Looking west from William Street at the Dutch Mill restaurant, corner of William and Carson streets in the 1950s or '60s.
Saturday
150 Years Ago
The screamingest Washoe Zephyr of the season blew down upon us yesterday and filled all creation, and all creation’s ears and eyes and nose with dust and sand. There is rain coming.
140 Years Ago
The greatest yet. Dan De Quille, in yesterday morning’s Enterprise, tells of a man who has discovered several acres of petrified animals in the Wind River range. He has also discovered a process by which he changes the stone band into the original meat and expects to have the birds and reptiles of the Silurian period walking about and on exhibition in menageries. This is by all odds the greatest lie yet produced on the coast. John Townsend is only a little frog pond compared to this mighty sea of fabrication.
120 Years Ago
Yesterday the substation in this city was the scene of quite an interesting electric display. A threshing machine attempted to pass under the electric wires and in so doing came in contact with them, shorting the lines and blowing out the fuses in the substation. The trouble was soon righted. The odd part of the affair was that no one on the threshing machine was killed or injured but it is safe to say that none of them wish to try the experiment again.
60 Years Ago
Three men were sentenced to life imprisonment today in Carson City for kidnapping a wealthy Lake Tahoe divorcee. They took Mrs. Erna Worland Barber from her Crystal Bay home to a Stateline casino, where the tried to force her to cash her $1,500 check.
40 Years Ago
Medical specialists were to join in efforts to identify a body found Friday in a plastic bag south of Silver City, a Lyon County Sheriff’s spokesman said today.
Sunday
150 Years Ago
Doctor Colton of the Carson District School Board called on us yesterday to say that owing to the overcrowded state of the primary department of the public school, it was deemed best to adopt the plan of teaching one half in the morning and the other half in the afternoon. There are 141 of these little people, and something like over 300 of scholars of all sorts and ages. The district is seeking to build a two-story addition on the back of the current building.
140 Years Ago
The eclipse last evening was very poorly attended. Carson has been a bad show town during the last six months.
120 Years Ago
The Reno Trade’s unions are said to be preparing to bring suit against two parties in that town for violating the eight-hour law.
60 Years Ago
Scientific sleuths will fire a nuclear blast near Fallon Oct. 26 to help learn how to detect the difference between underground bomb test and earthquakes. The Fallon site was picked because earthquakes have rocked its granite in the past.
40 Years Ago
Doug Picking’s dream of building a giant old-time sailing ship in the desert to house a casino and restaurant and the largest maritime museum in the West has vanished. And gone is the near $1 million invested by hundreds of Nevadans and others.
Tuesday
150 Years Ago
After sputtering and threatening and making up surly faces and wasting a great deal of unnecessary wind, the weather keeper deposited, slyly, in the dead waste and middle of the night Monday, just the least little frost bitten, half-starved flirt of snow — just enough to chill the air and make things disagreeable.
140 Years Ago
On Friday last there was considerable excitement in Genoa over a shooting affray and a fist fight. It appears that Ike Sunlan was crossing the street when a young man named Peck threw some stones at him. Sunlan fired three shots at Peck, none of which took effect, after which Tom Raycraft beat Sunlan with his fists. Sunlan was arrested and on Saturday matters were comprised all around.
120 Years Ago
E.B. Fuller, of the Junction House, twenty miles north of Reno, was in town yesterday. Mr. Fuller brought to this office a piece of meteor which fell near the house between 9 and 10 o’clock on the evening of the second. Its approach was heralded by a whizzing noise and a string of flame and fire and when it struck it sounded like a dull blast. It went into pieces on a boulder and fragments were strewn about a circle of many hundred yards. — Dispatch
60 Years Ago
Gov. Grant Sawyer’s Lake Tahoe committee today gave tentative approval to plans for a 2.56-mile tunnel which would carry sewage out of the Lake Tahoe basin into the Carson Valley.
40 Years Ago
At the Luxury Theatres Sean Connery in Never Say Never Again, Tough Enough and Man from Snowy River.
Trent Dolan is the son of Bill Dolan, who wrote this column for the Nevada Appeal from 1947 until his death in 2006.