I promise, last entry until tomorrow...

but as I sit here watching the election coverage I can't help but think back to election night 1986.  It was my last election where I was a working journalist.  Ronald Reagan was President.  Democrats controlled the House while Republicans controlled the Senate.  Dan Rather at CBS, Tom Brokaw at NBC and Peter Jennings at ABC were the 'big' news anchors.  CNN and CNN Headline News also had election coverage.  Fox News, MSNBC and others didn't exist.  The internet was in its early infancy and we had no computers at the radio station.  We typed our stories on IBM Correcting Selectric typewriters.  Often there were no erase ribbons and we'd use white-out or just line-out errors.

The current Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid was running his first Senate campaign and he was the winner by a fair margin.  At the time, Nevada was pretty much Republican in the North and Democrat in the South and the North's incumbent member of the House won an easy re-election.  A new Democrat was elected to the House in the South, taking the seat that Reid had vacated.

We had portable cassette recorders, not even micro-cassettes, which were too expensive for the station.  In fact some of us had to buy our own recorders because there weren't enough to go around.  Our News Director at the time is still in the news biz, he does news on a radio station here in L.A.  Our Assignment Editor at the time teaches journalism and anchors the morning news on the station at the college where she works.

I had an intern from UNLV trailing me as I went around covering various election headquarters happenings that night.  But before we could get to that I got sent out to cover a fire in a trailer on the Strip where the New York New York hotel now sits.  Yes, that was a trailer park back then.

Since I was still a California resident, I had to cast my own ballot via the absentee method that year.  I mailed it early because I knew I'd be busy on election day.

If you ended up on this page and you were looking for the "non-election" political entry I promised, it's the one after this one.