The news that Community First Bank plans to move part of its operation to the Crocket Building has drawn attention.<\/p>\n
Will the move itself revitalize downtown Las Vegas? We can hope. Irrespective of that, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s great the bank\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s owners, Ray and Joyce Litherland, chose to keep the bank downtown.<\/p>\n
To many of us, the Crocket Building means a lot. For the uninitiated, we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re referring to the Murphey\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Building. For many years, that was the center of New Town. Ernie Thwaites, the original manager of KFUN, used to run a live radio spot: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Douglas at Sixth Street, where Las Vegans meet.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
So it was. That was the downtown I knew while growing up.<\/p>\n
Let me explain:<\/p>\n
Because of the economy or even personal preference, we Trujillo children got fed most things at room temperature. In the really early days, not only did we lack a refrigerator, we didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t even own an icebox, and we downed our corn flakes with a mixture of room-temperature water and Pet Milk. Ah, what a joy when we got the first icebox! Once a week, the iceman cameth. Really! More than an allusion to a Eugene O\u00e2\u20ac\u2122Neill play, there was a man who delivered what looked like a 300-pound chunk of ice to our residence.<\/p>\n
The ice kept things cool \u00e2\u20ac\u201d never cold. Of course, with eight grocery stores within a half mile, getting fresh food daily was simple.<\/p>\n
We almost never tasted ice cream, except on what Mom called \u00e2\u20ac\u0153special days,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d when Dad borrowed a company car and transported us across town, to the county health department at the courthouse, for our yearly vaccinations, but that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a topic for a future column. Besides, rhapsodizing about ice cream when visualizing a syringe the thickness of a garden hose isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t appealing.<\/p>\n
The anticipation of the taste of real, cold ice cream made the shots almost bearable. I tasted my first malt at around age 9, at Murphey\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s, where the fountain treats were sublime. I\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d never seen that little dealie with a rod that stirred the concoction, the way we mix a can of paint.<\/p>\n
But rather than making this a restaurant review, let me move to other observations:<\/p>\n
Murphey\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s bulged with office and photo equipment and supplies. Need a bulb for some obscure brand of movie projector? Get it at Murphey\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s. A long-time pharmacist, John S. Moore, recently explained that the upper level of the store featured virtually every kind of columnar pad for bookkeeping.<\/p>\n
My dad, who kept books for the local Ford dealership, would walk to Murphey\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s to pick up exactly the kind of accounting pads he needed. Today, a computer program can give you all the columns you require, but back then, Murphey\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s stocked pre-printed forms.<\/p>\n
In my youth, in the late-40s and decades before the Wal-Martization of East Las Vegas, downtown housed all manner of businesses: auto dealerships, banks, clothing stores, coffee shops, drug stores, five-and-dimes, flower shops, hardware stores, hotels, jewelers, movie theaters, newsstands, photo studios, restaurants, shoe shops, supermarkets and taverns. There was little of that one-stop shopping in this town.<\/p>\n
My friends and I enjoyed counting the number of gum spots ground into the hexagonal tiles at the drug store. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s as if people bought gum for the thrill of getting it stuck on people\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s shoes, then on the tile floor.<\/p>\n
A weekly errand was for me to pick up a couple of Roi-Tan cigars at Murphey\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s. My father, for whom I fetched the smokes, insisted they come out of a humidor \u00e2\u20ac\u0153so they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re nice and fresh.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Another thing he stressed was that they let me pick out the cigars from the box.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153What\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s the difference, Dad?\u00e2\u20ac\u009d I would ask about the elaborate protocol. He explained that in the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153olden days\u00e2\u20ac\u009d (olden days even to him), the familiar ring that girds the cigar was what held it together.<\/p>\n
True, all of my life, cigars have come individually wrapped, but before that, they were placed in the box in bulk, and they weren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t always uniform. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153And that,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d Dad explained, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153is why it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s proper to let the customer pick out the cigars.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
In my youth, the soda fountain was the main draw: a soda-and-ice-cream concoction called a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153fizz\u00e2\u20ac\u009d sold for a nickel; shakes and malts were 15 and 20 cents.<\/p>\n
We Optic sellers often spent most of our profits at the soda fountain. My friend Wilfred (Billy) Martinez and I sold competing newspapers and often made the rounds together. We enjoyed chatting with some of Murphey\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s staff, Roy Browning, Sketchley Moore and Erminio (Herman) Martinez. By the time Charlie Hillis took over Murphey\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s, my friend and I had given up our newspaper jobs.<\/p>\n
The tenor of the times was more relaxed than now, and possibly because local merchants dealt with virtually the same customers over and over, everybody tried harder. We always felt welcome and appreciated at Murphey\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s.<\/p>\n
After all these years, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s great for the building to go back into use. For its entire existence (or at least my entire existence) Murphey\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s has helped make Las Vegas the place Petula Clark surely described in the \u00e2\u20ac\u02dc60s, when she sang, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153When you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re alone and life is making you lonely, you can always go \u00e2\u20ac\u201d downtown.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The news that Community First Bank plans to move part of its operation to the Crocket Building has drawn attention. Will the move itself revitalize downtown Las Vegas? We can hope. Irrespective of that, it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s great the bank\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s owners, Ray and Joyce Litherland, chose to keep the bank downtown. To many of us, the Crocket […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/541"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=541"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/541\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":549,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/541\/revisions\/549"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=541"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=541"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=541"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}