Column: Vegas lights and press box fights

The passing of Norm Clarke, the eye patch-wearing Terry native who spent a lifetime in newspapers, has brought a flood of eulogies and remembrances from across the state and country.

I can’t pretend to know him as much as most people — he’d left the Billings Gazette long before I arrived there in 1991 — but we did cross paths, and I feel obligated to add a couple tales that I was lucky enough to be a part of. Things not important enough (I guess) to make the handful of 1,100-word obituaries Clarke inspired. 

One was a meeting of the Butte Press Club, a loosely-knit, fairly-organized group of Montana-based journalists who meet semi-regularly in the Mining City. 

In the early 90s we invited Clarke to speak, and he told stories of covering tragedies like nightclub fires and plane crashes and triumphs like the Big Red Machine baseball teams of 1975-76. 

I’ll be honest: It wasn’t a great speech. But once we guided Clarke to the adult beverage part of the Knights of Columbus and got him talking about the fistfight he had in the Riverfront Stadium press box... well. That was entertaining. 

Clarke was an Associated Press reporter and repeatedly finding scoops where the two Cincinnati daily newspapers — those were the days — were not. When a competing writer started calling his notes section “Eye-Openers,” Clarke took offense and it came to a head before a National League game. 

A shaken Clarke then called his boss and was sent home — where he turned on his TV in time to see the dust-up lead the local news. 

Clarke would go on to bigger events, hob-knob with celebrities and get slapped by one: The late Pete Rose, whom Clarke had listed among the worst tippers in Las Vegas.  

For my money, Riverfront wins out. I don’t know if the Reds won that day. I’m not certain this account wasn’t embellished. But it’s a heck of a story. 

Here’s another. In late 2001 my fellow Gazetteer, Matt Bender, and I road-tripped to Tempe, Ariz. to watch his Oregon Ducks play Colorado in the Fiesta Bowl.  

Along the way we stayed with Clarke, at his condo overlooking the Las Vegas Strip. He took us to something called the “Red, White and Rubber Ball” and by the time we called it a night — after Bender dapped Gary Payton while we waited for valet — it was the morning and one of us needed a B12 shot. 

I saw Clarke a few times since, but only once did he send me a note saying, “It was nice hanging out with Montana’s version of the Bush twins.”  

He recovered to complete a long career of getting scoops on the national stage, the Montana journalism equivalent to — who? Mansfield, maybe? It was a life well-lived, and other than it ended too soon I can only think of one improvement. 

Rose should have tipped better. 

Fritz Neighbor can be reached at 406-758-4463 or at fneighbor@dailyinterlake.com.