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Reno's Blue Plate Special

1971 - 2010

It served our town well for 38 years, starting as a quarterly newsletter of Reno's lore, later transitioning into a Web site in 1999; up and down and resurrected a few times with a few breaks in continuity. And here I thank my friend and old RHS classmate Cal Pettengill, for hacking into the site for the past few months and keeping it alive this summer after it went to hell during the Reno High 50-year Reunion. The musical accompaniment  is his - he's the new website musical director (by the way some of you wrote about the song of Haiti; the artist was Harry Belafonte, the song Haiti Cherie, from his Songs of the Caribbean album, RCA Victor 1958)

Now, we move on and change the complexion of the site. I'm writing a new book, to be published someday, maybe this year, maybe another. Or never. The site's not being publicized; rather it's a raw work-in-progress where I can keep track of what I'm writing. If you found it, it's an accident, but keep its existence under your hat

The new work is

...it Leaves the City Trembling

a title I'm kind of proud of, although it seems mystically familiar for some reason, making me want to don my chinos, a bow tie, a Tilley hat and go down by the Truckee and sit on a rock by the Christian Science Church with a notepad and a #2 lead pencil. At the right is pictured Nevada Writers Hall of Fame writer Walter Van Tilburg Clark, who penned the City of Trembling Leaves in 1945, still the best book ever written about our town. (And I should promise that I'd never really use the City Trembling... title, should a book actually come to pass...)

We'll go all over Reno - and Sparks - with great abandon, with recollections of events, people, buildings and long-forgotten news of the days gone by. There's no pattern, either geographical or chronological - the motto is as this drive-by writer approaches the November of his years is, if it feels good, do it. Or write it. Or scan an old photo and post it. Or steal no, no, no – adapt someone else’s story.

A click will be added to lead to other segments and pages, maybe a calendar of upcoming stuff - when's the next Westerners' Corral? Who's speaking at the Good Old Days Club next Friday? When's the HRPS meeting? Do we have some cool reader pictures, or our own, to add? We'll add a click to those. And San Francisco, ahh, the City - seasoned readers know it comes up frequently in old columns - and the many Bay Area transplants in our valley seemed to enjoy it. That feature will endure. We'll resurrect the old Out-of-my-Mind page (thanks, Herb Caen, for that title). I maintained a Photo-of-the-Week page for a while and it will return. I'll probably post a reader-input column, something short of a letters-to-the-editor thing but available for letters and e-mails that further the cause.  The e-mail for this website is

carmineghia@live.com

That address is new - someday we'll speak of Carmine, our Blue Plate Special research director who has roots with the column back to the late 1980s (along with my typist Ophelia Payne, governmental affairs director Claude Hopper and photographer Lo Phat. They're all still aboard.) That e-mail address for input about this website; use the old e-mail address for anything personal. Spare us the lame jokes, incessant forwarded stuff and political and racial wisecracks. And as always, I'd never use your name or image without your permission. I hope you're long-since used to some of the cyber-shorthand in old websites and even columns (I ain't going to spell out HRPS every time; if you don't know Historical Reno Preservation Society you're peeking into the wrong website!) Turn-of-the-Century as always is a hundred-ten years ago. Photographs? Yes, in moderation. If it's unique, I'll post it, but a well-known image slows downloading and printing (see note below).

The final note expresses heartbreak that the exigencies of the 21st Century mandate that I use a web site to do all this on; the heartbreak being that some of my favorite readers don't use the web. Maybe somewhere out there a cottage industry will spring up, possibly with the resources of some of the senior groups in the valley, to copy and distribute the text to those who don't surf - these yarns are public domain and such distribution is welcomed and encouraged. (If that comes to pass I'll put out a printer-friendly page. More to follow on that...)

Enough rhetoric. A new book begins!  

Walter Van Tilburg Clark photo taken from Nevada Writers Hall of Fame website