Kurt Hildebrand
I was researching something else when I came across the June 1, 1995, front page news story that Swift Newspapers had purchased the Nevada Appeal.
At the time, The R-C was still on Eddy Street in the two-story building it had inhabited since just before the turn of the 20th Century.
Don Woodward still owned the building after he’d sold The R-C to Swift on March 1, 1988, and was doing some maintenance in the back the morning the news broke.
“What does it mean?” he asked, knowing a lot better than I did.
One of the things that it meant was that a proposal to move the press down from South Lake Tahoe to the new Record-Courier Center in downtown Gardnerville was shelved. The plans for the center located on the site of Miller’s Market didn’t actually change much after the purchase, which explains a lot about that building.
The R-C and the Appeal were among several newspapers owner Phil Swift added to his portfolio in the decade. I came to work for Swift in June 1988, not long after he’d purchased the Daily Independent in Ridgecrest the year before, so I was somewhat familiar with the drill.
When I arrived at The R-C in August 1989, I met some of the people that would affect my life to this very day, including my spouse Jennifer Hollister, her mother Joyce, Sheila Gardner and Dave Price.
Those are the folks who shaped my time at The R-C, and were still there when Swift bought the Appeal.
Up until that point, The R-C and the Appeal were bitter rivals, which sometimes spilled out into the coverage.
Six months later, I was running the night news desk at the Appeal. Price came over a short time later to cover sports, along with a collection of newsies from the other Swift papers, including the Tahoe Daily Tribune, the Tahoe World, the North Lake Tahoe Bonanza, and even the Greeley, Colo., Tribune, along with the folks who remained with the Appeal.
I left the Appeal in 2004 to return to The R-C. The hope in those days was to take The R-C to some sort of daily, back when that’s what all the cool kids were doing.
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New R-C and Appeal owner Adam Trumble came to work for the Appeal three years later in 2007 just before the Great Recession hit.
I was at the corporate meeting in 2014 when Adam, who’d just been named editor of the Tahoe Daily Tribune two months before, decided to seek the top editorial spot at the Appeal.
In the 21 years I worked for Phil Swift, I don’t remember once meeting him, though his presence was felt the entire time. I’d had several interesting conversations with his daughters over the years at the annual company meetings.
I met our last owner, Peter Bernhard, a handful of times. On our first encounter, he shared a sandwich with me.
Adam and I are in contact very nearly every day for one reason or another. Unlike the previous changes in ownership, I’m not anticipating any huge changes.
But back in 1995, when Don Woodward asked, “What does it mean?” I had no idea.
That’s the funny thing about the future, nobody knows.
Kurt Hildebrand is editor of The Record-Courier. Contact him at khildebrand@recordcourier.com or 775-782-5122.-
