Norm Clarke learned to love writing by reading the Miles City Star, and he wrote his first story for the Terry Tribune. He’s come a long way since then, and on Saturday he’ll deliver the commencement address for the graduating class at Montana State University Billings.
Norm Clarke agrees: he’s come a long way from his small-town start.
His lengthy journalism career began when he was in high school in his Eastern Montana hometown of Terry. The personable Clarke talked the editor of the local weekly newspaper, the Terry Tribune, into letting him report on a Class C basketball tournament in a nearby town.
It’s a long way, in more than miles, from that humble start to Clarke’s current stature as the man-about-town — a.k.a. gossip — columnist for the Las Vegas Review-Journal. In his “Vegas Confidential” column he chronicles the mischief — and sometimes heart-warming good deeds — committed by musicians, magicians and other entertainers; sports personalities; business bigwigs; and politicians of all levels, including the current as well as past presidents. It all makes for a sometimes-you-can’t-make-this-up hodgepodge of human folly and altruism played out on Sin City’s bigger-than-life stage.
His knack for being at the right spot at the right time, or at least having an excellent network of sources, means that more often than not he breaks big stories first — today and throughout a career spanning more than 50 years.
He’s still going strong at age 71, writing up to five columns a week for the Review-Journal. Yet, the guy who left the Treasure State about 40 years ago remains a Montanan at heart and can’t resist a call to come home. He’s doing it again this weekend.
Commencement speaker
He’s scheduled to deliver the commencement address to the 2014 graduating class of Montana State University Billings. The ceremony starts at 10 a.m. Saturday in the Rimrock Auto Arena at MetraPark.
The occasion will be special for Clarke because his mother, Dorothy, who died in 1990, would have celebrated her 92nd birthday on May 3. And her son says his mother would have added a homey touch to the festivities.
“She was known in Terry for her caramel rolls and her cinnamon rolls,” Clarke said Wednesday in an interview from his home near the Las Vegas Strip, which he shares with his wife, Cara, and their two dogs.
“She just loved baking them and giving them to people,” he said. “And I’ll tell you, if she were alive and in good health, she would be figuring out, ‘How do I make 7- or 8,000 cinnamon and caramel rolls and get ’em up to Billings for Norm’s graduation party?’”
This will be Clarke’s first college commencement address, although he’s returned to Terry five times to speak at high school graduations since the early 1980s. His loyalty to the Prairie County hamlet prompted him to write his first book, “Tracing Terry Trails,” a compilation of town history done to help commemorate its centennial in 1982. And even the frenetic pace of Las Vegas didn’t keep him from penning an article about a Terry High School track star for the Terry Tribune last spring.
When Clarke talks to young people about the craft of journalism and how to become a professional writer, his message is straightforward. It boils down to something more fundamental than a program of college study and a resulting degree.
“I would tell them as I have a number (of times), it’s going to be very important for them to appreciate history. They’ve got to have a love for history because they’re going to be writing history. They’re going to be chronicling the events of their generation,” he said.
“And so they’ve got to keep up, they’ve got to read the paper, they’ve got to watch TV, they’ve got to be very aware socially of what’s going on in the world. And not just in their hometown, their home state — you’ve got to build up your knowledge of world events.”
Clarke offered additional advice to aspiring journalists.
Write a lot, he said, because “it’s tougher than ever to come out of college and get a job on a newspaper.” Instead of shooting for a big-city paper (where some of the deepest staff cuts have occurred), young writers should consider applying at a suburban paper or writing for a blog.
Clarke has proven adaptable to technological change and accepting new outlets for his writing. His columns for the Review-Journal have been available online almost from when he started working in Las Vegas 15 years ago. For the past 10 years, his celebrity blockbusters have gotten extra buzz — sometimes gone viral, as in the case of Britney Spears’ hours-long marriage — thanks in part to drawing links from the Drudge Report, Matt Drudge’s mega news aggregator Web site.
And long before he became a Web presence, Clarke built a reputation as one of the country’s best breaking-news reporters. Notable milestones, all coming after he was hired by the Associated Press in 1973:
• Coverage of the Big Red Machine, the Cincinnati Reds juggernaut of the ’70s, including the society-sports event of the year in 1975 — the wedding with much fanfare of Hall of Fame catcher Johnny Bench.
• The first report on the Beverly Hills Supper Club fire in Southgate, Ky., which claimed 165 lives.
• Being part of the reporting team that earned a Pulitzer Prize nomination for reporting on the collapse of a nuclear power plant cooling tower in West Virginia, where 66 construction workers died.
• After transferring to San Diego in the early 1980s, encountering embattled Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling, who had just acquired the then-San Diego-based NBA franchise and who adamantly denied any intent to move the team — and then promptly did so, to Los Angeles.
• Coordinating AP’s coverage of the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, where he met the CEO of the games, Peter Ueberroth.
Clarke’s connection to the Olympics chief paid off when Ueberroth was hired as Major League Baseball commissioner after the Games.
Denver, which then had the AAA baseball Bears, was angling to become one of the next cities awarded a major league franchise. To heighten the drama, the Mile High City was the scene of one of the last true newspaper wars in the United States. It pitted the Rocky Mountain News, known to locals as “the Rocky,” against the Denver Post.
Getting the scoop
Who would get the scoop on Denver landing a big league baseball team?
The Rocky certainly wanted to be the winner, enough so that management recruited Clarke away from the AP. He delivered, breaking the news that a new squad called the Rockies would take the field at the Broncos’ Mile High Stadium, this occurring several years before Coors Field was built.
After a decade of writing sports for the News, Clarke switched to a different type of writing for the paper, a change that became the launchpad for his move to Las Vegas in 1999.
Recalling this week what happened, Clarke said:
“I got the bug to work Vegas after the Rocky promoted me to the man-about-town column in 1996. I loved it, but it didn’t take long to figure out that Vegas would be a great last stop. So at the age of 57, I decided to chase my last dream job.
“To be honest, I missed the AP and the almost-daily rush of turning hot tips into celebrity gold. Some days it’s Britney Spears getting married for a few hours or a shouting match between George Clooney and Steve Wynn. Figured out quite a while ago that I’m a news junkie with a serious adrenalin addiction.”
“Some days,” he added, “I feel like I’m operating a one-man AP bureau in the center of the entertainment universe.”
That was evident again earlier this month. Clarke got a tip that Las Vegas casino tycoon Steve Wynn and A-list actor George Clooney, who normally get along well in spite of differing political leanings, had gotten together for dinner. No real story there, except that the sharing of food and drink degenerated into an expletive-laden argument over Barack Obama, Clooney expressing his stout admiration for the president (whom he calls a friend) and Wynn expressing his equally stout contempt for the country’s chief executive.
Clarke went to work and, after calling Wynn and first asking him about casino expansion plans (none at the moment), got confirmation of the fracas.
And the story went viral. It got electronic and print media coverage across the United States and around the world, including top billing on the Drudge Report and the Huffington Post. Next thing Clarke knew, he was being interviewed by Matt Lauer on NBC’s “Today Show” about the shouting match.
Over the phone, you can hear the amazement Clarke feels thinking of where he came from and where he is now.
“I’ve only been starstruck a few times in my life,” he said. “(One) was when I first got to cover the big leagues … my second year in Cincinnati and I’m covering Hank Aaron.
“The Braves are coming to Cincinnati with Hank Aaron one home run shy of Babe Ruth’s record, and (the AP editors) told me I was going to be the lead writer for it. I tell you, I didn’t sleep much the night before. I thought, ‘Wow, don’t mess this up, Norm.’”
The Atlanta slugger tied one of baseball’s most hallowed records, Ruth’s 714 career homers, on April 4, 1974, with Clarke’s AP dispatch the lead sports story for newspapers across the country. He calls the feat a “numerologist’s delight” because it happened on 4/4/74; Aaron’s uniform number was 44; Reds’ pitcher Jack Billingham, who gave up Aaron’s shot, wore number 34; Aaron was batting cleanup, fourth in the order; and Aaron connected on the fourth pitch to him. To top things, four days later, Aaron hit number 715 to surpass Ruth.
In on the ground floor
At that point, it had been little more than a decade since he went to work for the Miles City Star. As a part-time sportswriter in 1963, his paycheck was $50 a week. His economic situation improved, but only slightly, soon afterwards when he landed a full-time sportswriting job with Helena Independent Record, earning $87.50 a week.
“The editor was this kind of stuffed-shirt kind of guy who said, ‘I don’t want you coming back and asking for more because you’re already under-qualified.’ In other words, I didn’t have a journalism degree. I didn’t really deserve anything more than what he was going to give me because that was it — you’re really lucky to have a job based on how little background and experience you have.”
Still, Clarke admits there was some truth in that assessment.
“I don’t know how many reporters could have been more raw than I was when I showed up at a newspaper. I was truly as green a reporter as you could get. But I had found what I wanted to do.”
Then 20, Clarke could look back on delivering grocery store ads to the Terry Tribune and asking the editor if he planned to cover the Terriers in the district 4-C Class C basketball tournament in Baker. “He said, ‘I’m not much of a sports fan but I see you at all the games so why don’t you cover it for me?’
“I remember thinking, he’s got to be kidding. You think in terms of being a grocery boy, you don’t think somebody’s going to give you a chance to cover sports. I loved sports. That was the biggest thing in my life when I first started. The guy who covered sports for the local paper was just a god to me.
“I had been a newspaper delivery boy and on those long walks (between subscribers’ homes), I just read the Miles City Star from cover to cover. And that’s where I fell in love with words and newspapers.”
Still, Clarke said he wouldn’t have “dared to dream something (as) grandiose” as reporting on the World Series, the Olympics or the latest shenanigans of pop stars like Spears, Lindsay Lohan, Pamela Anderson, Kid Rock, Tommy Lee and washed-up athletes like Dennis Rodman.
So, Clarke provides experience-based perspective to those thinking of going into an industry — newspapers — under siege.
“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve encouraged kids to go to journalism school,” he said, quickly adding that his success in spite of negative feedback from an editor long ago shows that hard work and openness to opportunity are just as important as a degree.
“Go crazy. Write a lot,” he said. And don’t undersell the value of a liberal arts degree at a time when higher education seems to encourage occupation-focused majors.
“How many of us knew what we wanted to be when we were teenagers?” he asked. “Hopefully, you’ll find what you really love, and it won’t (seem like) work.”
Details:
Norm Clarke’s columns for the Las Vegas Journal-Review in April 2014 provided insight into two major news stories: The George Clooney-Steve Wynn dinner argument over conflicting opinions of President Obama, and the travails of Los Angeles Clippers’ owner Donald Sterling, now banished for life by the NBA because of his tape-recorded racist comments.
Clarke has written four books: “Tracing Terry Trails,” 1992; “High hard ones: Denver’s road to the Rockies from inside the newspaper war,” 1993; “Norm Clarke’s Vegas Confidential: Sinsational Celebrity Tales,” 2008; and “Vegas Confidential: Norm! Sin City’s Ace Insider: 1,000 Naked Truths, Hot Spots, & Cool Stuff,” 2010.
About that patch
Norm Clarke’s trademark is the patch over his right eye. What’s the story behind it?
In his 2008 book, “Norm Clarke’s Vegas Confidential: Sinsational Celebrity Tales,” Clarke described a verbal altercation that year with Criss Angel, an illusionist/magician who had recently arrived in Vegas:
“Don’t write another word about me, or you’ll need an eye-patch over your other eye,” he cracked.
“Good one,” I replied. “Never heard that one before.”
I’ve heard a lifetime of one-eyed jokes since losing vision in my right eye at age three when the suspenders on my pants came loose and blinded me. I tolerated the jokes in my youth, after having the eye removed when I was 10. At 65, I was decades past the point of letting someone get away with a cheap shot. Especially a 40-year-old headliner-to-be who should know better.
Dennis Gaub is a former newspaper reporter and the author of the forthcoming “Dream Season: how the little Laurel Locomotives steamed to an unbeaten season and captured a historic Montana basketball championship.”
Website: dennisgaub.me
