Ruthe Deskin Article to Be Published
Happy to learn that the article Lance & I wrote about Ruthe Deskin is going to be published soon. Budget cuts had delayed the article’s publication. The article is titled: “Where She Stands: Ruthe Deskin and Her Place in the City of Bright Lights and Bigger Personalities After 50 years at the Las Vegas Sun.”
Here is more about Ruthe:
Acknowledged by Las Vegas Sun Publisher Hank Greenspun himself as the calming force behind his fiery brand of journalism, Ruthe Deskin held the power of the pen in Las Vegas for a half-century of checks and balances, keeping an eye on the grandstanding, greed, and hubris of the city’s leaders and developers while still finding time to champion her own causes. Yet the men she kept in line have always overshadowed her own important story.
Like many women journalists of her era, she helped to establish the foundation of her community, and her legacy is a lasting one. In her community, as co-founder, she left behind the Sun Youth Forum to give high school students a voice in the community. She also worked with the Juvenile Court Services, served as a Child Welfare Advisory Board Member, and served as director of the Spring Mountain Youth Camp. For this work, her community honored her many times over. A Las Vegas elementary school is named in her honor, and after Deskin died, the students and teachers decided to have an annual event to remember their school’s namesake. The students created murals and wrote essays about her life. At one presentation, former Clark County Superintendent Brian Cram said to the children: “Sometimes you hear people say, ‘When I grow up I want to be … When you grow up, I hope you are like Ruthe Deskin.”
Las Vegas Sun columnist Susan Snyder wrote of this truth upon Deskin’s death: “Women like Ruthe don’t exist in the past tense. They live on, embodied in women who go to work at newspapers every day as interns, business writers, cop reporters, columnists, editors and publishers. Women journalists can take for granted the opportunities their predecessors took any way they could get them. We’re fortunate to be here simply because we chose to be. But we should remember women like Ruthe, for it was she who made the choice possible.”
