Cowboy Sheriff: Rural Nevada's True Grit

I’ve profiled a lot of Western characters in my day, but probably the one who best represents that stubborn outlander spirit of the American West is an old wrangler named Ralph Lamb.

He’s gone now, but don’t fool yourself; Ralph was no lamb. More like a fox or a coyote or maybe even a wolf.

He was one of 11 kids born on a ranch in Alamo. Both his grandfather and father, William Grainger Lamb, died in horse accidents. Lamb’s granddad was thrown at night during a cattle drive, and his father was crushed while trying to save a 12-year-old boy whose horse had bolted during a rodeo. Ralph and his siblings took odd jobs to help make ends meet during the Great Depression.

Ralph was country come to town — with a vengeance. In the 1960s and 70s, he was considered one of the most powerful men in Nevada, a kid from the sticks who served as the Cowboy Sheriff of Clark County — the closest thing America had to the Old West, with gangsters substituting for gunslinging cowboys.

In those days, Vegas was a pretty rough place, barely urban; more like Elko but with more casinos. Ralph’s job was “keepin’ things cleaned up” with a blunt my-way-or-the-highway rule of law unparalleled in today’s policing world, a mix of shrewd country wisdom and what critics called the capriciousness of a conniving big city politician.

Ralph’s brother, Floyd, was a Nevada senator and before Ralph was voted out of office in 1978, word was that you didn’t do nuthin’ in Clark County — open a strip club, build a casino or even pass gas — without consulting the Lamb boys first.

In the 60s, Ralph arrested a few dozen Hells Angels, gave them haircuts and dismantled their sacrosanct motorcycles. He demanded that the Beatles show up personally in his office to apply for an entertainment license to perform on the Strip.

In his day, Ralph broke noses and rearranged dental work, “monkeying up” wanna-be mobsters with “the language those boys understood.” My favorite story was how he once grabbed John “Handsome Johnny” Roselli by the tie and worked him over in the lobby of a crowded casino. 

A reporter said the sheriff “slapped the cologne” from the tough guy’s face.

When I interviewed Ralph for the Los Angeles Times in 2012, he had long ago stepped away from the public limelight, but he still carried weight around town. That year, CBS premiered a new series titled “Vegas,” starring actor Dennis Quaid, who took on the persona of a 1960s-era sheriff named — what else? — Ralph Lamb.

Ralph was pleased by the portrayal. Even then, he laughed about his tough-guy image. “A lot of guys could have whipped me,” he says. “They just never came along.”

He continued riding rodeos until failing eyesight sidelined him at age 83.

I met him in a diner in North Las Vegas, not far from the boulevard that bears his family name, and the waitress brought him to his regular table, served him coffee and his usual dish without asking.

With a whiskered face peeking out from beneath a cowboy hat, Ralph still had the aura of an old-school lawman. He spoke with a gravelly twang, as down to earth as dirt, whether he was ordering a second slice of apple pie or saying things like. “Well, hell John, why don’t you come up to the house and we’ll talk about it?”

Ralph made his share of enemies over decades in law enforcement. One was a young lawyer named Oscar Goodman, who in 1999 became Las Vegas mayor. In the 1970s, Goodman represented “a lot of folks whose last names ended in vowels that Lamb didn’t want around town.

Goodman always insisted that Ralph was on the take. “He always wore suits way beyond his salary,” he said. “I can’t put it any other way.”

Ralph’s eyes narrowed that day eating apple pie when I told him what Goodman had said. “I always stayed clean, I just dressed up,” he said. “I knew where I belonged.”

While Ralph was eventually investigated for federal income tax fraud, he was acquitted. Years later, he still felt shame over the episode. He said he never took a dime that wasn’t his. “It hurt me,” he said of the investigation.

I left my interview convinced that Ralph was the real deal.

And I was sure-as-hell glad I’d decided to forego the cologne that day.

Weeks passed after our interview and I stayed busy as a journalist covering the America West.  One weekday morning, I woke up in Madison, S.D., where I was reporting a story on vengeance long delayed.

Not long before my arrival, Norm Johnson, a retired football coach, answered a knock on his door to come face-to-face with a man from his distant past.

The man twice asked Johnson’s name. When he was finally sure of his identity, the intruder shot the 72-year-old Johnson twice in the face, leaving him to die on the doorstep of his tidy brown-clapboard home.

Carl Ericsson later told police that he killed Johnson to avenge a long-ago locker room prank: In high school, Johnson, then the star football quarterback, had put an athletic supporter over his head for laughs.

He stewed over the slight for decades before finally deciding to strike back.

Now he faced first-degree murder charges.

A phone call woke me at my hotel while I was still in the middle of my reporting.

It was an editor in Los Angeles and she was breathless.

The night before, during a midnight screening of the film The Dark Knight Rises, James Holmes had walked into a Century 16 movie theater in Aurora, Colo. and opened fire, killing a dozen people and injuring scores of others.

I needed to get on a plane for Colorado.

As I packed for the airport, I checked my Blackberry to find more than a hundred messages, al of them critical. I was a jerk, a fraud, someone who had besmirched the reputation of a great American.

Pretty quickly, I was able to figure out what was happening.

And it wasn't good.

My Ralph Lamb profile had run that morning on the newspaper’s front page. The night before, during a spell check by the copy desk, a computer glitch had altered a single word of my story, but it was enough to set my world on fire.

Toward the end of the story, I used a simple transition to describe how the once-popular Sheriff Lamb had finally been voted out of office in 1979.

My paragraph read as follows:

"But cracks eventually appeared in Lamb’s public persona. Critics believed that as both sheriff and chairman of the county’s regulatory Liquor and Gaming Control Board, Lamb had opportunities for malfeasance."

But for some reason, the computer added a second letter t to the word but, making it butt.

Now the sentence read: Butt cracks eventually appeared in Lamb’s public persona.

I checked my voicemail. There were 30 messages. Along with irate readers were reporters from a local LA television station and a weekly culture magazine.

Apparently, butt cracks in the LA Times was news.

But before I began any damage control — not to mention catch my plane to Colorado — I had one call to make.

I needed to call Ralph. 

To apologize. He was a proud man and didn't deserve any such grief.

He picked up the line and said spoke in that gravelly country voice of his.

When I explained what had happened, there was a pause.

“Well, hell John,” Ralph said, “I thought you meant that line.”

Then the kicker.

“I kinda liked it.”

All was well with Ralph, and that was important to me.

“Well, sheriff,” I said. “If it’s OK with you, then it’s certainly OK with me.”

I headed off into my reporter's day from hell.

Ralph died three years later, at age 88.

And if you ask me, rural Nevada just ain’t been the same since.