Longtime Wyoming Newsman Bill Sniffin Wins National Lifetime Achievement Award

Bill Sniffin’s philosophy is that when life hands you lemons, make lemonade. As a newspaperman, tourism advocate and businessman, Sniffin said that the secret to his success over a decades-long career is tenacity and an ability to keep going — especially when his original goals have failed.

This persistence has landed him a lifetime achievement recognition from the National Newspaper Association.

Sniffin is only the second Wyoming newsman to ever win the prestigious Amos Award. His journey to the award began as a teenager when a disappointing setback opened the door to a career and profession he has embraced for more than 60 years.

More than 50 of those years have been in Wyoming, including as a columnist for Cowboy State Daily.

Unexpected Turnover

It was 1963, and Sniffin saw an opportunity to gain possession of the ball. He was the kicker and defensive linebacker for his high school football team and ran down the field to tackle an opponent. When he overtook the other player in a headlong tackle, rather than intercepting the ball, Sniffin knocked himself out cold.

“I was a pretty good high school football player, but this was a terrible concussion,” Sniffin said. “I had a couple other concussions earlier in my life, so my dad said I had to quit football. This was a huge blow for me.”

Devastated, Sniffin realized his days playing football were over before they had a chance to really begin. That was when his English teacher stepped in.

“Mrs. Grove came to me and she said, ‘You know, you're a pretty good writer and we need somebody to write up the football games for the school paper,’” Sniffin recalled.

Sniffin agreed because it gave him a chance to still be close to the action. He knew his subject well, and that inside knowledge helped shape his sports stories. He was stunned by the positive responses, and that was all it took for him to change course into a new career he had never before considered.

“As the old story goes, one door closes, another one opens,” Sniffin said, smiling at the memory. “That was the beginning.”

Crossroads

It was the beginning of a passion to write, but Sniffin’s dad had other plans than a journalism career for his son. He wanted his son to join the family business running gas stations, a job Sniffin had worked at since junior high.

“Dad taught me business. He was an entrepreneur and hard worker. There were 11 kids in the family, and everybody worked pretty hard,” Sniffin said. “Dad always said that you just have to give your customer really good service. Back in those days, I would pump gas, check your oil, wash your windshield, and I had a whiskbroom in my back pocket, and I'd sweep the car out for you and check your tires. I enjoyed that.

“That was what taking care of the customer was. And one of the important things is love. The love you have for your audience. You got to love your customers. My dad taught me that early on, that you got to have a smile on your face and make your customers feel good about coming to your business. I learned that when I was literally 12 years old.”

Despite his love for the customers, work at the gas station wasn’t his passion. Sniffin employed the help of his mom, and it was she who convinced his dad to pay for a journalism short course.

The Perfect Shot

“I went to Iowa State for two months in the summer of ’64 and learned photography, advertising and news writing,” he said. “They then threw me out there and three or four newspapers in Iowa wanted to hire me. I was lucky enough to go to a newspaper in Harlan, Iowa. It was very small, but was staffed by absolutely outstanding people.”

Under their mentorship, Sniffin learned the basics of photography and composition. He also learned how to get action photos in the days before autofocus.

“You get down at a low angle and pre-focus,” he said, describing the techniques of the huge, heavy cameras the newspaper office used. “When I would cover football games and the runner is coming towards me, I would focus on a place in the grass. Then I would wait for the runner to come to that spot and take the picture.”

It was December 1964 and fire sirens pierced the air.

Over the office police scanner, the bulletin came across that there was a fire at the gas station on Chatburn Avenue. Sniffin grabbed the speed graphic, a camera the size of a briefcase that could only take four pictures.

“I ran down there and I'm immediately taking pictures,” he said. “I had one picture left and here comes the owner of the gas station. That's Bob McLaughlin, and it's his gas station and he's walking across. So, I get down and I frame it just so he's just where he is. Pop the picture. And sure enough, it came out really well, composed and in focus.”

His editor was so impressed with the rookie’s photo that he entered it into the statewide contest against hundreds of other newspapers and titled it, “Hottest Brand Going.” It won first place.

“I didn't even know what a contest was at that point,” Sniffin said. “I was so young, but I was pretty tickled with it.”

Wyoming And A Pulitzer-Nominated Story

By the time he was 20, Sniffin had moved up from reporter to editor of a paper in Iowa. He decided he wanted to be the boss and make more money, so he and his wife, Nancy, moved to Lander.

There at age 24, he became publisher of the Lander Journal.

“In 1970, I made $6,500 a year as an editor in Iowa. When I moved to Lander as the publisher, I made 10 grand a year. Can you imagine?” Sniffin said. “I was in the deep clover. I was the editor, too, and I kept writing. I always figured that if there's a big story, I wanted to be involved in it because that's where the fun is.”

Sniffin found his big story in 1989 when Midge Olson kept coming into the newspaper office demanding that someone listen to her about the untimely death of her husband.

“She kept claiming that the U.S. government was killing all these guys, including her husband, Digger,” Sniffin said. “I took the time and listened to her story. Midge claimed that all these guys had worked out in the uranium fields right after World War II and were all catching these weird cancers and dying. The initial thought is that it was lung cancer, but it wasn't. It was just these crazy cancers. She claimed that her husband was so radiated that grass wouldn't grow on his grave.

“I started to meet with some of these other people, and I thought, ‘Man, this is this is way more serious than I thought,’” Sniffin continued. “I could smell a good story. It was a local story, right here in Lander. That's one thing I always say. I've given a lot of talks at newspaper conventions and other places and always give the advice (to) look for the big story right under your nose.”

Once he recognized the gravity of the situation, Sniffin made sure the public was aware as well through stories, editorials and even cartoons. He then got then-U.S. Sen. Al Simpson involved and, with Sniffin’s investigative reporting, a bill that had been languishing in Congress for more than 10 years was passed.

On Oct. 15, 1990, President George H.W. Bush signed the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act into law. According to Stan Cannon, Simpson’s press secretary at the time, Wyoming miners were no longer forgotten and a $100 million trust fund was established for the victims and their survivors. They would each receive $100,000.

Later in nominating Sniffin for the Amos Award, Cannon said that Sniffin was the true and only reason the act got passed.

Simpson felt so strongly about Sniffin’s work in giving the miners a voice that he nominated him for a Pulitzer Prize in 1991. Sniffin felt honored for the nomination, although he did not win. His most prized award, he said, was one from Midge and the miners he helped.

“That was the best story I ever did,” Sniffin said. “I've won all these newspaper awards in my life, but the best one I ever won was a battered old uranium miner’s helmet. It's signed by all these guys, and they gave that to me after we won the bill.”

From Activism To Economic Development

In 1982, a recession hit Wyoming, and Lander was hit hard. Sniffin took a step back and decided to change his focus to help his hometown survive.

“There's a famous old grumpy journalist guy named H.L. Mencken, and he had this famous journalism motto,” Sniffin said. “‘Afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.’

“I always saw my job was to afflict the comfortable. We raised a lot of hell as a newspaper editor and a publisher. We changed a lot of things and did a lot of very serious stories. But when the Wyoming bust hit, I decided it was time now to comfort the afflicted. We didn't do any more of those tough, gutsy stories, and we instead focused on how to help people and focus on what's going right.”

Sniffin had always believed that his role as publisher of newspapers was to report things, not to be involved, but he made an exception and got involved with economic development.

“The town needed me and I had a skill set that that was perfectly timed for this period in Lander,” Sniffin said. “When Lander needed me the most, I was there, and I did what I think I needed to do.”

Governor Race Leads To New Opportunities

In 1999, Sniffin sold most of the local newspapers he had owned and published and ran for governor in 2002. He failed in his race, but in typical Sniffin fashion, found another door opening.

“Reed Eckhardt, the editor of the Cheyenne paper, reached out to me after I lost in the primary election and asked if I would write a weekly column for his paper about the elections because I was a journalist,” he said. “I knew all the players, and so it was really fun for me to do that.

“Well, pretty soon Laramie started running it, then Rawlins and Rock Springs, and of course Lander and Riverton were running it. Before it was done, I had about 35 newspapers running the column. It became a statewide Wyoming column.”

Over the course of 20 years, Sniffin wrote more than 1,000 columns and compiled them into two books.

He has many accomplishments over the past 61 years. He was on the Wyoming Tourism Commission; has written three Wyoming coffee table books; founded several organizations, including Rocky Mountain International and Yellowstone.com; and won numerous awards.

His wife Nancy has always been by his side encouraging his advocacy. She was herself the recipient of the 2011 Jefferson Award for Wyoming Volunteer of the Year.

“I’m humbled to have received the Amos Award,” Sniffin said. “There are probably 5,000 newspaper publishers in America, and I was stunned to have been selected. It goes to just one publisher in the whole country.”

Since 2019, Sniffin has been writing columns for Cowboy State Daily.

The Amos Award is a lifetime achievement award and reflects Sniffin’s ownership interest in more than 20 newspapers, magazines, print shops, internet companies and ad agencies in four states. He also received a mid-career master’s degree in journalism from the Centre for Journalism Studies in Cardiff, Wales, in 1989, where he also served as a guest lecturer.

More than a dozen men and women went on to become newspaper publishers after working with the Sniffins in Lander.

Sniffin is not done yet. The veteran journalist continues to write and look for new opportunities that come his way.

He never knows when a lemon is ready to be made into lemonade.

Jackie Dorothy can be reached at jackie@cowboystatedaily.com.