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Two Las Vegas Journalists Bonded During Long-Ago Battle For Scoops

Associated Press

Forty years ago, the Las Vegas area had a population a little over 300,000 and three daily newspapers — the Las Vegas Review-Journal, the Las Vegas Sun, and the long gone Valley Times. They slugged it out for scoops and circulation in a town where mobsters were on the streets and not in a museum.

Two cub reporters working the swing shift met in the Review-Journal newsroom and struck up a friendship that spanned the decades as they took different paths to journalistic success.

Sherm Frederick went from reporter to editor to publisher at the RJ, where he racked up profits during the boom years and feuded with Sen. Harry Reid.

Tim Dahlberg joined the Associated Press as a Las Vegas bureau writer and became one of the news agency’s top sports columnists, covering several Olympics and Masters and the big Las Vegas fights.

Today they are partners in Battle Born Media, which owns a string of rural newspapers in Nevada and California.

INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS:

On the murder of culinary boss Al Bramlet:

Fredrick: We couldn’t have been more than 30 days into our careers. I take the assignment to go out into the desert because they found a body. At that point, they didn’t known it was Al Bramlet. That’s probably why the rookie gets to go.

At the time, there was a detective by the name of Beecher Avants, who was a crusty old guy, he comes over and says, ‘Well, it looks like it’s Al Bramlet.’ So, I have to ask, ‘how do you know it is Al Bramlet?’ He said, ‘his arm is sticking up out of the grave. The coyotes were gnawing at it.’ I said, ‘what does that tell you?’ He said, ‘well, it’s got Al Bramet’s ring on it’

So, I come back to the office and I’m all excited. It was such a big story that they immediately took me off of it and gave it to Tim Dahlberg, the seasoned reporter from UNR. I was devastated.

I complained. Said, ‘hey this is my story.’ But they said, ‘No let Tim handle it.’ So, Tim got it and he got paid back big time.

Tim, what did you have to do?

Dahlberg: Well my first job was to call the widow of Al Bramlet. You gotta remember Al Bramlet was a very powerful figure in Las Vegas in the 70s. He ran the Culinary Union and they were just coming off a big strike. My job was to call Mrs. Bramlet and ask what she thought of her husband’s body being found. And he had been missing for about three weeks.

So, I called her up and I said, ‘I’m Tim Dahlberg. I’m with the Review-Journal. Can you tell me how you feel about them finding your husband’s body?’ And she said, ‘What?!’ She didn’t know. In today’s world, that wouldn’t happen.

That was my introduction into dealing with people in the journalism business. It is just what you do. You deal with people you’ve never seen before on the most personal of issues, including death.

Was it better back then?

Dahlberg: I wouldn’t say better. I would say different. It is just a different world we live in. I think we lose some of the context of stories because you’re one story for 10 minutes and you’re on another one 10 minutes later.

Information is given in little bits and pieces. And it is hard to stay focused on one topic at a time.

What do people get wrong about Las Vegas 40 years ago?

Dahlberg: Probably that it was a town run by the Mob and that things were better because it was run by the Mob. The reality was the Mob had a definite interest in a lot of Strip hotels: The Stardust, The Tropicana, a few others. Money was being taken out the back door. There was a lot of influence in politics because of it. Las Vegas was an open city. So, a lot of crime families operated here. But that didn’t necessarily make Las Vegas a better place.

People have a tendency to romanticize that kind of stuff. But working the night police beat as I did. You would see what some of these criminals did and what became of some of their victims. So, it wasn’t such a great time.

Was the city better then?

Fredrick: No, that’s just a myth. It’s much better now. For one reason, there’s every celebrity chef in the world that’s got a place to eat. So enjoy that!

I don’t always like the corporatized gaming establishments that we have now. But when you look back, Benny Binion had his place and you could see him every once in a while and you could go in and get a 25 cent hotdog or something but c’mon! It’s not as good as it is today.

On covering UNLV’s basketball team at their height:

Dahlberg: You know going to a UNLV game back in the late 80s – early 90s was an event. The whole town was there. Steve Wynn was court side. Gucci Row… All the movers and shakers in town were in the first row. And if you weren’t in the first row, and you were in the second row, you were just biding your time until you were a mover and shaker in town.

They would sell out on a regular basis. Tark would be down there chomping on his towel. It was exciting stuff. This city had never really had anything to rally around as far as a team. And all of the sudden, we have this nationally ranked basketball team. I remember when we got Larry Johnson. I went down and interviewed him. They were only going to have him for two years but this guy was this huge 6-foot-10-inche monster. And I’m thinking, ‘They might be pretty good this year.’

I was at the championship in Denver when they won that. I was there the next year in Indianapolis when they got beat by Duke in one of the biggest upsets in college basketball, during that time. I still don’t know why Larry Johnson didn’t get the ball in the last few seconds.

Senator Harry Reid was a frequent punching bag for the Review-Journal when you were there, particularly during his 2010 re-election campaign against Sharron Angle. Why the antipathy?​

Fredrick: Politics mostly. Harry Reid when he got into office came in as a conservative Nevadan and over time transformed before our eyes. And eventually became the head of the Democratic Party in the Senate and those constraints made him a different person.

We had supported him over the years – off and on. It’s true that we gave him a hard time most of the time and when we gave him a compliment it was somewhat of a backhanded compliment. In 2010, we decided enough was enough. We gotta move on and change. Unfortunately, that change came in the form of Sharron Angle, who was – horrible doesn’t even begin to describe her. And so you’re sitting there trying to decide between the devil you know and the kook you don’t know. We would have much preferred at the RJ to have Sue Lowden. We talked about, ‘shouldn’t we endorse in the primary?’ And I’ve always thought we shouldn’t. Let the parties decide then we’ll pick ours after that. I wish we had gone back and maybe pushed a little harder for Sue, because Sharron Angle became a terrible candidate. I think at the end of day we did endorse her, but it wasn’t much of an endorsement.

The pair are planning an RJ reunion for Saturday at the Tap House, a West Charleston Boulevard tavern where newspaper reporters and editors have wet their whistles for decades.

Sherm Frederick and Tim Dahlberg, longtime Las Vegas journalists

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With deep experience in journalism, politics, and the nonprofit sector, news producer Doug Puppel has built strong connections statewide that benefit the Nevada Public Radio audience.