.
"I'm never going to completely leave it. I'm just going to establish a second beachhead."
And take life easy.
"I'm trying to sift through 30 years of neglect," she said. "I have so much stuff. It's just the matter of getting the place in order a little bit.
"I now can control my own clock."
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