Dema Guinn speaks for first time since husband and former governor’s death

Dema Guinn begged her husband twice not to go up on the roof to blow away pine needles, but it was one of the chores he wanted to do before they left for their Northern Nevada home and he was insistent. Kenny Guinn never minded hard work. At 73, he was in good health, although two years ago he'd had a mini heat stroke. She told him to be careful .

"I heard the ladder scrape over the concrete and I went outside. He was on the ground, his hand on his chest. He was dead." She rushed to hold her husband of 54 years in her arms, but there was no time for words, she said Saturday, in her first interview.

She remains shattered, but made one request.

"Tell the love story Kenny had with the state," Dema Guinn said between tears and sobs.

"He cared so much about the people of Nevada; he cared about the people who couldn't make their house payments, people who couldn't put food on the table, seniors, children. Every morning and night he worried about the state."

He worried about Nevada the eight years he was governor and he worried about it for the past three-and-a-half years after he left the office and the economy turned sour. He fretted about the unemployment rate, because it was more than a number to a man who had once been among the poorest of the poor, yet now was wealthy. He anticipated the 2011 legislative session would be the worst in the state's history. The man who knew the state's budget better than any other governor in recent times had offered to help whoever the next governor might be, Democrat or Republican.

Dema Guinn admitted she resents those who call her late husband a RINO: a Republican in name only.

"He was a people's governor. Kenny never thought of himself as a Republican or a Democrat or an independent," she said. The Guinn Millennium Scholarship, Nevada Check-Up (a program for uninsured children), Senior Rx, and increasing the state's mental health budget were not partisan in his eyes. Guinn could never understand why his efforts to create a stable tax base, efforts which ultimately failed, became a partisan issue with Republicans fighting him.

When it came to education, she remembers him telling her, "I can't look myself in the eye and cut more programs for education."

Our conversation took place at her son Jeff's home, where she has stayed since Thursday, unable to go back to the home where her husband died. It's still not certain, the coroner said, whether he fell and had a "medical event" or had a "medical event" and then fell.

Her husband had always said he wanted to die in their Las Vegas home, where they had lived since 1978. He didn't want to sell it. But the morning of his death, during their regular morning coffee conversation, he said keeping up three homes was becoming too much for them. Between the sprawling ranch-style home in Las Vegas, the home in Northern Nevada and a beach home in Carlsbad, Calif., it was becoming too much of a burden, he said. It was time to downsize.

Guinn will be buried in Exeter, Calif., the tiny town where the Guinns grew up together and fell in love. Their parents and aunts and uncles are buried there and a service will conducted there Thursday. But first, Nevadans will pay their respects at a visitation Monday at 7 p.m. and a service Tuesday at 10 a.m. Both will be at St. Joseph, Husband of Mary Roman Catholic Church, 7260 W. Sahara Ave. Although the Guinns are not Catholic, all their children and grandchildren are.

Plans were still being finalized, but, as of Saturday, Dema said they had decided to make the reception after the service the way Kenny Guinn would have wanted: beer and hot dogs. It was the way he lived and it was what he would have enjoyed.

The right way to remember her husband would be to donate to the Guinn Millennium Scholarship, she said. "If they wanted to do anything for my husband, they would keep that going," she said.

More than 60,000 Nevada students have attended Nevada colleges and universities on the scholarship program Guinn created in 1999, using tobacco settlement money. Students could receive as much as $10,000 to help them with their education. It was not a means-tested program. Any student who qualified with a certain grade point average could apply. Officials say that more than double the number of Nevada students are attending state colleges and universities since the program was established.

Every couple of weeks, the Guinns were thanked for the scholarship program, either from a former student, a current student or a member of a student's family.

"How do I keep his programs going?" his widow asked, her voice choking.

Presuming Republican Brian Sandoval wins the governor's race, "Kenny was going to do anything Brian Sandoval wanted him to do. If he needed help with the budget, Kenny would help. But if Rory Reid won, he would have made the same offer," she said. "In the next session, he'd be over there helping every day if he could, whether the governor was a Democrat or a Republican."

Guinn just didn't care about party.

She knows she's not supposed to make decisions right now, but she plans to sell the Las Vegas home.

"I can't go back to the home where he died," she said.

She may sell the homes in Northern Nevada and California, because they hold too many memories.

She plans to buy a small condo in Exeter, where she can be close to him, and a small home in Las Vegas, where she can be close to her two sons and their families.

As she spoke, their poodle Mimi sat by her feet protectively, or at least as protectively as a miniature poodle can be. Dema's memories bounced from their childhood in Exeter to their first days in Las Vegas, starting in 1964. They moved here initially so he could be an administrator in the Clark County School District. Five years later, when he was 32, the district asked him to be the superintendant.

"Kenny told them, 'I don't know how to be a superintendent,' " she recalled. School Board members said they knew that, but they also knew he was honest and a hard worker.

He had no banking experience either, although he was a numbers guy. Nor did he know much about running a gas company. He'd never managed a university when he took over the president's job for a year. And he'd never run for any office before running for governor.

But his reputation for honesty and hard work, and the one-time math teacher's grasp of budget numbers, kept him advancing.

Dema Guinn remains protective of her husband.

She noted news accounts talk about the record $833 million tax increase passed in 2003, but she noted her husband only asked for $704 million. The legislators bumped it up. When revenues came in higher than expected, Guinn returned $300 million to Nevadans in 2005. As guardian of his memory, she doesn't want that forgotten.

Whether he was school superintendent or governor, Guinn liked to get up early and go make unannounced visits to check things out with the people first on the scene. School janitors and cooks would tell of his unannounced visits.

Once as governor, he made an unannounced visit to the Andre Agassi College Preparatory Academy and bumped into Agassi's friend Perry Rogers, who was surprised to see him there, unaccompanied by the press.

"He didn't do things to get press," Dema Guinn said. "So he wasn't a smart politician. But he was a caring and honest politician."

Jane Ann Morrison's regular column appears Monday, Thursday and Saturday. E-mail her at Jane@reviewjournal.com or call (702) 383-0275. She also blogs at lvrj.com/blogs/morrison.