Sun’s first sports editor dies at 88

Thursday, Oct. 27, 2005 | 8 a.m.

* Born: Oct. 18, 1917, in Flagstaff, Ariz.

* Education: Las Vegas High School and the University of Nevada, where he majored in journalism, graduating in 1940.

* Military: Army, World War II.

* Services: Graveside 11 a.m. today at Bunker Memory Gardens, 7251 W. Lone Mountain Road.

* Survivors: Wife, Shirley Heckethorn of Las Vegas; son, David Heckethorn of Las Vegas; daughter, Cheryl Caviglia of Reno; brother, Howard Heckethorn of Las Vegas; and two grandchildren.

* Donations: To the Alzheimer's Association's Southern Nevada chapter or to UNR.

In 1949 Clarence Heckethorn made a decision that would change the course of his career and journalism in the Las Vegas Valley. Heckethorn, the Las Vegas Review-Journal's sports editor for five years during the late 1940s, opted to support the paper's production crew and pressmen who had been locked out after the R-J installed new equipment and eliminated jobs.

Heckethorn, fellow Review-Journal reporter Ray Germain and others joined the ousted International Typographers Union workers in founding the Las Vegas Free Press, which in 1950 was purchased by Hank Greenspun and renamed the Las Vegas Sun.

Clarence A. Heckethorn, the Sun's first sports editor, who later became the leader of the board that oversees the state's worker's compensation system, died Sunday. He was 88.

"My brother at the time of the lockout was president of the local editorial writers union and was not about to cross a picket line," said Howard Heckethorn, a retired schoolteacher who has a local school named for him.

"After he left the Sun in 1959 to become chairman of the Industrial Insurance Commission (now the Employers Insurance Company of Nevada), my brother missed covering sports. He loved football, basketball and boxing and for many years continued to go to big local events."

In the Sun's 50th anniversary edition five years ago, Alan Jarlson, a Sun reporter in the 1950s and '60s, called Heckethorn and the paper's first managing editor, Germain, part of "a band of young Turks from the old school of newspapering," referring to the staff's aggressiveness.

The Sun had a union production shop and press operation until 1990, when the paper entered into a joint operating agreement with the Review-Journal, which took over those operations with its nonunion production departments.

Heckethorn also served as executive director of Nevada Blue Cross Blue Shield before retiring in 1985.

Ed Koch can be reached at 259-4090 or at koch@lasvegassun.com.