Reno is upside down!

I have to make a confession. I had a very unsettling moment when I started this post. Well, ok... make that about half an hour. 

I grudgingly opened Google Maps to refresh my memory about locations and street names around Reno where I lived from mid-1942 till Feb 1953. Yikes! Either my memory has become a leaky bucket or they have changed the name of several major streets in Reno. Worse, Reno has been inverted so North is South and South is North- but not everywhere: just places I frequented as a child! Well damn- my 'reality' has Reno displayed on an easily rotatable map that I can position to suit the occasion. 

That has been a splash of cold water in the face. Oops! I guess this is part of getting old (and I don't like it!). Actually it has to do with undisciplined mental imaging as a child not mixing well with adult discipline of map orientation,

I know clearly that Carson City is South of Reno (and that's still true in my mental map). And I had a clear image that when I started the walk to school at St. Thomas Aquinas grammar school I was walking north and down hill from the Day Home on Arlington, then across two bridges which linked Wingfield Park to both sides of the Truckee River. After the second bridge I then crossed at the traffic light to St Thomas. The imagery in my head had me walking straight down the street to the school. So far so good- St Thomas is properly on the North side of the Truckee River.

After school if I wanted to go hang out with my friend Tom Farrer I walked toward the Truckee River and turned right, then walked along the Truckee River to Keystone, turned right and walked up a few lots to Tommy's house. Easy-peasey. But there was a problem. On that trip to Tommy's house, St Thomas was now toward the bottom of my mental-map and (surprise! surprise!) nothing on Google Maps agreed.

So in my head the imagery was of the school at the top which is also the North side of town, but once I looked for familiar landmarks I rotated my mental-map 180°. Keystone should have been to the right but (OMG!) it was to the left. And so too was Idylwild Park. Yikes!

Well I have it sorted now and have re-trained those ancient mental images from almost 80 years ago to keep North to the top of the map and at the top of my mental imagery. As my sainted mother once told me "old age is not for wimps!"

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All those mental gymnastics caused me to think about where we lived during our years. In roughly 11 years living in the Biggest Little City in the World we lived in several residences-

• I remember our house at 1015 Gorden Ave. It was our first Reno residence. We moved in sometime during the summer of 1942. That house suffered a flooded basement our first fall in Reno- an inky black lake of water with family documents floating here and there. So that's when we moved...
  
  

  

  Google Maps says this is 1015 Gordon Ave in Reno. It was unpainted brick when we were there. Looks like they added outside stairs to reach an attic apartment.
  

  
  
• We moved to a duplex at 440 St Lawrence after Gordon Ave- perhaps as early as winter 1942-43 after the basement flooded. The new duplex was conveniently located near the Catholic Day Home and St Thomas Aquinas parochial school. My parents didn't know it at the time but that was going to prove an excellent choice for me to walk to day care and then to school in 1943.
  
  My parents rented that duplex in the winter- it had snowed and there was ice on the sidewalks. The reason I know that is my mother and I stepped off the bus onto the sidewalk, turned left and had walked about 100 feet when my mother slipped and fell on the icey sidewalk. Yikes! Her first thought was to reassure me that everything was ok, but the reality was that it wasn't "ok". We checked out the duplex and went back to the house on Gordon Ave. But she was a long while recovering from that fall!
  
  An aside: across the street from us on St Lawrence lived the La Rue family. They owned and operated the Wigwam Coffee Shop downtown. There is a street in the area named for the family (La Rue St.).
  
  
• It was probably after that we lived for a few months at the Cloverleaf Motel South of town on Virginia St (which is also US-395). The motel was immediately beside the old V&T Railroad and a pasture. It was a great place to play... if you keep track of when the daily tourist steam-powered train went and returned to Virginia City.
  
  A little explanation is probably in order- finding a home rental in Reno during WW-II was not an easy proposition especially on a budget.
  
  
• After a couple months at the Cloverleaf we moved to 253-1/2 E Taylor St. That motel was about a block away from the old V&T Railroad (long gone I'm afraid). We rented the rear of that duplex from John Roberts- a local contractor.
  
  It was also pretty close to where Johnny Cadlini lived- a friend from St Thomas. His father's family owned or operated the Cloverleaf Bar downtown not far from Harold's Club.
  
  And the E Taylor St house was pretty close to St Theresa Catholic church where I spent a year or two as an altar boy.
  
  
• Our last Reno residence was on Ryland St just down a steep-ish hill from the Reno Youth Center (? I'm guessing at the name; long gone). That house was a convenient walk for my mother to get to work at Bell of Nevada.
  
  Like most houses in Reno, the Ryland house had a basement. Uniquely, however, the basement was equipped with a 'monkey stove': a small wood-burning iron stove which incorporated a way to heat water for doing laundry. And in lieu of a clothes dryer the basement had a clothes line- nearly got decapitated a couple times if I turned and moved in any direction without looking.

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With all the notable things about Reno it ought not be a surprise that I also remember the brothels- legal in Washoe County at the time of WW-II started. I did read recently that they closed the brothels in Reno in 1942 at the insistence of the US Army when the Army opened Stead Army Air Corps base just North of Reno.

It was impressed upon me that I was to go nowhere near that area. And of course I wanted to know where it was that I was to avoid so that I didn't go there (Catch-22). So I scouted it out: by my ancient recollection the brothels were on the North side of the tracks a few blocks East of Virginia St, roughly lined up with Wells Ave. As I recall events these 75+ years later, the brothels had 12 ft high fences surrounding the buildings. I never understood if those fences were to keep staff inside the compound or to keep the locals & customers out! 

Some of the 'cribs' of The Stockade brothel after they were converted to apartments in 1977

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Thinking back to those days, I feel the bigger threat to individuals, residents and visitors alike, was the many casinos. They were money machines which picked the pockets of almost everyone who walked inside, but especially those who had a gambling problem. If you were going to survive in Reno as a resident you had to stay away from the casinos unless you could manage that sort of impulsive behavior. By and large I could go weeks of even months without setting foot on Virginia St (but then they wouldn't have let me into any casino as I was too young!). The closest I got was a block away if I happened to go to a movie at the Crest Theater.

But then the slot machines ('one armed bandits') were everywhere except banks, the library and church basements. Grocery stores, pharmacies, service businesses, coffee shops - pretty much anywhere with enough clear floor space - had slot machines.

Fortunately we Bowmans didn't have an issue with gambling. There simply was no interest. But that wasn't true for at least a few others in our extended family. Along that line...

• On one extreme we had a relative arrive for a vacation. My parents insisted on some cash from them when they arrived ($20 I think) to be held for them till they were ready to drive back to California. They would need gas money (gas was under $0.20/gal in Nevada after WW-II) for the return trip and the concern was that they could easily lose everything at the casinos. More than one other resident invoked the same rule when their relatives visited.
  
  
• On the other hand was a family friend named Omar Jacobs. Omar was the mechanic who kept the Bowman cars running through WW-II & Korean war (a 1936 Buick sedan; a 1939 Chevrolet sedan; and a 1947 Chevrolet coupe). He would take a lunch break some days by driving downtown to the casinos where they served a free buffet lunch in those days (I doubt anything is free anymore!). On rare occasions he 'got a feeling' as he passed the slot machines. He played silver dollar machines only (penny/nickel/dime/quarter slots didn't have enough reward). Most often that 'feeling' paid off and he got a hit of a few dollars though never a jackpot. If he didn't get that small payoff within three silver dollars (his limit; he seldom had to use all three) he walked away. He rationalized it by saying 'the lunch was free'. Between his free lunch plus his frequent luck related to 'the feeling' Omar was ahead long term. Not a story that was repeated very often I suspect.
  

The old "One Arm Bandits"... completely mechanical machines. You could find them in every store in town: buy groceries and put the change in the slot machine!

 

The museum (plus a few spears and swords!), upstairs at Harold's Club. It had an amazing collection of antique firearms.

One more casino story- Harold's Club (the biggest casino on Virginia St at the time) was owned by the Smith family. When I was an altar boy at St Theresa's, one of my jobs at Sunday service was to go around with the collection plate during the sermon. I would bring all the donations into the vestry (the priest's changing room beside the altar) at the end of the service so the priest could bag it up. Usually the collections contained all small change with only a few silver dollars or $1 bills. But every once in awhile there would be a couple $20 bills or maybe a few $5 or $10 bills. One of the other altar boys told me "that happens when someone from the Smith family comes to the service. You know- Harold's Club."

 

And that's the back story of at least one of the casinos. The Smith family donated a great deal of money back to the city and to churches. I can't say if it was exclusively to the Catholic church or if they were equally generous to the other denominations as well. At some point I learned that the Day Home I went to during WW-II was in a building which was bought and paid for by the Smith family and then donated to the church.

 

Even in my pre-high school years I was also aware of how money was being harvested by all the casinos and that the casinos were always going to come out ahead. It was all in the mathematics related to random events (probability theory). At some point I learned that (again it was info about Harold's Club) the casinos set the slot machine to pay the clubs about 5-6%. Everything else went back to the players. The returns from the gaming tables (roulette, black jack, craps, others) were similar. I have no clue if that same return is in play today- my info is from 80 years ago! And all those out-of-place slots at the grocery store, etc. most likely were not so generous as to keep only 5-6%... I'm confident their return was significantly higher!