Friends, family share memories of longtime R-J attorney

Mark Hinueber, a lawyer who passionately defended the First Amendment for 42 years at the Las Vegas Review-Journal and other newspapers, hated funerals since his childhood as a Catholic altar boy.

So on Saturday afternoon, when his friends and family gathered at the TPC Summerlin golf club, few people wore black. They laughed, raised their glasses and cheerfully remembered the legacy Hinueber left behind after he died at a hospice in Las Vegas on Aug. 23.

He was 66.

Hinueber’s brothers, sisters and friends all said he faced death with grace, speaking matter-of-factly about his wishes and religious faith. After he was diagnosed with prostate cancer in early January 2017, Hinueber made a bucket list. Doctors said he had up to five years left.

“I wish I could be that courageous,” said Michael Ferguson, Hinueber’s friend and the former chief operating officer and CEO of the Review-Journal’s former parent company Stephens Media.

During Saturday’s memorial event,

Ferguson told the crowd that Hinueber had planned some of the service and had asked Ferguson to speak. Ferguson joked that his friend urged him to try not to talk for longer than 10 minutes.

“Mark was the guy we turned to for just about everything,” Ferguson said. “Mark knew a lot of stuff about a lot of stuff, and he loved getting into long discussions about that stuff.”

One of his two brothers, Matt Hinueber, said the Review-Journal’s former in-house counsel was always a newspaper man, even as a child in the small town of Litchfield, Illinois.

He said his brother founded the St. Andrews Elementary School monthly student newspaper, which cost 2 cents and was full of playground gossip. Mark Hinueber later became editor of the Newman Central Catholic High School newspaper and was a sports reporter for the local paper.

“Mark made sure that every kid, from the biggest geek in school up to the jocks, got their name in that stupid paper,” Matt Hinueber said.

Family members said that throughout his childhood, Mark Hinueber was known as a responsible and hard-working child with an “overdose of our parents’ Depression-era work ethic,” Matt Hinueber said Saturday.

“Father called him ‘The Professor,’” he said.

After receiving his law degree from The John Marshall Law School, Mark Hinueber’s career led him to Las Vegas, where his wife and son still live. After his diagnosis, he traveled to Europe, saw Bruce Springsteen on Broadway, watched the Vegas Golden Knights play in the Stanley Cup, and saw his favorite baseball team, the St. Louis Cardinals, play one more time.

But he wasn’t able to cross off an important part of his bucket list: to see his son Tom Hinueber’s daughter, his only grandchild, be born. She’s due in November.

Many friends mentioned Mark Hinueber’s use of Facebook to document his travels and thoughts. On Aug. 15, he posted a final Facebook status, writing that the hospice facility informed him he would likely “succumb sometime in the next 3 weeks to my illness.”

“Unfortunately I will not get to see my new granddaughter’s cherubic face,” he wrote. “I imagine she will be beautiful and intelligent. I pray she will also be kind.”

His son hadn’t planned to speak, but he stood up to talk after an aunt led a prayer.

“I didn’t know if I was going to have the right words to say,” Tom Hinueber told the crowd.

The 29-year-old described his father as a “deeply good man,” who was possibly haunted by a Catholic belief that he needed to help others so he would be a good person.

“If he was here I’d tell him it’s not true, because he was worthy the whole time by being the way he was,” Tom Hinueber said.

In addition to his son, Mark Hinueber is survived by his wife of 38 years, Maureen Hinueber; four siblings, Maggie Dicks, Matt Hinueber, Pete Hinueber and Liz Byrnes; and six nieces.

Donations in his memory may be sent to Blackburn College, for which he was a member of the board of trustees for the past five years, for the Mark Hinueber Endowment Fund c/o Mary McMurray, 700 College Ave., Carlinville, Illinois, 62626.

Contact Katelyn Newberg at knewberg@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0240. Follow @k_newberg on Twitter.