By the time they were teenagers, the Greenspun children knew how to check their cars for bombs. When your dad is Hank Greenspun, this was a normal part of your day.
“It was like a game,” said his son Brian, editor of the Las Vegas Sun, who will be answering questions Sunday with filmmaker Scott Goldstein following the screening of a documentary about his larger-than-life dad.
“He’d say, ‘c’mon, I want to show you guys something. I want to show you what we used to do in the war when we were worried people were trying to get us, we’d take a mirror and look under the car, then check for fingerprints on the hood.’ He’d say: you do that every day.”
In Goldstein’s documentary, “Where I Stand: The Hank Greenspun Story,” the filmmaker tells the unbelievable but true story of Greenspun, who was the editor and publisher of the Las Vegas Sun from 1949 until his death in 1989.
From the pulpit of his newspaper columns, Greenspun, who had fierce eyes and an insatiable hunger to fight when he perceived injustice, took on Nevada politics and Sen. Joe McCarthy, who he called a tyrant, a sadist and a pervert.
“I love newspaper lore, so I’d heard of him, and I knew he was one of the last give-’em-hell editors,” Goldstein said. “I also knew he worked for Bugsy Siegel. And I knew he was involved in Israel and gun-running.”
Not to mention Watergate, using Frank Sinatra as a mole and enlisting Jimmy Hoffa to help keep Howard Hughes holed up in the top floor of the Desert Inn. If it was good for Vegas, Greenspun would do whatever it took to make it happen.
His story unfolds in Goldstein’s artful but thorough and unsparing treatment of a man who most people never heard of. In the late 1940s, Greenspun smuggled machine guns and other implements of war to the beleaguered new nation of Israel, whose army was defenseless against Arab attacks. When the captain of the ship refused to set sail with the contraband, Greenspun pulled a gun on him and counted to five.
He never killed anyone (that we hear about in the film at least). And later this act of thuggery would be perceived by many as heroic, even if it did break several laws.
“You don’t grow up fighting your way to and from school everyday and lose that instinct in life,” Brian Greenspun said, adding that one might say my dad “could start a fight in an empty warehouse.”
While some of Greenspun’s colleagues describe him as ferocious, his children recall a gentle, caring and engaged father who had more fun sitting on the floor playing with the children than he did hanging out with the adults.
“Unless you were doing something wrong,” Greenspun said. “He could go from zero to 10 with ease.”
MORE INFO
See "Where I Stand: The Hank Greenspun Story" at 10:30 a.m. Sunday, Jan. 17 at Lefont Sandy Springs. A Q&A with filmmaker Scott Goldstein and Brian Greenspun follows. For ticket information and details, visit www.ajff.org or call 404-806-9913.
