History curator sees Reno community gone
by Jaik Sanders, Outpost staff
Phillip
Earl
In 1963, Pappy Smith, owner of Harolds Club casino,
sometimes dealt blackjack in downtown Reno. In 1963,
University of Nevada expenses -- rent, books, tuition, gas
for a car, etc. -- cost less than $400. In 1963, there was a
grocery store in downtown Reno not far from Central Middle
School on West Street.
OCCUPATION: Curator of history, Nevada
Historical Society
RENO RESIDENT SINCE: 1963
Phillip Earl, then a senior college transfer from Las Vegas, can't even see his own shadow in downtown anymore. If he strained, perhaps he could. But Earl now refuses even to go downtown.
"That isn't Reno," he said. "When I moved here, there were no casinos north of the railroad tracks. Downtown was commercially viable, which is to say there was a diversity of businesses there."
Earl sees Reno as a small, reasonably dense community he moved into in 1963. The change in image, he said, dates from the thrusting of corporations into local ownership -- most markedly in casinos.
"At the Riverside or the Mapes, for example, there would be a showroom," he said. "You'd go in and buy a couple of drinks and see a quality show -- usually someone up-and-coming in comedy or the theater. The food was reasonably priced and excellent. That would bring the people off the streets. That they'd play the slots a little or some poker was a nice addition to your revenues."
After the corporations came, things changed.
"Those people are all MBAs, and they don't know a damn thing outside their own cubicles and the bottom line," Earl said, tugging his hair. "That's why no one goes downtown anymore."
But the thing most alienated in Reno, he said, is the university.
"When I came here in 1963, there was a much closer relationship between the community and the university," he said.
He told the story when he first came from Vegas as a college student and did not have a heavy winter coat. He did not have much money at that time. A friend suggested he go downtown to Hatton's Men's Clothiers, long since gone from what has become Reno's neon orchard.
"I walked in the front door and asked about getting a coat," Earl said. "I said I was a student at the university, and the gentleman said 'Go pick out any coat you like. You can pay along at $5 a month.'
"I chose one for $60 and paid my $5 a month. He never even asked to see a student ID. That was Reno."
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Posted Dec. 16,
1999
Copyright 1999, Nevada Outpost
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