Looking for Pat Cassedy? Try the lane that bears his name
Even if Pat Cassedy hadn’t lived most of his life in the same house, there’s little chance he’d forget the address. He lives on Cassedy Lane, and that isn’t a coincidence. It’s named for him.
Cassedy came to the valley in 1941 when he was 2 years old. His parents leased 160 acres roughly bounded by what are now Sandhill Road, Hacienda Avenue, Lamb Boulevard and Rawhide Street.
The family operated a hog ranch there. After a while his father opened up what Cassedy said was the first garbage business serving Henderson.
“He dumped most of it down a hill in the back of the property and fed the edibles to the hogs,” Cassedy said. “It was a good deal for him. Besides establishing a new business, he got free hog feed.”
At the time, the valley was more sparsely populated and there were large tracts of open desert between communities. Traveling between Paradise, Whitney and Henderson, as Cassedy and his family often did, meant trekking along graded roads for miles.
After a few years at the pig farm, the land owner got an offer for the property, but he gave Cassedy’s father an option to buy it first.
“I think he was asking $11,000 for the whole thing,” Cassedy said. “My dad was tired of the hog ranch and the garbage business, so we just moved.”
When Cassedy says moved, he doesn’t mean just the family. They moved the house, too. The bedroom of the home had been moved once before. It was originally an office at the corner of what is now Tropicana Avenue and Boulder Highway for the company that divided Boulder Highway. Cassedy’s father bought it and moved it, then moved it again to its current location, just a few blocks from where it had originally been.
At the time Cassedy Lane was named Desert Road and was located behind the first Whitney post office. That post office building is now the Accuracy Gun Shop at 5903 Boulder Highway.
The Cassedy family started an ice company and distributed ice across much of the southeast part of the valley, taking it to homes and businesses.
“I never had a baby sitter my entire life,” Cassedy said. “We used to go to all the bars and restaurants. Some of the lower-income people still had ice boxes, where we’d have to bring the ice right into their homes and put them in the box.”
Cassedy still remembers the signs they gave home customers printed with the numbers 25, 50, 75 and 100. The customers would turn the sign so the number of the pounds of ice they wanted was on the top.
Cassedy’s father died about a year after the ice business began. His mother continued to run it, and when Cassedy was 21 or 22, he took it over.
“By that time it was being used more for recreational use,” Cassedy said. “People would take it to the lake or whatever. We had big coin-operated ice vendors, maybe 9 feet high by 8 feet wide, that moved the ice by conveyer belt. Most of them were 16 feet long, but we had one that was 24.”
His mother became involved in local government early on and served on a town advisory board. Cassedy followed in her footsteps and served on the Whitney Town Advisory Board for around 15 years.
“I was very instrumental in deciding where the east leg of the freeway (U.S. Highway 95) is,” Cassedy said. “We managed to get the first senior center in any of the towns,” he added.
He also was on the board when members secured $100,000 of funding for improvements for the town park, now called East Las Vegas Park. His mother had originally designated it a park when she was on the board.
“It wasn’t much of a park back then,” Cassedy said, “just some grass that wasn’t watered much and a few trees my mother had planted and a broken-down picnic table.”
Cassedy’s plans for the park put him into conflict with Bob Forson, then director of parks and recreation for Clark County.
“I wanted modern playground equipment with slides and swings, which was a luxury at the time,” Cassedy said. “Bob wanted to make it into a county ball park.”
The conflict was resolved, not in the courts, as it probably would be today, but in a face-to-face meeting between Cassedy and Forson in the office of County Commissioner Sam Bowler. The park was renovated as per Cassedy’s plan.
“It was a different place then,” Cassedy said. “I used to meet Bob Broadbent once a month for breakfast to discuss town matters with him. He’d stop in on his way downtown from his home in Boulder City.”
Cassedy said the street he lived on was renamed for him in honor of his service to Whitney. The son of a farmer now owns most of the homes on the street. It is, after all, Cassedy Lane.
Contact Sunrise/Whitney View reporter F. Andrew Taylor at ataylor@viewnews.com or 380-4532.