The minutes were ticking toward midnight on the first Friday of May 2016 when my cellphone lit up.
A friend asked me if I had heard.
“Heard what?” I replied, turning on the lamp next to my bed.
She continued her conversation by telling me Anne Pershing, the former Lahontan Valley News editor and general manager, died unexpectedly. Five years have passed since that call on May 6, but her memory will last a lifetime with many of us, especially those who worked with her in the newspaper business such as Anne McMillin and Rachel Dahl or knew her around town.
Anne Pershing guided the LVN during a time when local ownership prevailed, and each printed edition hollered with the valley’s local news and sports. After she left the LVN in 2002, she returned to Fallon two years later to run the Fallon Star Press, one of Gannett’s weeklies, she served again as a community editor until the Great Recession shut down the newspaper in late 2008. To many of us, she became a mentor, and for me, she, of all people in media, had the greatest impact on my journalist career.
My family moved to Fallon in 1986 after spending two years in Panama where I taught at a Department of Defense high school. The first year introduced us to the Lahontan Valley, but I wanted to write again for a newspaper. I approached her during the summer of 1987 asking her if she needed a sports writer. I began with football and volleyball, and she kept me for basketball and wrestling and then the softball and baseball season.
That was almost 35 years ago.
Anne was a hands-on editor, but she gave latitude and expected detail as well as accuracy. During our conversations at the LVN and afterward for the next 15 years, she strongly believed community papers are the only important local news sources. Personal columns and the occasional editorial stayed on the opinion page and not within the articles, a trend I kept when I became the LVN editor from 2008 to 2017. When the editor’s position opened at LVN in February 2008, I procrastinated for days until I finally accepted the new challenge at Anne’s insistence. She had the confidence I could guide the paper as its next editor, but little did both of us know how taxing the Great Recession would be to any management job in the newspaper industry with reduced frequency and laid off staff. I still consider her the big sister I never had.
We talked often. I asked her for advice on numerous occasions, but then she called to ask how I was doing or to inquire about my two sons and daughter. We never let our different paths drift in opposite directions; instead, we always found ourselves at the crossroads on numerous occasions. Anne encouraged me to become a member of the Nevada Press Association Board in 2011 and more active with the International Society of Weekly Newspaper Editors. The pinnacle of success for me came in 2012, though, when the NPA recognized me as a Co-Journalist of the Year, and Anne presented me with the plaque at our annual convention in Las Vegas.
This award not only served as recognition but also told me how important community news is to Churchill County. The community became my first family, and the LVN tackled the news of the day and expanded its opinion pages. We had viewpoints from every spectrum and continued to cover local government, the military and high-school athletics. She encouraged me to go to Afghanistan not once , but twice to cover the local soldiers after I retired from the Nevada Army National Guard. The newspaper’s crowning achievement in reporting local news came in late June 2011 when a truck collided into an Amtrak passenger train north of Fallon, killing six. What was local rapidly became international news.
There aren’t too many days when I don’t think of Anne’s friendship and mentoring. Occasionally, I wonder what would Anne do or say?
I am also thankful for the other mentors who have been there, beginning with Rex Daniels, my high school journalism teacher, and Bob Stoddard, who owned KBET Radio in Reno. He hired me as a radio announcer when I was a high school sophomore, but he also gave me the opportunity to broadcast sports and read the news. As a side note, his son Dick, Bobby Mitchell and I played the hits as “Boss Jocks” for four years as the radio station’s format moved to Top 40 and album rock in the late 1960s, early 1970s from late afternoon into the wee hours of the morning.
I found my aircheck tapes buried not too long ago in a storage shed, and had a few laughs from my radio days.
Yet, my reaction to Bob’s death in 1975 was similar to Anne’s I 2016: I cried like a baby.
The late editor of the Nevada State Journal, Paul Leonard, told me in 1971 print was better than broadcast, but it took me years to see his point. Retired Col. Phil Gustafson persuaded me not to enlist as a combat medic in the Nevada Army National Guard but to become an officer. I was first attached to public information and traveled the country. I spent more than three weeks in South Korea with a public affairs detachment for my first international military exercise, Team Spirit 84. From there came the love of reporting on military events and veterans.
Others like former LVN publishers Keven Todd and Rick Swart provided me with the tools and encouragement to become a better journalist and storyteller as did editors Steve Lyon, and Josh Johnson and friends Barry Smith and Adam Trumble. Ron Goldman, program director with the Southern Command Radio-TV Network in Panama in the mid-1980s, gave me the creative eye to develop content. Dick DeWitt, an anchor and news director for KCRL (now KRNV) TV preached consistency and the active voice in writing copy.
To you, Anne, the “Grandma with an Attitude,” I remember the wisdom you gave not only to me but also to others in the journalism field. Even when my two teenage sons wanted to take photos and write articles for the LVN to earn money in the 1990s, she didn’t flinch.
“Anne’s trust in my father was never questioned, and she knew that the quality of sports journalism in Fallon wouldn’t be compromised,” oldest son Thomas wrote. “Trusting a teenager to help to cover high school games was gutsy, but no one doubted her confidence.
“Two years later, I began writing while my brother, who was in seventh grade, started taking photos. Anne offered insight, as well, and along with my father, she helped me develop my raw skills. Competent, young and determined, my brother and I were off to a strong start in the newspaper business.”
Thomas has been in the newspaper business for more than 20 years now, yet I couldn’t have said his thoughts any better. Big sisters like Anne don’t come around often. Steve Ranson is LVN Editor Emeritus.
