DENNIS MYERS Against the Grain Advertisement

A few days ago I was swapping email messages with a historian friend and he mentioned Ray Knisley (pronounced nyze-lee), a formerly prominent Nevadan. I ran a search and found that Knisley had died in 1998 at age 99.

Knisley was a Democratic member of the Nevada Assembly from Pershing County, serving from 1958 to 1966, where he and Lincoln County's Cyril Bastian succeeded in raising casino taxes. He also was instrumental in creation of the Desert Research Institute, a scientific arm of Nevada's higher education system.

On one occasion in 1961, a joint hearing of the budget committees of the Nevada Assembly and Senate, on whether the state could provide more funding to county school districts, erupted in snapping and snarling between Knisley and Clark County Commissioner Harley Harmon, who also pounded his fist on the table.

Knisley and his wife transferred the ownership of Camp Richardson at Lake Tahoe to the federal government at a time when very little land at the lake was publicly owned.

After his departure from the legislature, Knisley lobbied and served as a consultant to various levels of government, including the state attorney general's office.

In the 1970s he was appointed to the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, the bi-state agency created by California, Nevada, and Congress to handle development in the Lake Tahoe basin.

In other words, his life was a useful and significant one. So I was surprised when I found one obituary in a Las Vegas daily newspaper that was only 72 words long. Most of it was devoted to family matters and his late-in-life residence in Boulder City. His public career got just three words -- "a retired legislator..."

I've encountered this before.

In 2002, I was working at a Reno television station when Howard Cannon died. Cannon had been county attorney in Washington County, Utah, city attorney of Las Vegas for four terms, and a U.S. senator from Nevada from 1959 to 1983.

As chair of the Senate Rules Committee, he oversaw the precedent -- setting first confirmation of an appointed vice president of the United States, Gerald Ford, followed by the confirmation of Nelson Rockefeller after Ford became president.

As chair of the Senate Commerce Committee, he opposed airline deregulation only to be overcome by Sen. Edward Kennedy, after which Cannon joined Kennedy in processing the legislation -- and then watched as the airline industry was nearly destroyed by deregulation.

When Cannon died in 2002, and I pitched doing an obituary in my newsroom, I had to fight hard to get to do it. Only one person in that meeting had ever heard of Cannon.

A lack of institutional memory is a chronic problem in a state with rapid growth and turnover like Nevada, of course, but media entities -- particularly daily entities -- have often made the problem worse by not holding on to their veterans.

Recently the Reno daily newspaper, to the dismay of its reporting staff, laid off its morgue director, who ran the newspaper's archives and had worked there for 42 years. Imagine the institutional memory in her head that walked out the door with her.

After her departure, one of the same newspaper's columnists wrote a piece whose general topic is indicated by its opening sentence: "One of Nevada's mysteries, a decades-old enigma, is why unions have never caught on in the north."

In fact, it isn't really a mystery -- the answer is in some specific events in the late 1940s and early '50s.

It's entirely possible that the departed worker, in her four decades on the job, learned of those causes and could have been helpful to the columnist if she had still been on the job.

Does it matter? I think it does. If there had been more people in Nevada familiar with its troubled history with the unstable sales tax, the 2009 Nevada Legislature might have -- and the 2011 Nevada Legislature could make -- better decisions on our tax system. If there had been a deeper understanding of how many times presidents have lied us into wars, we might have been more cautious about Iraq.

Every public policy decision needs a look at the past, and most public policy decisions suffer from an absence of that historical perspective.