Naming Las Vegas: Alexander Road

When a street is named for someone, it’s usually the person’s full name or the last name that is used. Not so with Alexander Road, which runs east and west and is north of Cheyenne Avenue. It was named for Alexander Coblentz.

Bob Reeve, a real estate agent in Henderson, knows the family and said Coblentz was one of the first doctors in town.

“There used to be a little motel on Las Vegas Boulevard, right across from the neon sign museum, and it was called, I believe, the La Paloma,” Reeve said. “Dr. Coblentz practiced medicine out of the hotel for many, many years in the early days of Las Vegas.”

He said the motel was torn down a few years ago.

Coblentz studied at the University of Alabama and was a graduate of New York Medical College’s class of 1932.

Suzanne Feld is his daughter. She recalled how the family came to town in 1939 from Lovelock in Northern Nevada, where her father had been a doctor. They were driving through on their way to New Orleans and Tulane University. Her father intended to further his education there to become a surgeon.

“We got stuck in, of all things, a snowstorm down on Fremont Street,” she said. “There was really nothing much of anything on Fremont Street.”

The couple decided to wait it out, sitting in the car with their two young children, Suzanne and David. Seeing them, the owner of the furniture store across the street, Bill Mendelson, invited them inside to get warm. Upon learning that Coblentz was a physician, Mendelson contacted a Mr. Sills, who owned a construction supply business, and together they convinced Coblentz and his wife, Thelma, to settle in Las Vegas as its doctor, something it sorely needed.

“It was around the time of the war, 1940, ’41, and everybody was being called up for military service,” Feld said. “My dad couldn’t go into the service because he’d been in a horrible car accident in Lovelock. His car blew a tire or something, flipped over, and he broke his back.”

They offered to build an office nearby, big enough for the family to live in the back portion. The address was 750 E. Fremont St.

It backed up to the construction supply lot, which included a huge sand pile. Feld recalled how she and her brother would climb to the top and slide down, to the utter horror of their mother.

“It never occurred to us that it could collapse on us,” Feld said.

Feld said her father was a hard worker, often seeing patients on weekends and making house calls. He was seldom there for dinner, working until late in the evening. The family later moved into a small house in the Huntridge area.

Coblentz was a principal leader in the quest for the county hospital. He grew up poor and worked his way through college, so he was sensitive to the circumstances of others.

“When a family who he knew couldn’t afford to pay him needed (his services), he’d tend to them and then never send them a bill,” Feld said.

Some people paid in other ways, giving them a goat, a rooster, dogs and chickens.

“The rooster — they crow at dawn — drove all the neighbors crazy,” Feld said. “And the goat ate anything he could find.”

They eventually got rid of the animals.

One year, the family planted a tree. It was supposed to be a cherry tree, and every spring, they’d keep an eye on it, anticipating the cherries that would come. But all it sprouted were leaves. One day, returning from church, the children piled out of the car to see not fledgling sprouts but fully grown cherries, ripe for the picking. It turned out her father had stayed behind, gone to the grocery store and picked out all the double-stemmed cherries so he could lob them onto the tree branches.

“It was the best childhood anyone could have,” Feld said.

Coblentz bought 80 acres far west of town. The family would trek out there to see it now and then, but there was “nothing out there, and we didn’t have (surveyor) maps or anything,” Feld said. “I don’t think my father knew exactly where his land was.”

Coblentz served as a city commissioner from 1969-73. Feld said he was a small partner of Milton Prell’s in the Sahara Hotel. He eventually got his advanced degree, a master’s in surgery, from the College of Medical Evangelists in Loma Linda, Calif. She said he worked almost until 1991, when he died from colon cancer.

Feld suspected someone in an official capacity saw her father’s name on the land deed and that inspired the name of Alexander Road.

“They must have thought his name was appropriate, and I’m forever grateful for that,” she said.

Contact Summerlin Area View reporter Jan Hogan at jhogan@viewnews.com or 702-387-2949.