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If there is ever an embodiment of what a Nevada journalist needs to be, or should be, or must always be, you need look no further than Guy Clifton.

There are few Nevada journalists who can equal Clifton’s passion for telling the stories of the ordinary people of the Silver State in extraordinary ways while also capturing the state’s history through meticulously researched stories that always conjured the pull of Nevada’s past.

In addition to an award-winning newsroom career that included 22 years as a writer, editor and columnist at the Reno Gazette-Journal (RGJ), Clifton, a University graduate and former editor of the student-run campus newspaper, The Nevada Sagebrush, was the author of nine books – all of them in one form or another about Nevada.

Clifton, who passed away on Sept. 7 at age 62 following several months of illness, was according to longtime friend Mike Mentaberry, who also studied journalism at the University, “an incredible journalist. I’d tell him, ‘Clifton, the stuff you uncover, these little-known facts, these historic gems that you uncover in your work, they’re really something very special.’ He was a great storyteller and writer, and a voracious investigative reporter.

“Guy could do it all.”

Clifton’s passing was mourned throughout Nevada. Clifton covered political, sports and community figures throughout his career of writing and reporting in Northern Nevada.

His former RGJ colleague, Heather Burns, recalled Clifton as “incredible … Guy always made you feel that you were the most important person he had ever known. One of his many gifts was his ability to make you feel special.”

University President Brian Sandoval became friends with Clifton while the two were students at the University; Sandoval was a member of the Associated Students of the �԰���ɫ�� in 1985-86, the same academic year Clifton served as Sagebrush editor.

“Guy loved everything about Nevada, and from the moment you met him, that fact was abundantly clear,” Sandoval remembered. “He was a proud product of Gabbs High School and a proud product of our University. Guy was a person who would go out of his way to share the best and most thoughtful acts of kindness with the people he knew.”

Sandoval added: “I always came away feeling I had learned something new and important about Nevada with every conversation I had with Guy. He was a true son of Nevada. He deeply loved our great state. He was a friend to everyone he met.”

Steve Ranson, an award-winning editor and writer for the Lahontan Valley News in Fallon and a University graduate who was inducted, along with Clifton, on Sept. 15, into the Nevada Press Association Hall of Fame, wrote of Clifton in the Nevada Appeal, “Guy … never lost sight of who he was or from where he came.”

“‘Sons of the Rurals’ is a phrase coined for those who revere the vast, open land beyond the boundaries of Reno, Las Vegas and Carson City and who embellish the life of its people and their lifestyles and thinking,” Ranson continued. “As a reporter, Guy wrote about those people for decades. Like many of us who feel that gritty Nevada dirt that whirls across the Great Basin and sweeps through miles of sagebrush, Guy easily assimilated into the ‘Sons of the Rurals’ as a friend whose heart never left the small towns and their people.”

Said Ray Hagar, the former Reno Gazette-Journal sports editor who was a colleague throughout Clifton’s 22-year tenure at the RGJ: “When Guy passed, and we held his memorial service, you’d think he had served as governor of Nevada. Everyone was there – the former governor of Nevada (Sandoval), the mayor of Reno (Hillary Schieve), (Hall of Fame Nevada Wolf Pack football coach) Chris Ault, members of the Washoe County Commission. You had the biggest movers and shakers in Northern Nevada there. That shows you how much Guy was beloved and respected.”

A SON OF THE RURALS ARRIVES IN NEVADA ALMOST BY CHANCE

Clifton arrived in Nevada almost by chance. He was born in Alabama in 1962, to Miller and Lorraine Clifton. Early on the baby was sickly, suffering from asthma and allergies. The Clifton family, which came to total six children, had a decision to make. If their baby was going to survive, Guy needed a new place to live, with a drier climate where it was easier to breathe.

They moved to Nevada and eventually took up residence in Gabbs, located in the northern corner of Nye County on Nevada State Route 361. When Clifton graduated from Gabbs High School in 1980, the town’s population stood at 811 residents.

Clifton, who would go on to become an all-league performer for the Gabbs High School Tarantulas 8-man football team, loved the hometown that helped give him life with all his heart.

He remembered growing up in a town supported by a magnesium mine where the parents worked hard, the kids were free to roam, and where there were a surprising number of big moments that filled him with excitement.

“An annual event called Gabbs Day was held each September,” Clifton wrote in one of his popular “Sagebrush Almanac” columns in the Reno Gazette-Journal in 2001. “People would come from all around the state to pitch horseshoes, watch the fire departments in competition, and enjoy free barbecue and drinks. The mine paid for the whole thing. It was Gabbs Day 1972 when I met (Nevada) Gov. Mike O’Callaghan, who remains one of my heroes to this day.”

Clifton remembered at Gabbs’ high school graduation in 1979, U.S. Rep. Barbara Vucanovich attended: “Midway through the speech, the backstop on the stage fell over onto her and the other dignitaries. Thankfully no one was hurt. Mrs. Vucanovich did return, but it might have been because Mrs. Walker, our school secretary, was a good Republican.”

Gabbs was a place where kids rode bikes all over the place, where eight of the 15 members of Clifton’s 1980 graduating class from Gabbs High School had all started their educational careers together in first grade, where Clifton and his good friend Troy Weyer were Little League home run champions, where his freshman English teacher, Tim Sowles, inspired him to be a writer and perhaps just as importantly given how Clifton’s love of writing was often eclipsed by a love fishing, Jim Weidert taught him history and how to be a better fisherman.

“My best friends in life were made on the playgrounds, in the gymnasium and on the streets of Gabbs,” Clifton wrote. “So what was it like growing up in a place where you had to drive (60) Hawthorne or (80) Fallon miles to get groceries or see a dentist or eye doctor? What was it like to grow up in Gabbs? It was the time of our lives. It was home.”

Clifton pursued journalism at the University and cited Reynolds School of Journalism professors such as the Jake Highton – also an inductee in the Nevada State Press Association’s Hall of Fame in September – in providing equal parts encouragement and challenge. Highton, Clifton remembered in 2017, “… was as subtle as a chainsaw, but he never forgot a student.”

Clifton made lifelong friends among the people who would become the award-winning staff at the Sagebrush. They included people like Greg Bortolin, the Sagebrush sports editor who would for a time be Clifton’s roommate, and would later serve as Nevada Gov. Kenny Guinn’s press secretary and director of communications; Chris Tumbusch, the photo editor who would work with Clifton at the Record Courier in Gardnerville; Bryan Allison, the production manager, who would go on to become the chief operating officer for Greenspun Media in Las Vegas.

Also on staff that year was an unlikely friend: Will Hogan, a 50ish-year-old from rural Massachusetts, a Veteran who was fluent in four languages, who wrote theater reviews, proofread every issue of the Sagebrush with a monastic attention to detail, and who had worked for at least four previous Sagebrush editors.

Amid the loud music, loud voices, and the occasional firing of a fire extinguisher in the Sagebrush offices near the loading dock of the Jot Travis Student Union, Hogan always remained a picture of quiet focus.

It was something Clifton, who came to be known throughout his career in newspapers for his unfailing ability to write calmly, and quickly, and error-free while on deadline, never forgot.

“Will was quiet and polite,” Clifton wrote of his friend, who passed away in 2002. “He was the eye in our hurricane, always calm amid the chaos. He was never judgmental and sometimes I’d catch him hiding a smile and imagined him thinking, ‘Ah, to be young and foolish again.’”

A STELLAR NEWSPAPER CAREER THAT REAWAKENED THE ECHOES OF NEVADA

Clifton’s career in Nevada newspapers included stints with the North Lake Bonanza, the Gardnerville Record-Courier, and beginning in 1994 and running through 2016, his time at the Reno Gazette-Journal serving at various times as assistant sports editor, columnist and senior reporter.

“Guy was the first guy that I called when I came back to Reno,” said Hagar, the RGJ sports editor who had left Reno in the late 1980s to become sports editor at the El Paso Times before returning to Reno in 1993-94. “I had always been impressed with Guy’s work and his demeanor when he was a stringer for our sports department. What I loved about him was his demeanor never changed. He never got upset. He set such a great example for everyone to follow, including myself.”

Clifton established a reputation, particularly for his column and feature writing, for impeccably written stories that often went beyond the obvious. His writing would dive a little deeper into human nature and sometimes find a historical hook that would add an extra layer of poignant context of what being a Nevadan was all about.

He once wrote of his good friend from their days on campus at the Sagebrush, Bortolin, thinking about accepting a position in the administration of Gov. Kenny Guinn in the early 2000s as Guinn’s press secretary. Guinn was a Republican. Bortolin, a Democrat.

Bortolin, unsure about what it might mean for a Republican governor to have a registered Democrat as his press secretary, placed a call to the former Nevada Gov. Mike O’Callaghan (also a fellow Democrat) for some advice.

“Party affiliation,” Clifton wrote in the RGJ in 2004, “never meant as much to O’Callaghan as character.” Bortolin recalled to Clifton that O’Callaghan’s advice to him contained a simple Nevada logic to it: “Kenny Guinn is a good man. What else do you need to know?”

Bortolin accepted the job.

Clifton had a way, Mike Mentaberry recalled, of immersing himself in his work that few others could match.

Mentaberry, a Reno realtor who served as president of the Reno Rodeo Association in 2000, became friends with Clifton during the 1990s. It was a period where Clifton’s coverage for the RGJ of one of Reno’s most historic events – the rodeo was first held in Reno 1919 – drew the attention of rodeo fans from throughout the world.

There would be advance coverage in the days leading into the Reno Rodeo, several stories each day as the event was held, and post-event coverage as well. The quality of Clifton’s coverage was such that he was honored with the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association’s 2002 Rodeo Writer of the Year award.

“I marvel at the energy that Guy put forth for a two-week period every June for the rodeo,” Mentaberry said. Then Mentaberry smiled and chuckled: “Guy wasn’t a fitness guy, and I know how much my feet hurt after day after day at the rodeo. But Guy would be there each day before any of the events got going, and he’d be there until two or three in morning.

“If it wasn’t for him, (the success of the Reno Rodeo) wouldn’t have happened. You’re talking about millions of dollars of press coverage that he provided, telling the stories of our rodeo.”

A fateful trip in fall 1998, where Mentaberry and Clifton traveled to the famed Pendleton Roundup in northeastern Oregon, changed everything for Clifton. It was at that event Mentaberry wondered aloud if Clifton might be interested in putting together a history book of some sort about the Reno Rodeo.

“Let me think about it,” Clifton, who was clearly intrigued about the idea, told his friend.

“A year later we’re sitting on palettes of books telling the story of the Reno Rodeo’s first 80 years,” Mentaberry said.

Clifton not only researched and wrote the entire, “Reno Rodeo: A History – The First 80 Years,” which was released on Jan. 1, 2000, he also edited and designed it.

The book was a treasure trove of stories and information about an event that had grown from its debut in 1919 into what is now known as the “Wildest, Richest Rodeo in the West.”

Clifton unearthed history that had been lost to time. There are more than 1,300 names of people associated with the rodeo from 1919-1999 included in the book and more than 300 photos, including people like Black cowboy Jesse Stahl, the rodeo’s 1919 steer wrestling champion and founding fathers and community leaders W.H. Moffat and Charles W. Mapes Sr., among many others.

Clifton remembered working every night after work at the RGJ on his manuscript and spending every weekend – and even using personal vacation time – for research.

“I missed the NFL season, the (Nevada) Wolf Pack season, and most of the Wolf Pack basketball season,” Clifton told RGJ books editor Susan Skorupa in June 2000. “Then I had so much information, I had to condense it and get all the pertinent information in. That was hard.”

And what information it was. Perhaps the best example was a seemingly harmless misspelling Clifton discovered. During research for his Reno Rodeo history, Clifton ran across a street name that didn’t look right. In the newspaper archives from the 1930s that he was poring through, Clifton kept seeing references to Charles Sadlier as “Sadleir.” The two-tenths of a mile long road leading into Reno’s rodeo grounds, Clifton seemed to recall, had always been called “Sadlier Way.”

What was “Sadleir” all about?

It turned out that in 1946, Reno’s city leaders wanted to honor Charles “Sadleir” as he was referenced in the newspaper articles of the time, by naming the street that ran between Valley Road and Wells Avenue as “Sadleir Way.”

Sadleir, a former Reno City Councilman, was president of the Reno Rodeo Association from 1935-48 and was generally considered the “father” of the Reno Rodeo. The Reno City Council’s gesture, though well-intended, was not executed properly. By 1947 city maps showed Sadleir’s name misspelled as “Sadlier.” The typo endured over time and remained on street signs.

Beginning in June 2000, using the research he had compiled from his Reno Rodeo book, Clifton kept revisiting the topic in his “Nevada Notes” column in the RGJ. He then enlisted the support of prominent figures in Nevada’s historical community, including State Archivist Guy Rocha and Eric Moody and Phil Earl of the Nevada Historical Society.

Clifton took the error to the Regional Street Naming Committee. He presented extensive documentation of the misspelling. And then, finally, on Feb. 12, 2004, the Reno City Council officially corrected the error and changed the street’s name back to the original intent, to “Sadleir Way.”

Clifton wrote of a mistake that had persisted for much longer than people knew: “Misspelling Sadleir’s name is nothing new. In fact, it seems to be a tradition that dates back at least 100 years. A March 1903 advertisement for Reno’s Overland Hotel lists ‘Mr. Sadlier’ as one of its proprietors.”

Clifton’s incredible drive to plunge deep into Nevada’s history was one of his most defining characteristics, his good friend and former RGJ colleague, Burns, said.

“Guy could talk to you off the top of his head about all of the original families of Nevada … where all the old towns, the old mining towns, where they were located and what their stories were,” said Burns, who was a sportswriter at the RGJ from 1994-98 and today is ESPN’s NFL Senior Deputy Editor, overseeing all of the Worldwide Leader’s NFL coverage. “It isn’t an exaggeration to say that he knew everything about Nevada, and particularly anyone who has ever lived in northern Nevada. His house was like a museum to Nevada history.”

Burns became friends with Clifton almost immediately from the time she started covering high school sports for the newspaper.

“My first day was on a Saturday, and I’m sure I’d been assigned to cover a softball or baseball game, and I’d gotten done with my shift,” she said. “Guy (then the RGJ’s second in charge in the sports department as assistant sports editor) said, ‘Do you want to get a beer? We went out for a beer, and Guy was amazing.

“Even then, from that first time, he was sharing the things I needed to know. He was very much, ‘I’m your confidante and I’m here for you’ and sort of setting up the feeling that you need someone in your corner who understands you. You need that someone who is a little older, and a little wiser than you are.

“Guy was that person for me.”

Burns, who eventually became roommates with Clifton, said, “I couldn’t have done my 20s without Guy Clifton.” She learned all of the Clifton life staples from her friend: “Fishing, rodeo, guns and Nevada,” she said with a laugh. “He was very smart, but he would never tell you what to do. But he had this way without you even realizing it, that he was pushing you in a certain direction.”

Even in the fast-paced, breaking news nature of the around-the-clock ESPN world in which Burns’ leadership is a prime cog, there isn’t a day that she doesn’t think about Clifton.

“Especially relationships,” she said. “You can’t just text people. You need to take the time. You need to learn about them as people. Guy was great at that. He could remember everyone’s names and their spouses and their kids’ names, too. What a great gift he had.”

A CAREER IN FULL, A LIFE OF IMPACT

Clifton’s nine books are incredibly Nevadan. His “You Know You’re A Nevadan If …” and its sequel lay out the questions, quotes, phrases and mythology that have come to define being a Nevadan. Sandoval noted with a smile that Clifton’s book title has forever become ingrained in the language of Nevada. “You Know You’re a Nevadan,” Sandoval said, “If … you knew Guy Clifton.”

The book that Clifton co-authored with Ray Hagar, the former sports editor of the RGJ, “Johnson-Jeffries: Dateline Reno: The Fight of the Century,” retells with vivid energy one of the most important sporting events of all-time, one that put Reno on the sporting map, the heavyweight boxing matchup between the “Great White Hope,” Jim Jeffries, and the famed African-American boxer, Jack Johnson.

“It was a lot of work,” Hagar recalled. “It was kind of frantic toward the end. I remember at one point we only had about three months to hit our Fourth of July deadline. Guy just knew how to persevere. He knew the publishing industry, and he knew how the book needed to be. Even though it was very hard at times, working with Guy on that book was a pleasure. It was fun, hard work but very rewarding. I’d complain and Guy would say, ‘You know what? You’ll feel so much better when see the book and you have the knowledge that you were the one who wrote it. That’s something that no one can ever take from you.’ And you know what? Guy was right.”

Clifton’s “Dempsey in Nevada,” is a love letter to old Nevada, tracing the early life of the heavyweight champion boxing champion Jack Dempsey through Nevada’s hardscrabble mining towns and his eventual residence in a bucolic home on the “old Reno” street of Joaquin Miller Drive not far from the regal old Reno mansions on the bluffs above the Truckee River on California Avenue. Mentaberry and daughter Molly helped Clifton dig out some of the long-lost records of the Dempsey home, though Mentaberry was quick to add, “The book is all Guy. We just found him some property records. And then, of course, he went to town on it and did what Guy always did – write a beautiful book about an important and interesting part of Nevada history.”

Clifton’s career also included being named a “Distinguished Nevadan” by the University in 2022. By that point in his career, Clifton had a well-established reputation for going the extra mile in telling any Nevada story. He was a reporter, who, when asked to write about one of Reno’s most notable buildings, “The Nelson Building” located on 401 West Second Street, which was home for decades to the Reno Evening Gazette newspaper, found a person who was actually born in the building, Elizabeth Shay, to help tell the building’s story.

It is all together fitting, Mentaberry said, that the University and the Reno Rodeo Foundation will honor Clifton’s memory with a scholarship that will be awarded to a student seeking many of the same things young Guy Clifton was hoping to find when he arrived on campus in fall 1980 – a chance to learn the craft of journalism, and an opportunity to write and report accurately, warmly and with currency about the people, state and world around him. The Guy Clifton Memorial Scholarship Endowment, through the Donald W. Reynolds School of Journalism, will help provide the means for future student journalists to pursue a career that Clifton felt was essential to everything he hoped to be, and eventually became.

“You can trace so many things that would not have happened in this community if not for Guy Clifton,” said Mentaberry, who still possesses the black and white proofs, with clips to hold the pages together, of Clifton’s Reno Rodeo book. “It’s a testament to his kindness how he is always going to be remembered.”

Hagar agreed: “Guy was so kind and always willing to help other people. People remembered all the lessons that Guy that taught them because of how nice, how encouraging, he always was. He had such an influence on so many journalists and public relations and communications professionals throughout our community and the state. If they came through the RGJ as a stringer or a clerk, Guy was always there to teach them. People gravitated to him because of his kind demeanor.”

Hagar said he marveled at Clifton’s journalistic output, even as health issues began to slow Clifton over his final few years. A pet project of Clifton’s was “‘Brushin’ Up,” a monthly newsletter Clifton produced detailing information and history about alumni of the Sagebrush, the student-run newspaper he had piloted while editor-in-chief in 1985-86.

“Guy was all about Nevada,” Hagar said. “I believe the last thing he did in journalism was ‘Brushin’ Up,’ which was an amazing history of the Sagebrush and all of the people who worked there. That was just one example of all of the amazing things Guy came up with throughout his career. He loved writing about Nevada and Nevada things.

“‘You Know You’re A Nevadan If …’ will never be duplicated. It’s been so well-received and so many people have seen it. When you say that title, you know exactly what the book was, and who wrote it. It’s Guy Clifton.”

During a memorial service that was held in Reno at the Our Lady of Snows Parish Center in late September, Burns watched the livestream from her home in Connecticut. She had traveled to Reno a few weeks before, to see Clifton in person before he passed.

“I told him all the things I needed to tell him,” Burns said. So many things. Like how Clifton’s thoughtfulness was always so deep and meaningful. How Clifton had made it a point to call all of his friends on Christmas Day, 2020 to remind them that even if they felt like they were alone at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, they weren’t.

Burns said she laughed and cried while watching the livestream of Clifton’s memorial in late September, as Clifton’s many friends recalled the stories of how he’d helped them. Burns even admitted she was a little surprised with how many people remembered Clifton as a person who believed in them and did everything he could to see them achieve their dreams.

“Everybody got up and told a story that they were Guy’s person,” she said. “I got a little jealous, because that’s what I always thought – I always thought I was Guy’s person. But then I realized that whenever someone can do that, that’s an incredible gift, the way Guy always did, to make everyone you know always feel so important.

“Guy really felt that Nevada had saved his life. I’m not alone in wanting his name to live on so that people can understand what an important figure he was in Nevada history.”

Added Mentaberry: “Guy always made sure you felt you were the most important person in the room. He shared a genuine goodness without looking for anything in return. I can only hope to be as genuine and as kind as he was.

“Guy was the best of Nevada. He was the best of all of us.”

The Donald W. Reynolds School of Journalism has announced that the late Nevada journalist Guy Clifton will be honored with the that will help future �԰���ɫ��, Reno students seek careers in the field of journalism. You can .