Harry Reid. (Photo: Associated Press)
Shortly after Christmas, Nevada’s longtime U.S. senator and state career politician Harry Reid died after a three-year battle against pancreatic cancer.
Since he became the city attorney in Henderson in the 1960s and then a state assemblyman from Clark County in 1968, Reid had a strong pulse on Nevada politics for half a century. He tended to have a love-hate relationship with the media during his political career, schmoozing either with the national press or the Las Vegas and Reno media and throwing a bone to the rest of us.
Reid, though, had established a relationship with former Lahontan Valley News and Fallon Eagle-Standard owner David Henley in the 1970s, and the communication between the two continued, even after Harry was elected to Congress in the early 1980s and then to the U.S. Senate in 1986. Then-Gov. Mike O’Callaghan, who prodded his protege to speak to Henley in 1978, had coached Harry as both his boxing and football coach at Henderson’s Basic High School.
As editor, my relationship with Reid wasn’t as harmonious as his rapport with Henley, but we had spoken a dozen times or so on issues affecting Churchill County, specifically military or veteran affairs.
Steve Ranson
I wasn’t keen with Reid and his philosophy on the national stage, but for being a nonveteran, he ensured both the Nevada National Guard and the two active-duty bases — Naval Air Station Fallon and Nellis Air Force Base in Las Vegas — received improvements. In 2005, he led the charge against the Base Realignment and Closure committee proposing to shutter the Hawthorne Army Depot and take the C-130s away from the Nevada Air Guard.
During his years in Washington, D.C., Reid and his military adviser, the late Maj. Gen Robert Herbert, took care of the state’s National Guard. New readiness centers sprung up in Washoe and Clark counties and many existing armories including the one in Fallon received major facelifts. No longer did we feel like we were fighting the 1960s Cold War.
Reid occasionally addressed local veterans and other guests on either Memorial Day or Veterans Day, alternating between the Southern and Northern Nevada state cemeteries.
When Reid died in December at the age of 82, I recalled the first time I met him almost 52 years ago and then again in Panama on a chance meeting in October 1988.
Labor Day 1970. As a teenager who was days away from attending the University of Nevada, Reno as a freshman, I had accepted a challenge from several people in the Reno media to race camels in Virginia City. In between races on Saturday was a parade down C Street.
Before summer, I bought a bright red, used Toyota Landcruiser, and in June my dad helped me remove the top and install a roll bar for four-wheel outings. Politicians who arrived in the Comstock were frantically looking for people who had convertibles to drive them in the parade. Two men approached me with another next to them, and they introduced the shorter man as Harry Reid, a first-time candidate running for lieutenant governor.
So Reid climbed into the back of the Landcruiser at the parade’s starting point on C Street north of Fourth Ward School and proceeded to grip the rollbar. Once we drove past the major bars and businesses, I turned west on one of the narrow streets to chug up the hill to B Street. Being a teenager, I thought I would have a little fun going up the hill and decided to take my foot off the accelerator and let the Toyota roll backward a few feet.
A sudden moan emanated from the back, and I could see Reid in my rearview mirror holding on for life and gasping, wondering if we were going to roll back to C Street. We did reach the top, but he decided to jump out and walk.
I encountered Reid a few times after that parade, but he had left politics and became a member of the Nevada Gaming Commission.
My unit received orders to Panama in mid-October 1988 for three weeks of annual training. Within an hour of our arrival at Howard Air Force Base, soldiers gathered in the terminal after retrieving their duffle bags and boxes of gear. We weren’t alone. We saw Reid walk in, and he stopped to chat with us after one of our soldiers who knew him greeted the senator. Reid saw our arm patches shaped as the state of Nevada.
We indulged with the normal chitchat. Reid made the small talk and asked us about our unit, which was the 106th Public Affairs Det., and asked about our training. We introduced ourselves before he told us about his trip to Panama. He thought we were all novice journalists who wrote articles for the Nevada Guard newspaper.
What came next was unexpected for the junior Nevada senator.
One of our soldiers asked Reid some “hard-hitting” questions on a few state issues, and his eyes widened. He looked stunned. Hannah Philips, who had once lived in Fallon and was now working for the Nevada Appeal in Carson City, then told him she was a government reporter. I jumped in and said I was with the Lahontan Valley News in Fallon (but I didn’t tell him I wrote sports).
Reid hastened his time with us before we left Howard AFB and headed into Panama City.
I saw Reid a few more times when, as a senator, he visited the Northern Nevada Veterans Memorial Cemetery in Fernley or stopped in Churchill County — once at the newspaper office and another time at Lattin Farms when he was running for another Senate term in 2010. After he toured the hoop houses and the farm, I interviewed him on his filing for re-election … and if you’re wondering … he still remembered hanging on to the rollbar.
After the March 2010 visit to Lattin Farms, though, I would occasionally receive a card or letter from him congratulating me on some newspaper or military award. After my first trip to Afghanistan as a journalist and two years after my retirement from the military, I had written about Nevada’s soldiers facing unemployment when they returned home. Both he and then-Congressman Dean Heller, along with former Gov. Brian Sandoval, began to address those issues affecting the Guard soldiers.
Reid and Heller ensured a bill that passed Congress in 2016 gave military personnel in the National Guard, U.S. Army reservists and state technicians veteran-status recognition from the federal government. The states had already granted that veteran recognition.
I never saw eye-to-eye with Reid when he ran for Senate because of differing viewpoints. Perhaps he didn’t like a column I wrote during the 2010 campaign when I labeled his opponent as the “new darling of rural Nevada.” Yet, what he did for veterans and the military may never be replicated in Nevada politics. For that, he didn’t have to worry about me taking the foot off the gas and rolling backward.
It was a smoother drive when he supported our veterans.
Steve Ranson is editor emeritus of the Lahontan Valley News and a 28-year veteran who retired in 2009.
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