June 21, 2025 marked a significant anniversary. On that day in 1950, Hank Greenspun took over a newspaper that became the Las Vegas Sun. Greenspun and the Sun have done a lot to shape our past and present.
Las Vegas has a storied journalism past. Even before the railroad townsite auction on May 15, 1905, the McWilliams Townsite had three competing weeklies. Only the Age survived, and Pop Squires bought it in 1908. He edited, published, or wrote for the Age for nearly 40 years, until it merged with its competitor in 1947. The Age’s former editor, Charles Corkhill, founded the Review in 1909.
Eventually, Corkhill’s ex-wife won the paper in a divorce. In 1926, she sold it to longtime Nevada publisher Frank Garside. He had worked in several mining camps, including Tonopah, where he owned the Times-Bonanza. Garside didn’t plan to run the paper himself and reached out to Al Cahlan. He had taught math and coached at the local high school, then moved to Elko to work on the Free Press with a college friend. He came to Las Vegas as part-owner of the Review. Later, Garside moved south and became the postmaster at the old federal building that now houses The Mob Museum.
For his part, Cahlan began expanding the paper. In the late 1920s, Las Vegans expected big things from building the dam. Finally, in January 1929, the Review became an evening daily. Former Governor James Scrugham had started the weekly Journal and sold it. Thus the main daily became the Las Vegas Evening Review-Journal. Squires made the Age a daily as well, but as a Republican in a Democratic town and with less staff, he really couldn’t compete.
By the late 1940s, the Review-Journal was dominant. It was close to Senator Pat McCarran and his political machine. Al Cahlan’s brother John edited the paper. The top reporter was John’s wife Florence Lee Jones. And her brothers Cliff and Herb were prominent local attorneys with political connections.
With Las Vegas growing, Cahlan wanted to expand. He found a buyer for Garside’s percentage: Donald W. Reynolds, from Arkansas. Reynolds took over in 1949. He spent more on the physical plant. But when he installed typesetting machines, the typesetters joined the International Typographical Union. Reynolds wouldn’t negotiate, so they walked out. They started a paper, the Las Vegas Free Press, with some R-J veterans; Garside’s son Scoop Garside, and son-in-law Ray Germain.
The paper was quickly in trouble. It had only one resort advertiser, the Desert Inn, because the hotel’s publicist disliked the Review-Journal. His name was Hank Greenspun. He was unhappy working for Desert Inn boss Moe Dalitz. Greenspun went to the union’s headquarters in Indianapolis and bought the Free Press with $1,000 down that he borrowed from Las Vegas pioneer businessman Nate Mack. He changed the name to the Las Vegas Morning Sun, then just the Sun. Cahlan did an editorial page column called “From Where I Sit” that included a piece critical of strikes. Greenspun felt he was the target and wrote a front-page spoof, “From Where I Stand.” The compositors didn’t include the “From.” “Where I Stand” was born, and survives, as does the Sun, but in a different way.
Greenspun admired liberal republican former congressman and New York City mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, and shared his hatred of political machines. Nevada had one headed by Senator Pat McCarran. Greenspun also saw McCarran, correctly, as anti-semitic. Greenspun was Jewish and had helped Israel during the war that followed its creation, ultimately pleading guilty to violating the Neutrality Act. He criticized McCarran on numerous grounds, including that he had tolerated corruption that Senator Estes Kefauver’s committee on organized crime had ferreted out.
Eventually, on March 24, 1952, almost every casino in Las Vegas canceled its Sun advertising. Greenspun sued McCarran and the resort executives, accusing them of a conspiracy. The case went before U.S. District Judge Roger T. Foley, who wouldn’t have been appointed in the first place without McCarran’s assent. But Foley played it fair. The publisher won a settlement: money plus the return of the advertising.
Also in 1952, Nevada had a U.S. Senate race. McCarran and his allies backed former state attorney general Alan Bible in the Democratic primary. Greenspun backed a relative newcomer to Nevada, Tom Mechling, who barely defeated Bible. Greenspun had shown he had some political muscle.
Greenspun also took on bigger fish. The early 1950s were the McCarthy era for the Wisconsin senator and his anti-communist crusade. Greenspun had supported Dwight Eisenhower for the Republican nomination in 1952 but switched to Adlai Stevenson when he saw the general as too close to McCarthy. When McCarthy campaigned for the Republican ticket in Nevada on October 13, Greenspun said of him, “He has spread suspicion and fear among the people and by these very acts has weakened our defenses against the dangers of communism.” Greenspun then attended McCarthy’s rally, where the senator referred to him as an ex-communist. At the end, Greenspun rushed the stage, grabbed the microphone, and turned the crowd in his favor. He then began attacking McCarthy in the Sun. That included a series asking, “Is Senator McCarthy a Secret Communist?” He accused him of corruption. He questioned McCarthy’s sexuality, later saying that he didn’t care and had no evidence, but McCarthy deserved to have done to him what he did to others.
On January 8, 1954, a Greenspun column declared, “Sen. Joe McCarthy has to come to a violent end … The chances are that McCarthy will be laid to rest at the hands of some poor innocent slob whose reputation and life he has destroyed through his well-established smear technique …. Really, I’m against Joe getting his head blown off, not because he does not have it coming, but I would hate to see some simpleton get the chair for such a public service as getting rid of McCarthy.” The Eisenhower administration revoked the Sun’s mailing privileges and the U.S. attorney prosecuted Greenspun for “tending to incite murder or assassination.” He was acquitted. All of this made Greenspun nationally known, profiled in major magazines of the time. Meanwhile, the Sun was gaining on the R-J in circulation and advertising.
The Sun was rising in the journalism fight here. But on November 21, 1963, the Sun’s building burned in an early-morning fire. Greenspun and his wife Barbara were traveling in Switzerland and Ruthe Deskin, his longtime assistant, called him with the news. Greenspun ordered that the Sun publish the next day, even if it was just four pages.
The Sun never really recovered from the fire. But it remained influential, as did Greenspun. In 1966, Howard Hughes came to Las Vegas. Greenspun was involved in the negotiations that led to Hughes’s arrival and purchase of the Desert Inn. Hughes loaned Greenspun about $4 million at low interest, and bought Channel 8 from him for $3.6 million. But eventually Hughes fired his right-hand man Robert Maheu, Greenspun’s ally. Maheu provided memos written by Hughes and Greenspun attacked the billionaire in the newspaper.
The memos were in Greenspun’s office safe and in the summer of 1972, someone tried to break into the safe. It turned out to be part of Watergate. Richard Nixon’s people were trying to get their hands on information on connections between him and Hughes.
The Hughes memos got attention for the Sun, as did its political coverage. Its reporting and Greenspun’s columns helped elect Mike O’Callaghan governor in 1970 and reelect him in 1974. In 1979, after leaving office, O’Callaghan became an editor at the Sun and joined Greenspun, his son Brian, and longtime Sun executive Ruthe Deskin writing “Where I Stand.” The Sun also boasted a variety of well-respected journalists, from Adam Yacenda, Joe Digless, and Colin McKinlay in the 1950s to later reporters like Mary Manning and Ed Cook. The Sun also kept crusading. It was strongly anti-nuclear waste, first at the low-level repository at Beatty, then the proposed Yucca Mountain facility.
The Greenspuns had other important interests. They developed Green Valley starting in the 1970s. Greenspun won the contract for local cable television. Then, in 1989, Hank Greenspun died. The Sun had been a distant second to the R-J in circulation for many years. After his death, the R-J and Sun signed a Joint Operating Agreement, which the Justice Department would allow in order to save a newspaper in financial trouble. The Sun moved to the less lucrative afternoon market and merged advertising and circulation with the R-J. The newsrooms remained separate.
Before the Great Recession of 2008, the Sun greatly expanded its newsroom. It paid off with the first reporting Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for a Nevada newspaper, for its work on the deaths of construction workers and the lack of enforcement. Alexandra Berzon was the main reporter; she’s now with The New York Times. Marshall Allen and Alex Richards were Pulitzer finalists for local reporting on preventable injuries in hospitals.
By then, the Sun no longer published separately in the afternoon. Instead, it appeared as a section in the Review-Journal, starting in 2005. The Sun also cut its staff. There have been lawsuits and public arguments between the two papers, and among the Greenspun family, over the Sun and its relationship to the R-J.
The Sun still comes out, with columns, editorials, news, and feature stories. Las Vegas still has distinctive journalistic voices in print, online, and on the air. Here’s to that continuing forever.