More Nevada lawmakers wearing beards, goatees

CARSON CITY - In an era when showing off your tattoos is the rage, some Nevada legislators have gone in a different, and decidedly old-fashioned, direction.

They have returned to the days when Mark Twain covered the Legislature for Virginia City's Territorial Enterprise and are sporting beards or long Wyatt Earp-style mustaches.

At least 11 legislators - Sens. Aaron Ford, Justin Jones and Mark Manendo, all D-Las Vegas, and Kelvin Atkinson, D-North Las Vegas; Assembly members Joe Hogan, Andy Eisen, Jason Frierson and Richard Carrillo, all D-Las Vegas, David Bobzien, D-Reno, Randy Kirner, R-Reno, and Ira Hansen, R-Sparks - sport beards of one kind or another. Most prefer goatees.

"I have been around a long time," said Hogan, 75. A beard "is granting yourself the status of a wise elder."

Hogan also surmised that vanity is a factor: "There is no question that typical male arrogance and self-love leads us to be as attractive as we can be."

Kirner joked that he added a beard to cover up the fact he is bald. And Ford said that he will cut his beard the next time he visits a barber.

Senate Minority Leader Michael Roberson, R-Las Vegas, had a beard until he abruptly shaved it off last week.

Sen. Greg Brower, R-Reno, said he had competed with Roberson in growing a beard but shaved his off after six days when his family decided he looked like a hobo and would not pose with him for pictures.

Sen. Pete Goicoechea, R-Eureka, and Assemblyman Cresent Hardy, R-Mesquite, sport mustaches that resemble those of 19th-century gunfighters.

Compare all these hairy guys with the 1921 class, whose photo hangs in the Legislative Building.

Not one had a beard.

Photos are not displayed for every Legislature in the era after statehood, so you can't say this year's class of graybeards is a record.

But in the state's early days, every governor wore long beards, apparently in tribute to Abraham Lincoln, who was president when Nevada became a state. Portraits of every Nevada governor are found on walls in the Capitol.

By the dawn of the 20th century, most legislators and governors had stopped wearing beards, and few had mustaches.

Historian Guy Rocha said a governor has not had a beard since Reinhold Sadler in 1903. He was followed by heavily mustached John Sparks, a cattle baron who looked the part of a gunslinger.

By the 1920s, no governors even wore mustaches.

The thinking for politicians always has been they had to be in the "mainstream" in dress and grooming, not "hippies" or part of the counterculture, Rocha said.

Until recent years, legislators rarely had beards, with notable exceptions such as the late Assemblyman Marvin Sedway in the 1980s.

A smoker, the colorful Sedway once even accidentally lighted his beard during a Ways and Means Committee meeting. Smoking is no longer permitted in the Legislative Building.

While legislators don't have visible tattoos, it's a safe bet in football-mad Northern Nevada that some are hiding theirs or at least considering imitating University of Nevada, Reno graduate and San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick.

Kaepernick has become America's best-known tattooed guy.

Contact Capital Bureau Chief Ed Vogel at evogel@reviewjournal.com or 775-687-3901.