Letters from Las Vegas

In the spring and summer of 2018, Lauren Ekroth — writing from Las Vegas, Nevada at age 83 — published two letters to the editor in newspapers outside Nevada. The first appeared in the Elko Daily Free Press on April 13, 2018, under the heading “Latino Vote Suppression.” Signed “Dr. Lauren Ekroth, Las Vegas,” it argued that Republican commissioners rejecting Spanish-language ballots constituted voter suppression. “In Las Vegas, all public libraries post events and requests for resources in Spanish,” he wrote. “I know, because I speak fluent Spanish and talk to them in their native language.”

The second letter ran in the Idaho Statesman on July 1, 2018, directed at Idaho Senator James Risch, who had appeared on PBS defending President Trump’s summit with North Korea, the cancellation of joint military exercises with South Korea, and his treatment of G7 allies. Ekroth signed this one simply “Lauren Ekroth, Las Vegas,” and opened with autobiography: “I was born and raised in Wisconsin. My father was a five-term Republican sheriff of Douglas County, 1943–52.” He recalled watching the Army-McCarthy hearings as a young man and Senator Joe McCarthy’s “commies everywhere” conspiracy rants. He invoked Joseph Welch’s famous rebuke — “Have you no sense of decency, sir?” — and aimed it directly at Risch. He identified his military service: “From 1958–60 I served with the U.S. Army in Europe, 221st Missile Battalion,” adding that in 1961 he was teaching military officers in West Berlin when the Berlin Wall was built on August 12, 1961.

The two letters mark the first documentation of Ekroth living in Las Vegas, presumably sometime after his last known Hawaii appearance in 1997. Together they show the same impulses that had produced a letter defending a fired teacher in 1961, an arrest at Bachman Hall in 1968, and an ACLU board seat in 1970 — still active at 83, still targeting specific injustices, still writing to newspapers in states he had no personal connection to, in pursuit of politicians and policies he found indecent.