Sunday, June 05, 2005
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

The Buying Man

For Nevadan who's invested millions in small towns, history's the thing

With his dog Brandy in tow, Jim Marsh walks out of his Santa Fe Saloon in Goldfield, carrying an unopened bottle of Picon, a French liquor used to make a Basque drink known as Picon Punch. Photo by John Locher. Surrounded by locals, Jim Marsh holds court at the Santa Fe Saloon, the 100-year-old bar in Goldfield he bought in 1976. Photo by John Locher. Click image for enlargement. Graphic by Mike Johnson.

GOLDFIELD

Jim Marsh is about to stroll into the Santa Fe Saloon like he owns the place when his cover is blown by one of the regulars.

"Look out," the man bellows, "here comes the owner of this dump."

With a smile, Marsh steps through the open door to the sound of laughter.

If you've shopped around for a car or turned on a television in Las Vegas, chances are you know this man. He bought his first dealership in 1971, and for 20 years he and his daughter, Stacy, have appeared together in local commercials.

But in small towns and cow counties far from the lights of Las Vegas, Jim Marsh is known as something else: a community booster and historic preservationist.

Marsh, 71, has invested millions in the boom-and-bust towns in Nye, Esmeralda and Lincoln counties. He owns a hotel and two casinos in Tonopah, a hotel-casino in Amargosa Valley, a bar in Pioche, a bar and a motel in Manhattan, and two cabins in Belmont.

Then there is the Santa Fe Saloon, which celebrates its 100th anniversary in July. Marsh snapped it up for $12,000 in 1976.

"I bought this place to preserve the history more than anything," Marsh says during a Memorial Day weekend tour of his properties. "Central Nevada has always kind of fascinated me."

"He's into history," says Laurel Arnold, who has managed the saloon for the past seven years. "And to him, this is one big antique."

But unlike a rolltop desk or a rusty old lever-action rifle, this antique serves drinks.

While his two dogs take turns slurping water from a plastic coin cup, Marsh has Arnold whip up a round of Picon Punches, a Basque concoction made with the French liquor Picon, grenadine and soda, with a splash of brandy.

In preparation for a party at the Santa Fe, Arnold learned how to make the high-octane drink over the phone from one of Marsh's friends in Eureka. The same man later shipped a case of the hard-to-find main ingredient to Arnold on a southbound hay truck, which she met on the side of the highway as it passed through town.

Marsh was born in Denver and raised mostly by his mother in Nebraska after his parents split. He was barely old enough to drive when he sold his first car at his father's Ford dealership in Denver. Since then, he has sold more cars than he can count.

Sometimes, though, Marsh feels like he was born in the wrong century. He feels like a man meant to stake claims, not sell cars.

"I can understand how gold fever could get you. If I'd been born 100 years sooner, I probably would have had it," he said. "It's like gambling. You're always looking to hit that next big strike."

Instead, Marsh confines his prospecting to land sales, antique shops and auctions, where he hunts for new pieces of the Old West to add to his collection.

That's how he came to own a 14-foot-tall fiberglass cow that used to stand on the roof of the Holy Cow! casino and brewery at Las Vegas Boulevard and Sahara Avenue. It cost him $2,200, not including the price of hauling it to Amargosa Valley and setting it up next to his Longstreet Inn and Casino.

When Marsh walks into the Longstreet, the first stop on his weekend tour, his dogs follow him inside, sniffing slot machines and licking the hands of a few startled patrons. Marsh holds open the men's room door, so the dogs can drink from the toilets.

"I'm a pussycat when it comes to animals," he says. "I don't do well bargaining for animals. I usually pay through the nose."

Brandy, for example, is a "$5 dog" Marsh bought last year for $500 from a neglectful, cash-strapped hitchhiker in Tonopah.

About a year old, Brandy is part German shepherd, part backhoe. "She's made my back yard look like a battlefield," Marsh said.

But she likes to ride in the car, and so does Marsh's other traveling companion, a bearded collie named Clydette.

Marsh drives up to visit his rural properties at least once a month -- more than 500 miles round trip -- and "the girls" are almost always with him.

Then there is Herman, the Holstein steer Marsh rescued from the barbecue last year.

Herman was born at a dairy in Amargosa Valley, but he ended up in Beatty, where a friend of Marsh's was fattening up the animal for slaughter.

"I told him, 'You can't do that to a pet for crying out loud,' " Marsh said.

He bought Herman on the spot for $600 and had him hauled to the Longstreet, where he shares a stall with a goat not far from the casino's front door.

Built in 1995, the Longstreet is Marsh's most ambitious rural project to date: a 60-room hotel and casino at the southwestern edge of Nye County, where state Route 373 crosses into California on its lonesome way from U.S. Highway 95 to Baker and Interstate 15.

More than a few people called him crazy.

"And they're probably right," Marsh says. "If you look at it from a purely business standpoint, it probably wasn't the best decision I ever made."

The Longstreet cost $7 million and now sits across the street from a failed gas station and a boarded-up saloon. Of all his investments in rural Nevada, it is the one that comes closest to losing money.

But Marsh insists that none of his far-flung enterprises is a failure. "Every one of them makes money," he says.

They also create jobs -- 100 or more, by Marsh's count -- in places where decent jobs are not all that easy to come by.

"It's a major impact," says Karen Rodgers, general manager of Marsh's two casinos in Tonopah. "I wish he'd buy more places here and fix them up."

"What I like about Jim is he finds a need, no matter how small, and he fills it," says Nye County Commissioner Joni Eastley. "A four-room hotel in Manhattan (Nevada) wouldn't seem like a big deal to most people, but it means a lot there."

And to protect his investments, Marsh is not above importing customers.

For each of the past seven years, he has chartered a bus to introduce his city friends to a few of rural Nevada's attractions, including the occasional stop at a Marsh-owned enterprise.

The first rural tour was a 900-mile round trip to Virginia City. This year's trip, scheduled for next weekend, includes a tour of the maximum-security prison near Ely, followed by wine and cheese on Ely's historic Nevada Northern Railway. On the way back to Las Vegas, the bus will stop in Pioche and at a ranch where one of Marsh's friends keeps a herd of about 30 buffalo.

Back in the car and headed north toward Goldfield, Marsh fills the space between stops with stories. Most of them involve "a good friend of mine," a title Marsh has conferred on dozens of Central Nevada residents over the years.

A lot of those friends have since grown old and died, an alarming number of them recently, Marsh says. "It makes you worry about your own mortality is what it does."

That night, Marsh and the dogs settle in at his hotel in Tonopah, which is crowded with guests on the eve of Jim Butler Days, the town's annual anniversary celebration.

The next morning, Marsh will swap his trademark black and white wingtips for tennis shoes and drive his 1922 Model T in the parade down U.S. 95, waving and smiling to people who call out his name along the route.

Marsh figures he has been to about 30 Jim Butler Days Parades and ridden in a half-dozen of them.

He has been doing business in Tonopah since 1995, when he leased the casino at the historic Mizpah Hotel. Two years later, he moved his gaming operation out of the Mizpah and into a small building left vacant when Bank of America closed its Tonopah branch.

The Banc Club casino was born.

Marsh added to his holdings there in 2002 with the purchase of the Tonopah Station hotel and casino up the street.

"When he goes through the casino, he has a hard time getting out. Everybody wants to talk to him," Rodgers said. "They should name this Marshville or something."

After the parade and a few meetings in Tonopah, Marsh will spend the rest of his Memorial Day weekend with his girlfriend, state Sen. Sandra Tiffany, at one of his favorite spots in Central Nevada: a 100-by-100-foot lot in Belmont he took as a down payment on a Datsun pickup in 1974.

It was Marsh's very first rural Nevada investment, and it's where his private cabin now stands.

The rest of Belmont is home to about five full-time residents and 40 vacation homes. On holiday weekends, the population of the faded mining town can swell to 150 people.

"I call it the poor man's Mount Charleston," Marsh says.

He added to his holdings there in 1989, when he bid on eight acres of land, site unseen, for $1,800.

"It had a legal description as long as your arm. Nobody could figure out where it was, me included," he says.

Naturally, Marsh did what any community booster and historic preservationist would. He bought it.