Welcome to this week’s Reno News & Review.
Me again. I just wanted to add one more thing to the 21st birthday celebration. I can’t remember exactly when Bruce Van Dyke started writing a column for the Nevada Weekly—it was like December 1993, and the column was called Future Coot or something—but he certainly deserves a mention whenever we talk about the history of this newspaper. I can’t tell you how many times people have told me, “Bruce Van Dyke is the first thing I read in that paper, and it’s not all that uncommon that it’s also the last.” Anyway, Bruce, I’m going to write a paragraph to add to the 21st anniversary story, and in 30 years, we’ll just pretend it was there the whole time.
Bob Grimm is the same way. My memory of his first review is even foggier. I think he sent a review to R.V. Scheide, and R.V. ran it without telling him, and then offered him the gig. So that would make it, probably June or July of 1995. Despite recent missteps regarding the new Star Wars movie and a completely erroneous review of The Witch, which read like it was written by one of the movie’s producers on Rotten Tomatoes, I’ve enjoyed Bob Grimm’s antics over the years, and while I don’t often agree with him, I always enjoy reading him. We would not have been the RN&R you know and love without his efforts.
I took a giant step back from the development of that birthday story. I picked the writer, Mark Maynard—who as always did an admirable job—and I sent him a bunch of sources (even people who’ve hated us over the years), but I didn’t want to much influence the story. I just couldn’t be my normal editor self without coming off as sort of auto-fellating. I was a little bit disappointed that some of the people who accused us of all manner of unethical behavior over the years didn’t take the opportunity chime in, but you know, fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke.