Willard Street named for early Whitney Town Board member

A story in the Dec. 4, 2012, Sunrise/Whitney View outlined how many of the streets in the oldest part of Whitney were named for early residents of the area. The article prompted a call by Corita Dewitt, who clarified that Willard was not, as the article claimed, named for a family named Willard. She said it was named for Willard Mathison, an early resident of the area.

She should know. Mathison was her father.

Dewitt still lives two doors down from the house where she grew up in Whitney, in a home built by her grandmother, Bertha Verbeke.

"I've lived in a lot of places," Dewitt said. "My first husband was in the Air Force, and so we moved around. I always come back here because there's always good jobs here."

Dewitt said her father traveled quite a bit before finding his home in Whitney. He was raised in Minnesota, and for a time he worked on his uncle's farm there. He moved around before getting a job at the Manganese Ore Co. in Henderson, near the site of present-day Lake Las Vegas. She has one of his check stubs from August 1944. His take-home pay for a 40-hour week was $37.95.

Mathison was living at Whitney Court on Boulder Highway when he met Frances Verbeke, Dewitt's mother, in the mid-1940s. They married soon after and had three children. Corita was the last, born in 1950.

When Nellie and John Bunch turned the area behind their Boulder Highway gas station into the homemade housing development of Copper Acres, the Mathisons were among the first residents. Willard Mathison was on the Whitney Town Board, and he kept meeting minutes in his neat, tightly spaced handwriting. Dewitt still has copies of the minutes.

"His handwriting is amazing," Dewitt said. "There aren't any spelling errors. You can see why they had him do it."

Dewitt's maternal grandparents followed their daughter to Whitney and settled there. By 1954, her grandmother was the subject of a major article in the then-4-year-old Las Vegas Sun.

The article, headlined "Woman, 62, builds home" explained how "Mrs. Joe Verbeke" built her home mostly by herself out of railroad ties purchased from a proposed spur line that was canceled. She poured the concrete, scoured the desert looking for large flagstones for the hand-built fireplace and cut the ties to length with handsaws. The article noted that she had limited help from her ailing 82-year-old husband.

"He worked on the railroads for 30 years," Dewitt said. "He was hurt on the job, something to do with an accident with a coupler, I think."

Dewitt's grandmother added lots of little touches to the home, including built-in shelves in every room and fancy, curved-cut wood decorations on the cabinets.

"She used a coffee can to mark the circles," Dewitt said. "She cut them all with hand tools."

Next door, a second home was also made from the railroad ties, and Dewitt's aunt lived there. The Mathisons lived on the other side of that house.

Dewitt remembers a bucolic rural life as a child. At the time, Bunch Street was the edge of the world as far as she was concerned. Nothing was built across the street until after she was out of high school. She and her siblings could play for hours among tall mesquite trees and catch pollywogs in the swamp, a marshy part of Duck Creek.

"As kids, we rode stick horses everywhere," Dewitt said. "Nellie Bunch always had a horse and a burro up by their property on Boulder Highway, and I would feed them carrots and mesquite beans on my way to school."

The Mathisons lived in Whitney before sewer lines were built there and when water came from artesian wells. Dewitt said the family chopped wood for heat and washed its clothes with a ringer washer and dried them on a clothesline. Any major shopping had to be done at Las Vegas Village, a trip they made about once a month. Medicine had to be picked up in downtown Las Vegas at White Cross Drugs.

Although the family lived in what was a rural area at the time, it did travel for school and major events. Although Dewitt attended the Whitney School for her elementary years, she went to junior high in Henderson and high school at Bishop Gorman.

"My father won the Whiskerino Contest one year," Dewitt said, referring to the annual contest connected to Helldorado Days in which locals try to grow large and outrageous facial hair. "They wouldn't let him take first place because we didn't live in the city; we lived in unincorporated Clark County."

Willard Mathison worked for 30 years as a custodian for the Clark County School District. He died in 1982. His son John followed in his footsteps, also working the job for 30 years.

"I moved around a bit, but I'm living in the same home I grew up in," John Mathison said. "Not a lot of people can say that."

Willard Mathison never lived on the street that bears his name, but some of his descendents do.

"It was named for him not because he lived on the street but because he was a pioneer out here," Dewitt said. "There used to only be three families out here, and we were one of them."

Contact Sunrise/Whitney View reporter F. Andrew Taylor at ataylor@viewnews.com or 702-380-4532.