Sunday, April 24, 2005
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`YOUNG LAS VEGAS, 1905-1931: BEFORE THE FUTURE FOUND US': Chapter Nine

People-watching provided plenty of entertainment for early Las Vegans

All Special Collection photos are the property of University of Nevada, Las Vegas Libraries and cannot be reproduced The Las Vegas Labor Day celebration of 1912 or 1914 is shown. One fun competition that took place downtown was a hard-rock drill contest. It tested men on a skill used in mining. UNLV LIBRARIES, SPECIAL COLLECTIONS Lorenzi Park offered a diving platform at its swimming lake, shown in the 1920s. UNLV LIBRARIES, SPECIAL COLLECTIONS Nellie Waite, wife of Frank Waite, sits by Indian rock art near Sloan, outside of Las Vegas, in an undated photo. Frank was a deputy to Sheriff Sam Gay, and eventually became sheriff himself. Early Las Vegans helped themselves to specimens of rock art, which they then installed in their yards at home, as no law yet forbade removal of Indian artifacts. UNLV LIBRARIES, SPECIAL COLLECTIONS Robert "Spud" Lake, his wife Mary and two unidentified people cook a meal on the roadside during a drive, in an undated photo. UNLV LIBRARIES, SPECIAL COLLECTIONS Franklin Hardman, whose mother cooked at the Old Ranch, also called the Las Vegas Rancho, enjoyed swimming at its so-called plunge, where a portion of the Las Vegas Creek was dammed and "fenced" with canvas sheets. The photo is undated. UNLV LIBRARIES, SPECIAL COLLECTIONS

Life in a small town can get predictable and tedious. In the first years of Las Vegas, antidotes to boredom included the creative minds of pranksters, and looking over the travelers stopping at the train depot. Many found the trains themselves interesting.

"In summer evenings, people would walk down to see that big old steam engine come in," Ed Von Tobel Jr. recalled in 2004. He was born in Las Vegas in 1913.

Some Las Vegans showed up at the train station to snag a little free ice, as fragments would fall to the ground when an icing crew went to work. "They'd shove hundreds of (buckets) of ice into holes at each end of the cars. That was their refrigeration," according to a 1980 history piece in a Las Vegas newspaper. "Everybody in town went up to meet the train and steal a little ice," early settler Leon Rockwell (1888-1968) said.

People-watching was the reason Von Tobel's sister, Betty, tagged along to the station. She told a Las Vegas newspaper in 1980: "There was nothing else to do. ... We could see how the city folks were dressed when they got off to walk around a little."

Of course, not all the people-watching was directed at travelers passing through. Sometimes the townspeople knew a particular newcomer was expected, and turned out in curiosity.

Pharmacist William Ferron set up shop in 1916, then temporarily left Las Vegas to marry his sweetheart, Ruth Cooper, who was back in Salt Lake City. When the bride arrived in Las Vegas, she had to walk a gauntlet of inquisitive eyes, from the depot to their house three blocks away. "Everybody was out looking to see who was the new bride," their daughter Shirley Ferron Swanson said in 2004. "She thought she was at the end of the world."

Some residents were proactive in stirring up fun. Or stirring up trouble, others might say.

Jim Kieth, an early prankster, was known as "old Dad Kieth," according to Rockwell. Once Kieth took a segment of broomstick and fitted its ends with the sort of covers used on dynamite sticks. He also drilled a hole in one end of the broomstick so a fuse could run down into it. Then Kieth would pretend he was drunk, light the fake dynamite and wander into a bar.

"He had it up so everyone could see it, and everyone was hollering: "Throw that out, Dad. You'll blow the place up!' " Rockwell said.

As fraternal and civic groups formed, they became another outlet for having fun. The Eagles, who formed an aerie in Las Vegas in 1905, took in 54 new members after a recruiting picnic in 1907, according to the oral history of early settler Charles Aplin (1887-1971).

Rockwell, who helped organize the city's initial all-volunteer fire department, enjoyed participating in what he called the department's shivarees, all-male parties at which a newlywed man was "roasted."

"I most always got to be the bartender because I never drank too much," Rockwell told his 1968 interviewer. "I had to solder the (metal cup) handles on, because they would get to singing and keeping time ... with the cup on the plate. And the handles come off."

After the fire department acquired two fire carts, the city's annual Labor Day celebration incorporated athletic contests using the equipment. "In the water fights, we had two equal distance hydrants, and one cart would go to one and one to the other," Rockwell explained. Then each team would turn its hose on the other, trying to knock whoever was holding the nozzle back behind his team's pre-drawn line on the ground.

"They got to hitting each other with the nozzle, and we had to tie ropes on them so (the teams) couldn't get together," Rockwell added.

A 1915 schedule of Labor Day activities in Las Vegas included foot, burro, horse and automobile races; wrestling matches; a hard-rock drilling contest; nail driving contest for women; trapshooting; and open-air dance on Fremont Street.

Dancing was available year-round. The Arizona Club -- the pre-eminent drinking spot on Block 16, the saloon-and-red-light district -- had a small orchestra. The group played on the premises and could be booked for dances elsewhere in town, too, according to "Trails to Rails," which the Nevada Power Co. published.

But the first local resort with multiple amenities, including swimming and dancing, was what early Las Vegans called the Old Ranch. It had been the home of the Stewart ranching family until it sold the land in 1902 to the San Pedro Los Angeles & Salt Lake Railroad. In 1905 the railroad had subdivided a section of the ranch and sold lots in order to create Las Vegas.

The area immediately around the old ranch house was leased and renamed the Vegas Park Resort. On Saturday nights the resort brought in an orchestra from Salt Lake City for dances.

And it diverted water from the nearby Las Vegas Creek into a concrete "plunge" for swimming, which was open in the afternoon. Stream water flowed through the plunge. "This was a good place (to swim), the water was warm" because of its origin from a spring, Las Vegan Leslie Smith said in 2004. Smith, who was born in Las Vegas in 1927 to one of the town's first dentists, remembered swimming there in the 1930s.

Speaking of the dressing booths at the plunge, Las Vegan Bob Underhill said in 2004 that "they damn near looked like outdoor toilets, the little shanties that you changed in." He was born in Las Vegas in 1926.

As time marched on, other swimming venues were added, although Smith disparaged the Mermaid Swimming Pool at Fifth and Fremont streets for its cold water. "Captain" James Ladd built another pool, called Ladd's, in 1911 on Fremont between 12th and 15th streets, to serve residents in his new housing subdivision.

In 1922, D.G. Lorenzi started a resort two miles northwest of the railroad tracks, on land that is now the municipal Lorenzi Park. Lorenzi had purchased the site with agriculture in mind, but after discovering underground water, changed his emphasis toward recreation. A stonemason, he used that skill to create two artificial lakes for boating, as well as a dance pavilion and swimming pool.

Lorenzi's was the place to go for July Fourth festivities, according to several Las Vegans interviewed in 2004, who were children or teens in the 1920s and 1930s.

Mount Charleston was considered remote and primitive -- but desirable as a summer getaway -- when businessman E.W. Griffith opened a resort there in summer 1915. That year, he had completed a road into Kyle Canyon, erected about a dozen tents and arranged meal service for guests who wanted to be served rather than cook. He also set up auto service for Las Vegans to reach the resort. Less than a year before, when Griffith acquired his mountain acres, the only road into the canyon had been "a rutted track made when horses dragged logs down from a 19th century sawmill which had been used by early Mormons and railroad people," wrote Florence Lee Jones in her 1975 book, "Water, a History of Las Vegas."

Mount Charleston's Mary Jane Falls, which is popular with modern-day hikers, was named after Griffith's granddaughter, Mary Jane Griffith, who spent many of her early summers in the wooded mountains.

Some families, such as that of early business leader Ed Von Tobel, eventually built their own summer cabins on Mount Charleston. Motoring out of town for a daylong jaunt was another recreational option. Virginia Beckley Richardson, born in 1917, said her family used to picnic at a site in the southeastern Las Vegas Valley, called Grapevine Spring, which had running surface water. Children would catch frogs and adults would bring sacks to fill with sand, to take back to Las Vegas "to plant the lawn," she recalled in 2004.

Von Tobel Jr. remembered his family occasionally driving to the bank of the Colorado River for a picnic. In the era before Hoover Dam, the river's water was muddy red. "The first thing Mother would do, she'd take a bucket of water out of the river, and let it settle," he said in 2004. "So she could wash the dishes. We didn't have paper plates and cups in those days."

As Las Vegas grew, it offered more in the way of sports and entertainment for folks who stayed close to home.

Tennis started up before the end of 1905, when a court was built next to a drugstore on Main Street between Fremont Street and Ogden Avenue, according to "Trails to Rails."

Baseball teams formed fairly soon, too. In March 1915, the local team played the visiting Chicago White Sox. "Trails to Rails" reported Las Vegas lost, 14-0. As well, the spectator stands collapsed from the weight of the crowd, with some injuries but no deaths. The baseball diamond was on the northwest corner of Stewart Avenue and Las Vegas Boulevard, where city hall stood in 2005.

In 1925, Henry Wilson of Las Vegas, an African-American, organized the city's first baseball team of black players. Called the Las Vegas Tigers, it regularly played against a team of players who worked for the railroad, which by then was known as the Union Pacific Railroad.

An outdoor bowling lane was put in at some point, but Underhill could not precisely remember when or where. He did remember that his father, Clarence Underhill, had the first indoor lanes installed by Brunswick in the mid-1930s.

The first rodeo took place in January 1923 at downtown fairgrounds that had just been donated to the city by the railroad, as it merged with the Union Pacific. "More than a thousand spectators, close to half of the town's population, watched a hundred cowboys compete," Las Vegas historian Frank Wright wrote.

Golf came along by 1927, when a group of aficionados got together to build a course near the airfield, near the present southeast corner of Sahara Avenue and Paradise Road. "Golfers had been asked to be present (on a designated Sunday in December) with rake and shovel to start work on the course," read an account in a 1955 Las Vegas newspaper, which put out a special edition marking the 50th anniversary of Las Vegas' founding. The course had gravel fairways and sand "greens."

For couch potatoes, Las Vegas also offered recreational choices.

The first movie theater in town was the Isis, which was in business from 1909 to 1911. A grander movie theater, the Majestic, opened with fanfare in April 1912. It brought in movies and vaudeville acts. But the Majestic closed at the start of June, because of the heat. In summer, "Trails to Rails" recounted, an open-air theater called the Airdome operated on the northeast corner of Third and Fremont streets.

Las Vegas moviegoers got to fill in as movie extras in 1914, when a film crew for the "Hazards of Helen" movies came to town. These movies competed with the more famous "Perils of Pauline," and were similar serials in which each installment featured a cliffhanger ending designed to bring viewers back the next week to find out what happened. Every "Hazards" installment was railroad related, and starred actress Helen Holmes. Some locals went on-camera in crowd scenes, others picnicked while watching the filming.

Next Sunday: Fun on the Wild Side

The book and series are a joint project of the Review-Journal and its sister book publishing company, Stephens Press, in recognition of Las Vegas' centennial year. Additional information, and many more pictures about everyday life before legal gambling and Hoover Dam changed Las Vegas forever, will be included in the book. Advance copies of the hardbound book may be reserved at $24.95, a $5 discount from the cover price, at http://www.stephenspress.com.