The 53rd annual Virginia City Camel Races will begin on Sept. 6, and once again the media will enlighten us on how the race was born over a half century ago, with a hoax published in the Territorial Enterprise in 1959 by then editor, Bob Richards.
The story is true. Richards, however, was a hellava lot more than the father of the Virginia City Camel Races. A talented individual with a creative mind, Richards was a driving force for the promotion of tourism on the Comstock for the 14 years he lived here.
Bob Richards came to Virginia City from Southern California in 1954. An excellent illustrator and artist, Richards kept busy as a sign painter until the fall of that year when he hired on as a writer with the Territorial Enterprise. The paper at the time was owned by Lucius Beebe and Charles Clegg who purchased it in 1952. Richards became managing editor and stayed with the Enterprise until it was sold in 1960. It was in this six year period with the Enterprise that Richards honed his creative chops, and put the Comstock on the national map when he wrote a fictional piece about the Virginia City Camel Races. Writers today credit Richards with this hoax in 1959, but in truth he began the camel race charade in a story he wrote in 1957, 1958 and 1959 before the first official camel race took place in 1960.
Richards also created the “Tourist Of The Week” sketches that appeared on the front page of the Enterprise. The sketches were accompanied with quaint questions asked by uninformed tourists, who had little knowledge about the history of Virginia City and the Comstock Lode. In 1959, the best of these sketches where published in book form titled: “Bob Richards’ Virginia City Scrapbook.” The volume today is a highly sought after collector’s item.
By 1960 the creative juices at the Enterprise was starting to wane with the departure of Beebe & Clegg, that left Richards responsible for the paper’s writing and publication. Richards would later write: “I had all the paper’s writing and production on my hands, and working for the T.E. was no longer the stimulating business it once had been.” Richards became disenchanted and disappointed with the quality of the paper and went on to say: “ ...and then there came the sale of the paper to the person called Jack Tell which was like turning a Rolls Royce into a garbage wagon, and once I met the man, I knew that the end for me was soon to come and within a month it did.”
Richards next move was to Las Vegas where he had a short stint writing for the Las Vegas Review Journal. A Comstocker at heart Richards returned to Virginia City, and in 1962 began publishing his own newspaper called The Virginia City Chronicle. The first issue was published April 13, 1962. The paper was a tabloid, 12 page weekly published ever Friday and sold for 15 cents.
Even though the Territorial Enterprise had gone through several owners in the time since Richards left, it was still the premier newspaper on the Comstock, and garnered most of the advertising revenue. Richards might have hoped history would repeat itself just like 1916 when the old Enterprise went under and was absorbed by the Virginia Evening Chronicle, but that didn’t happen. After eight months Richards could no longer keep his paper financially afloat, and published his last issue #31 on November 9, 1962. It was in this last issue of the Chronicle that Richards vented his anger and frustration in his last days with the Territorial Enterprise two years earlier.
In 1965 Richards was employed at the Thomas Wilson Advertising Agency in Reno, when he received a call from the Enterprise’s new owner Lou Hardy, “Would he be interested in a position with Virginia City’s oldest newspaper?” Thus, in September 1965 Richards began the last stage of his career pursuing what he loved doing the best, writing for the Territorial Enterprise.
Bob Richards was at his desk on Wednesday, June 26, 1968 getting the copy ready for Friday’s deadline when he died suddenly of a heart attack, he was 57 years old. That Friday’s issue of the Enterprise carried a front page obituary for Bob Richards. In part it read: ... “We have lost a great Nevadan, a man who will be sorely missed. The Territorial Enterprise can only carry on. And it will carry on in the proud tradition of the people who made it a great newspaper. In the tradition of Mark Twain, Lucius Beebe and Bob Richards.”
This writer concurs.
— Chic DiFrancia is a long-time Virginia City resident, freelance writer, historian and letterpress printer. In his youth he once was a typesetter at the Territorial Enterprise in Virginia City.