Continuing the Mapes Hotel story: Whether it was Roy Rogers, sipping decorously from a water tumbler full of vodka-no ice at a Sky Room Press Conference, Shirley Temple taking to the dance floor there to try her skills to the music of Eddie Fitzpatrick or multi-millionaire Wilbur May laughing at the repartee of comedian Jim Backus (Mr. Magoo) in the corner booth at the south … [Read more...]

One of the Mapes coffee shop’s most memorable menus was the “Chinese” that went on at midnight and attracted rounders and swing-shifters into the wee hours. Not until Bill Fong’s New China Club began featuring a “takee outee” menu did the Mapes have any serious competition. A favorite story, which could be fact or fiction, is that an oriental couple came into the Mapes coffee … [Read more...]

Last week we ended our column about the Mapes Hotel with a description of its manager, Walter Ramage. Walter was the premier hotelier of all time in the Biggest Little City. He would have been at home running a hotel in any of the major cities in the country including New York and Chicago. At the Mapes, standing ramrod straight, Ramage cruised every square inch of the … [Read more...]

Exactly seventy years and ten days ago, one of the most memorable events of the twentieth century occurred in Reno. It was the opening of the fabled Mapes Hotel. Overnight, the City of Reno was transformed from a rambunctious town of cowboys, miners, divorcees and a host of roustabouts into a slightly sophisticated entity. Physically, the Mapes was a towering twelve-story … [Read more...]

The time was April of 1957, some sixty years ago, when Reno was to receive its most spectacular appearance on television. The occasion was to occur in the Sky Room of the Mapes Hotel when strong man Paul Anderson would make a three or four minute live appearance on the famous Ed Sullivan Show. As reported in the Press, the popular Sullivan Show had an audience of 40,000,000 … [Read more...]

Located almost smack dab in the middle of Lake Tahoe’s eastern shore is a tiny hamlet that has the same mystique as the storied Camelot. Its name is Glenbrook, which may be a little redundant because Webster lists the definition of glen as, “a valley usually wooded and with a stream”, however, early settlers wanted to definitely describe the area in its totality. At the … [Read more...]

Looking at the current expansion and renovation of the University of Nevada campus, it might be a good time to reimagine what the school looked like in the by-gone era of the middle of the last century. At that time the compact little campus extended as far north as the new (Virginia Street) gym. Beyond the gym were the hilly grounds covered mostly by sagebrush. Even the … [Read more...]

HUMPTY DUMPTY HILLARY. Like the fictional nursery rhyme character, Hillary Clinton took a tremendous fall last November and all the king’s (Obama’s) horses and all the king’s (Obama’s) men could not put her together again. In Hillary’s case, the horses and men included President Obama, Joe Biden, Michelle Obama, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, the disgraced DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman … [Read more...]