Columnist Susan Snyder: Deskin was a true pioneer

Monday, Feb. 16, 2004 | 9:01 a.m.

Susan Snyder's column appears Mondays, Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Reach her at snyder@lasvegassun.com or (702) 259-4082.

I'm not going to pretend I know Ruthe Deskin any better than the regular reader because that's how I did know her -- as a reader.

Her passing marks the end of an era for the Back and Forth faithful.

And it's the end of an era for women like me. Women like Ruthe are the reasons we are paid to do what we love.

Ruthe started the hard way, with a paper route for the Reno Evening Gazette that she worked while growing up in Yerington during the Great Depression.

She worked as the women's editor for the Reno newspaper in the 1940s and was employed at a Las Vegas radio station and an advertising firm when offered a job as assistant to Las Vegas Sun Executive Editor Hank Greenspun in 1954.

Even for women with experience and talent, journalism of the 1950s remained a career that more often happened by chance than design.

As Greenspun's assistant, Ruthe found herself in the thick of deadline frenzy after he was critically injured in an automobile crash. She visited him daily in his hospital room, seeking guidance for the course of the next day's business.

In a column published May 15 last year, Ruthe recalled the events that led to her writing career in Las Vegas:

"After one particularly hectic day at the office, I sat down at my typewriter (no computers in those days) and wrote messages I bunched together under the title, 'memo to Hank.' I detailed my concerns about some local problems involving politics, the Board of Regents, traffic, water and law enforcement."

She took the memo to the hospital for Hank's perusal and saw it the next morning printed word-for-word on the Sun's front page. Her column, Memo to Hank, was a regular fixture until shortly before his death in 1989.

Back and Forth followed in Accent, which is where I first met her.

In my five years at the Sun, I laid eyes on Ruthe three times. She worked from home, occasionally shooting me an e-mail about something I had written.

I rarely valued another journalist's opinion as much as I valued Ruthe's. She didn't get here the easy way.

Ruthe's career path was a bumpy one she paved herself. She trusted her skills, ethics and instincts, and established a woman's rightful place in what was once a man's business.

"Sometimes a career is generated by accident or even luck. But always, it is best to be prepared with whatever might lie ahead," Ruthe wrote back in May. "Luck might have something to do with the future, but don't count on it."

Count instead on hard work, education, integrity, faith and a will to succeed, she said.

And she did to the very last.

I'll miss Ruthe's Thursday wisdom and wit. I'll desperately miss her e-mail and encouragement. But she'll always be in the newsroom.

Women like Ruthe don't exist in 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.