If timing truly is everything, LaVarr Webb’s first day at the Deseret News 48 years ago was a mixed message.
It was June 5, 1976, a Saturday. If you know anything about regional history, you might recognize that as the date the Teton Dam burst in Eastern Idaho, killing 11 people and causing an estimated $2 billion in damages.
For many in the area, it remains a landmark in time — a day in which life changed forever.
For a young Webb, it was the day he became invisible.
Anxious to make a good impression on his first day, he instead did nothing.
“Reporters and editors were running around like crazy, and I was standing around, basically forgotten,” he wrote in a career summary he provided me in advance of an interview last week.
It was great timing for a journalist eager to cover a big story, but bad timing for a newcomer.
But it was the last time he would be invisible.
Teton day was the beginning. The end came this week, as Webb, a 73-year-old respected, seasoned journalist and politico, wrote his final column for the newspaper — a right-left, point-counterpoint political column he co-wrote for 21 years, first with former Salt Lake Mayor Ted Wilson and then with former Democratic state representative and minority leader Frank Pignanelli.
Webb has been the “right” part of that equation, although Pignanelli describes their relationship as anything but adversarial. If Gov. Spencer Cox needed poster children for his “Disagree Better” campaign, they would fill the role nicely.
“We were very much like an old married couple,” Pignanelli told me. “We knew how each other thought and wrote. … That’s how I felt. He may not like me to say it, but I’ll say it.”
Webb admits it will be hard to walk away. Like anyone whose life has been intertwined with politicians and journalists, it’s tough when the phone stops ringing. But Webb and his wife, Jan, have been called on a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to Hong Kong, in the church’s Asia Area office, which includes 22 countries.
“I’m not quite grieving,” he said about the end of his career. “But if not for the mission, it would be hard. Really hard.”
Pignanelli, who will continue writing as the “left” part of the column, admits to not being stoic. The day the two wrote their final column together, he said, was hard emotionally.
I caught up with LaVarr a few days ago at the ranch he built with his wife. It’s a beautiful white house surrounded by 240 acres of green pastures, jagged cliffs, a creek and just about anything else a man who gained a love for farm work decades ago as a teenager in rural Orem could want.
It is, to be honest, in the middle of nowhere — an hour’s drive to Burley, Idaho. But I suspect that’s part of the charm.
And about that career — Webb wasn’t exactly wet behind the ears when he showed up that Saturday morning. Before he started his first newspaper job with the Color Country Spectrum in St. George, he had been an intern with famed Washington columnist Jack Anderson, who had strong Utah ties.
It may be hard to remember now, but that was an age in which syndicated Washington columnists mattered, wielding great power and influence. The printed word was king.
Anderson was a tough investigative journalist whose work won him a Pulitzer Prize and a spot on President Nixon’s enemies list. Even just being assigned to answer the phone in that office, Webb told me, yielded some great stories.
And after Teton, Webb rose quickly at the Deseret News, from political editor to city editor and managing editor.
Then he abruptly quit all that. He ended up managing Mike Leavitt’s campaign for governor. Then, after Leavitt won, he became the governor’s policy deputy.
Pignanelli said Webb doesn’t get enough credit for helping to turn Leavitt into a national figure — only the second Utah governor to be appointed to the president’s cabinet. (Leavitt was Secretary of Health and Human Services for President George W. Bush. Gov. George Henry Dern served as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Secretary of War.)
“He did a great job crafting an image of Mike Leavitt, an image that elevated him to a national figure,” Pignanelli said of Webb. “It was based on substance. Leavitt was a good governor and an effective leader. But he took it to the next level.”
How seasoned is Webb? Put it this way: when he started at the Deseret News, he was assigned an IBM Selectric typewriter. When he began covering the Utah Legislature, reporters were allowed to roam the floors of the House and Senate freely.
“We could kneel next to a legislator in his chair and interview him on the floor” while business was being conducted, he said.
Today, the news media is confined to the galleries, but that wouldn’t have mattered much to Webb. He never cared that lawmakers would meet behind closed doors. “I didn’t mind that so much, because I had the kind of relationship with legislators that I could find out five minutes after they came back on the floor exactly what happened.”
Pignanelli, who was serving in the Legislature at the time, remembers him as much tougher than his shy demeanor would indicate.
“As a reporter, he was a no-nonsense guy,” Pignanelli said. “I tried to dance around him a bit, but he was persistent. I knew I couldn’t hoodwink him. He was very serious.”
Pignanelli said he was shocked when Webb called him 21 years ago and asked him to replace Wilson on the column. “I wasn’t sure if he liked me or not. I wondered if he could barely tolerate me.”
No doubt many former lawmakers felt the same about their own relationship with him.
After his work in government, Webb became a consultant. He ran a successful citizen initiative campaign to increase local sales taxes to fund an expansion of TRAX and an extension of FrontRunner. He helped with the Count My Vote effort that resulted in candidates being able to reach a primary ballot via petition signatures, rather than only through the convention process.
He published Utahpolicy.com and helped found the Exoro Group.
He rejoined the Deseret News for a time, but the column has been his lifeline to journalism, and to that first day as an invisible new hire.
Webb has another, even more powerful memory of those early days at the Deseret News. He calls it his “worst day.” He was assigned to do a brief story about the start of the Mormon Miracle pageant in Manti, but he got the date of the first performance wrong. Lots of people drove all the way out there, only to learn it didn’t start until the next day.
The city editor let him have it.
“I really did think I’d get fired,” Webb said.
From invisible to getting chewed out. It’s a common theme. Lots of people in this business have similar memories from early mistakes. Some never recover.
Luckily, Webb did. He always double-checked dates after that, and he also went on to have a career that changed the world around him for good.