Pine Nuts: A history of Nevada revisited

By McAvoy Layne — Around 11 p.m., I asked the only other passenger in an elevator at Reno’s Grand Sierra, “Any Luck?”

He was a cultured looking gentleman, nicely attired in cowboy chaps and bolo tie, and had a sagacious twinkle in his eye.

He shouted, “Lu-uck!?” And I thought I detected whiskey in the air. 

“Son, have you any idea but a child’s, what LU-UCK is?!” he asked.

“Well, I guess I meant to ask, have you won any money?” I answered humbly.

“Son, you are a but a newborn, come with me.”  He locked his little finger into my buttonhole and pulled me into a bar around the corner, where he stood back, looked me over, and began dusting me off, like I had been in storage somewhere.

“What’s your name, boy?”

“Johnie Walker” I lied.

“Well, Mr. Walker, let me give you a little Nevada history at no charge…”

Fortifying himself with a restorative, he launched headlong into a history that went well into the midnight hour.

“In 1897, on St. Patrick’s Day,” he began, “Carson City hosted the Heavyweight Championship Fight of the World.  That fight, son, between Gentleman Jim Corbett, our champ, and Fightin’ Bobby Fitzsimmons, England’s champ, would save Nevada’s statehood.  You see, mining had played itself out here in the Silver State, our population had dwindled to 40,000 people, and there was a movement in congress to revoke our statehood.

Then suddenly four thousand people crossed the High Sierra to see that fight, which Fitzsimmons won in the fourteenth round with a low blow to the solar plexus, but then Corbett always wore his trunks hiked up so high, who was to know?

Anyways, when everybody had gone back to California and we counted up all the money that was left behind, our legislators asked themselves out loud, ‘If four thousand people will cross the High Sierra to see one fight, how many more will come if they can spin the French Wheel, get married, get divorced, visit a brothel?’

So you see, son, Nevada’s romance with disrespectability began with the Corbett-Fitzsimmons fight. Those two boys preserved our statehood, and we became the state of attractions on St. Patrick’s Day, 1897. My boy, everything you see around us today, from that crap table over there, to all of Las Vegas, and back to the Mustang Ranch brothel, is a direct result of that fight! Luck!? It ain’t just luck, it’s called, NEVADA! We’re the only state in the union whose economy and very identity are intrinsically linked to luck.  You see, son, here in the Silver State, the words, LUCK, and NEVADA, are merely two different words for the same thing. So the next time you ask a stranger if he’s had any luck, understand that you are asking a perfectly round rhetorical question.”  

And with that he gave me a slap on the back that watered my eyes.  So I guess the moral of this story is, don’t talk to strangers in elevators.

— Go here for the spoke word version of this and other columns. For more than 35 years, in over 4,000 performances, columnist and Chautauquan McAvoy Layne has been dedicated to preserving the wit and wisdom of “The Wild Humorist of the Pacific Slope,” Mark Twain. As Layne puts it: “It’s like being a Monday through Friday preacher, whose sermon, though not reverently pious, is fervently American.”

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