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Lucius Beebe lived in Nevada for only ten years, but he accomplished enough in that decade to qualify for more than one Silver State Hall of Fame, helping to restore Virginia City and resuscitate the historically significant Territorial Enterprise newspaper.
Beebe was already an accomplished cultural critic and journalist when he moved to Nevada in 1950 with his longtime partner Charles Clegg. A noted gourmand with aristocratic roots and what Wikipedia calls an “impressive and baroque wardrobe”, Beebe joined the New York Herald Tribune in 1929 and remained with the paper for 21 years. From the 1930s through 1944 he wrote a syndicated column called “This New York”, which chronicled the city’s “cafe society”, a term he helped to popularize.
In 1950, Beebe and Clegg had had enough of cafe society life and opted to move to Virginia City, a town they fell in love with at least in part due to its association with railroad history, a subject that obsessed them both. They bought the Virginia City News and launched it as the Territorial Enterprise two years later, breathing life into the newspaper that had employed Mark Twain nearly a century earlier.
Beebe wrote a column called “That Was the West,” covering everything from history to gastronomy. Drawing on his relationships with the nation’s literati, Beebe convinced prominent authors like Bernard DeVeto and Walter Van Tilburg Clark to contribute regularly. Under his direction, the weekly newspaper grew to 6,000 subscribers and generated national attention.
According to the Online Nevada Encyclopedia (ONE), Beebe and Clegg did nothing to conceal their homosexuality in Virginia City. “Nevertheless, oral histories note that while most residents disapproved of a gay lifestyle, they chose to overlook it, in part because the men were improving the community with preservation efforts,” said ONE.
In 1958, Beebe was appointed by Governor Charles Russell to serve as chairman of the committee that planned events honoring Nevada and Virginia City on the state’s Silver Centennial. Clegg and Beebe sold the Territorial Enterprise in 1961 and moved to the San Francisco area. Beebe died of a heart attack five years later.
Beebe wrote more than three dozen books (about half co-authored by Clegg), most focusing on the joys of railroad travel. He was inducted into the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame in 1992.
More on Lucius Beebe:
Lucius Beebe and Charles Clegg, Online Nevada Encyclopedia
