Question of the Day - 26 October 2023

Yesterday’s Question of the Day covered Ned Day’s early years, his Mob associations in Milwaukee, reinvention as a crusading journalist, and relocation to Sin City. We pick up the thread as he accepted a reporter’s job at the underdog Valley Times in North Las Vegas …

Las Vegas and Ned Day were a marriage made in heaven and he took the low-paying Valley Times gig with one proviso: He had to have a corner desk. “He liked the glitz, the glitter, the bimbos, the lounge lizards,” said former Valley Times scribe Linda Faiss. “He liked the movers and shakers, and the fact that we were such a young upstart city. That was his kind of place.”

It was a life of strange contrasts. Day spent his first Vegas Christmas in a topless bar on the Strip. He shopped for his wardrobe at the Salvation Army and squired burlesque-queen bombshell Angelique Pettijohn.

Aiming his Valley Times column like a machine gun at the Mob, Day “went out of his way to seek the most belittling language,” remembered a former editor. “It was a very effective weapon, I think, in reducing the potency of these characters.”

From The Valley Times, Day moved on to be a columnist for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, where his style was recalled as “a combination of John L. Smith’s everyman eloquence and Jon Ralston’s political savvy.” The established paper recognized that it needed someone like Day to shake up its stodgy image — something with which it struggles to this day. Reminisced then-editor Tom Keevil, “He wrote to the firewall all the time.”

Simultaneously, Day doubled as the managing editor of KLAS-TV. His midwestern twang and pugnacious manner made an odd but effective on-camera combination. He rose to be news anchor, sharing the desk with an unlikely TV partner: future GOP bigwig and casino boss Sue Lowden.

As UNLV's Michael Green recalled, Day ”could be rough and critical of everyone from entertainers he disliked to governors he disagreed with. He could be sentimental in his way, but mainly about people he saw as better than himself — the average folks, making a living out of the limelight or even at its edges.”

Fellow investigative reporter George Knapp remembers the July 1986 detonation of Day’s Volvo as the happiest day of that reporter’s life: “This was proof that he was really getting under someone’s skin. When the [‘This is not NED DAY’S car’] bumper stickers appeared days later, it was even better. Characteristically, Ned tweaked the noses of those responsible.” 

Day’s own spin on the bombing was, “It doesn’t take much courage to sneak up and attack an unarmed car.” His only regret was that his golf clubs were ruined.

“There were other incidents involving threats or attempts to cause him harm, some never made public,” Knapp told the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

“If something happened to me,” Day bristled, “then '60 Minutes' and ABC’s' 20/20'—Geraldo Rivera and all those jerks—are going to be all over here like they were in Arizona where reporter Don Bolles was murdered.”

That said, Knapp, no stranger to conspiracy theories, definitively rules out foul play as the cause of Day’s Hawaiian demise, noting that his colleague was at the top of every risk category for heart disease. At the time, former governor Grant Sawyer eulogized Day as “the most influential man in Nevada.”

Day is interred at Palm Memorial Park in Las Vegas. Every year on the anniversary of his death, Knapp leaves a fifth of Jack Daniels and a can of 7-Up at Day’s grave. His headstone reprises his on-air sing-off, “I thought you’d like to know, I’m Ned Day.”