Veteran LV newspaper editor Digles dies at 73

Friday, March 12, 2004 | 10:48 a.m.

Longtime newspaperman Joseph Digles died of cancer Thursday in his Incline Village home. He was 73.

Digles, former owner of the now defunct Valley Times, served as managing editor and then editor-in-chief of the Las Vegas Review-Journal in the 1960s. He began his journalism career at the Las Vegas Sun in 1955, quickly moving from the sports beat to covering crime.

"He worked at the Sun when Hank Greenspun was still alive and Hank Greenspun told him to go after anybody and everybody who was a bad guy," Joseph Digles' brother, Ron Digles of Henderson, said this morning. "And he did just that."

Ron Digles said his brother's coverage of local mobsters was fearless, and that he "really set himself up to be in a bad place" with some of his every-other-day, front-page exposes on Las Vegas gangsters.

"He was a tough bird," Ron Digles said.

Joseph Digles went to work for the Review-Journal around 1958, and in his first year there he covered the worst airline disaster in Las Vegas history. Fortynine people died when an airliner collided with an F-100 figher jet from Nellis Air Force in southwest Las Vegas.

"It was just a tragedy. I don't really know how to describe it," Joseph Digles said in a 1998 Review-Journal article commemorating the 40th anniversary of the crash. "You just knew no one was going to be alive.'

Sen. Bob Coffin, D-Las Vegas, remembered hanging around Digles in the Review-Journal newsroom when Coffin was a sports stringer in high school.

"He was in constant motion, a bundle of nerves," Coffin said this morning. "A stickler for accuracy and brave as a bull."

Digles and others thrived on the fierce competition between the Sun and the Review-Journal, Coffin said.

"It was exciting to be in the newsroom with guys like Digles," Coffin said.

Digles, who originally was from Chicago, studied journalism at the University of Southern California. He made it a career after winning three awards for best story at a college journalism conference, Ron Digles said.

Digles served in the Army for two years before moving to Las Vegas in 1954. Ron Digles said their father had to give him a crash course on how to drive to be able to make it out here for his first newspaper job.

Digles is survived by his brother Ron and his three stepchildren, Jim Gallo, a former North Las Vegas fire chief who is now retired, John Vorphal of Las Vegas and Jennifer Slade of Colorado. His wife, Barbara, died in 2002.

Services are pending at Palm Mortuary. Burial will be in Las Vegas.