Last weekend in Reno, Frank McCulloch’s name was added to the Nevada Newspaper Hall of Fame. It was a nice gesture, well-deserved and long overdue.
There was no shortage of worthy recipients of the honor that Saturday, but even in that group McCulloch’s contributions to journalism qualify as something special.
At the ceremony, McCulloch’s proud grandson, Christopher Parman, spoke on behalf of the family and reminisced about the man he came to know as a great teacher and lifelong student. His grandfather was not only a giant of journalism, but also a person who took him fishing and taught him how to play baseball.
“First and foremost, he was a Marine,” Parman said. “I mean if you look at him, if you look up Marine in the dictionary, there would probably be a picture of him. He carried himself like a Marine. He spoke like a Marine. … And when I was 9 years old, he coached my Little League baseball team.”
But it’s a safe bet that the native son’s name isn’t well recognized around Nevada these days, even by many of the state’s veteran journalists. That’s unfortunate. The country and its beleaguered working press can benefit from McCulloch’s story. His life and career were distinguished by integrity, courage and grit on deadline from San Francisco to Saigon.
As a reporter and editor with Time and Life magazines, along with the Reno Evening Gazette, Los Angeles Times, Sacramento Bee and San Francisco Examiner newspapers, McCulloch broke big stories and directed investigations that resulted in the exposure of mob influences in the casino business, and corrupt politicians and businessmen. And when the going got tough, McCulloch never failed to support his people after their best efforts resulted in multimillion-dollar defamation suits. Most notably for Nevadans was his tenacious, and successful, defense of his Sacramento Bee reporter against then-U.S. Sen. Paul Laxalt.
It all began in Fernley. Born in 1920, the son of a pioneer cattle ranching family, he courted his future wife, Jakie Caldwell, on horseback and dreamed of pitching in the big leagues. Scouts saw potential in his fastball, but he was too wild for the pros. He enrolled at the University of Nevada in Reno and gravitated toward journalism, editing the Sagebrush campus newspaper and stringing stories for UPI. That effort led him to a job in San Francisco and the world beyond.
“If it weren’t for that journalism school,” McCulloch liked to tell friends, “I’d still be bucking bales of hay on the ranch in Nevada.”
At the beginning of World War II, he enlisted in the Marine Corps, but a heart murmur kept him from the frontlines. Instead, he contributed to the war effort by writing stories of valor and glory for the Marines’ San Francisco information office. When the war ended, McCulloch went to work for the Reno Evening Gazette.
Almost immediately he turned the state upside down by exposing the corrupt casino licensing of men with direct ties to organized crime. The stories earned him a reputation for reporting excellence, death threats from myriad hoodlums and spurred Time to hire him first as a correspondent in Los Angeles and then bureau chief in Dallas. There, his reporting on the segregated South brought the issues of racism and discrimination to the magazine’s readers. In 1955, his cover story of a young Black attorney named Thurgood Marshall, fresh from his victory in Brown v. Board of Education, introduced the civil rights icon and future U.S. Supreme Court justice to many Americans.
McCulloch is not only the last reporter to interview American tycoon Howard Hughes, but he is also responsible for exposing writer Clifford Irving for penning a fraudulent autobiography of the reclusive billionaire.
At the Los Angeles Times, McCulloch was largely responsible for helping to turn the newsroom into a professional operation that stressed investigative reporting. Exposés of the political reach of the John Birch Society and the Teamsters Union’s financial connections to Los Angeles area land development helped move the newspaper into a new era and gave it national prominence.
At Time, McCulloch served as Southeast Asia bureau chief in Hong Kong and Saigon during the buildup of the Vietnam War, developing a reputation that reflected his U.S. Marine Corps training. In the service of the facts in a war-fogged land where the truth was often hard to come by, he became disillusioned with America’s mission and that of his magazine. As David Halberstam wrote in his masterful The Powers That Be, “Frank McCulloch was a legend in Vietnam. … It is characteristic of the war that he was one of its best reporters and that no one outside of his profession knew his name, partly because of the anonymity of Time and even more because of the unwillingness of his magazine to accept his reporting.”
He would go on to top editing positions at the Sacramento Bee and San Francisco Examiner, start his own education magazine and jump into courtroom battles in defense of the First Amendment. All the while he maintained his affiliation with UNR and its Reynolds School of Journalism, receiving an honorary doctorate and recognition as a Distinguished Nevadan.
McCulloch received Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism’s highest honor in 1984 “for singular journalistic performance in the public interest” and “overarching accomplishment and distinguished service to journalism.” But Pulitzer Prize-winning Nevada journalist and author Warren Lerude says his longtime friend wasn’t about awards, or even recognition. He was about fighting the good fight at all levels for journalism because he understood its importance to a free society.
“Frank McCulloch stood for one thing above all, and that was integrity,” Lerude says. “Generations of reporters at all levels, from the small dailies and weeklies … to the major organizations like The New York Times, Time-Life News Service, and PBS, revered in his steady performance and vision about what journalism was all about.” Journalists face great conflicts in war and peacetime, and McCulloch believed in “the service of the public” at all times, according to Lerude. “He was a great blessing for all of us who always need to learn more and more how to do what we’re doing in our profession and make our craft better and better.”
In his own long journalism career, Lerude faced many First Amendment issues, and through the decades “the first person I would always turn to was Frank for the vision and strength of purpose and position to advance the cause of freedom of information.”
McCulloch served as a great inspiration to several generations of reporters, Lerude says, teaching them to respect themselves and everything they stood for. “He was in the fight always, and he was in the leadership of it always.”
Frank McCulloch died in 2018 at age 98. His legacy lives on in those who continue to fight the good fight to report the story and get it right.
John L. Smith is an author and longtime columnist. He was born in Henderson and his family’s Nevada roots go back to 1881. His stories have appeared in New Lines, Time, Readers Digest, Rolling Stone, The Daily Beast, Reuters and Desert Companion, among others. He is writing a biography of McCulloch.
