Sonny's Story:A Journalist's Memoir

In popular myth, anyone can make it to the top in America, no matter how humble his or her origins. That may be true, but few have faced greater challenges along the way than did Rollan Melton.
    Sonny, as he was called when he was young, was born into a dysfunctional family in Boise, Idaho, at the beginning of the Great Depression. His parents divorced when he was six years old. His mother, Rusty, had no skills and practically no education and found it hard to care for both of her children. For years young Sonny drifted from home to home, from town to town, living sometimes with his mother, sometimes with his father, and sometimes with relatives. Before his fifteenth birthday, he had attended eighteen schools in Idaho, Oregon, and Nevada. He was a very poor student and essentially without friends. When he dropped out of school in the ninth grade, a dim future seemed assured.
    In 1946 Sonny at last found himself in a stable situation, and his life began to change for the better. His mother alighted in Fallon, Nevada, where she found work at the Owl Cafe-Casino. She sent for her son and enrolled him in Fallon High School. There he was taken under wing by the school’s football coach, who introduced him to the joys of athletic achievement, competitive sports, and teamwork.
    Sonny also found after-school employment as a printer’s devil with the Fallon Standard, a weekly newspaper. Without realizing it, he soon was taking his first halting steps along a path that would lead to the top of the American newspaper business. Taking into account his great need and his improving grades and attitude, the high school faculty voted to award him a Harolds Club scholarship to the University of Nevada. There he majored in journalism and played football. Following a stint in the army, he became a sportswriter for a Reno newspaper.
    Melton was a tireless worker who made the most of every opportunity that came his way. He also benefitted from an astonishing chain of circumstances and from the mentoring and support of others. At the age of thirty-two, he was named the editor of the Reno Gazette-Journal; at thirty-five, he was the paper’s publisher; and two years later he became the vice president of the Speidel newspaper group. He went on to become president of Speidel and a vice president and director of Gannett. In 1978, when he was forty-seven years old, Rollan Melton resigned his vice presidency to return to Reno and to writing.
    Rollan Melton’s memoir is an unflinching examination that does not shrink from discussing the emotional pain and deprivation of his youth. It is also an American success story of almost mythic proportions.

Sonny's Story: A Journalist's Memoir by Rollan Melton. Reno: UNOHP, 1999. (234 pp., 46 photos, cloth, $24.95)