At a Las Vegas restaurant, I stared at a scantily dressed waitress when she brought us lunch. “You’re going to like it here,” said the Associated Press correspondent that I was about to replace.
I did like it. I thought it would be the best job I would ever have. I was right!
From 1968 to 1970, long before the AP bureau grew to five reporters, I was the only one. In fact, I was the only one writing for out-of-town media other than the rival UPI correspondent.
Opening night for Frank Sinatra? Of course, I went. Elvis Presley’s debut? Got to see that. A real live elephant playing a jumbo slot machine? Sure, get a picture! Another nuclear test? I sat at the bar at the city’s tallest hotel and called the L.A. bureau. “It went off,” I said as I felt some shaking. And I had another drink.
I used to drool over the clippings I got from the Las Vegas News Bureau: Hundreds of newspapers had run my articles about a showgirls’ strike, Howard Hughes scooping up another hotel or Lana Turner’s wedding.
I covered lots of fights including one of George Foreman’s first and Sonny Liston’s last. At ringside, you didn’t dare wear a white shirt if one fighter bled a lot. I even asked Muhammad Ali a question at a press conference.
I interviewed dozens of famous people: Dionne Warwick, Ramsey Lewis, Little Richard, Dizzy Dean, Hoagy Carmichael and Jose Feliciano. When Feliciano got in trouble for a bouncy national anthem in the World Series, he told an AP reporter, “Say hello to Mike Doan for me.”
So why am I not still there? I really got restless in that historical moment as the world seemed to be falling apart. When Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were assassinated, all I did was get gamblers’ reaction. The Vietnam War was in full blast, but I was writing about roulette and blackjack.
The demands of Nevada radio stations and newspapers were overwhelming. I did not want to write another article about an arraignment of some mobster accused of dumping a body in the desert. I didn’t want to set up my teletype machine in the convention center again for another statewide election.
There was no AP repairman within 280 miles. If a radio station’s machine broke down, I had to interrupt my news writing and remove it and put it on a bus for Los Angeles.
So, when an opening came for my hometown of San Francisco, I took it. Now I could get back to real journalism: students rioting, the Black Panthers, Indians occupying Alcatraz. Back to real life!