Silvio Petricciani - University of Nevada, Reno

6 Silvio E. Petricciani
just a chip off the old block. And he was a
very well-respected man in the community.
And he belonged to the Elks Club here and
some of the Italian organizations that had
sprouted up early in the twenties and thirties.
And he was, oh, shall we say a hail-fellowwell-met.
He knew everybody in town, and
everybody knew him. He always had a hello
for everybody, and even to this day—he
died in 1955—and people still come and
reminisce about him, you know, and what a
wonderful man he was. And many things that
he would [do for] poor people and so forth
went unnoticed, and there’s a lot of things I
knew about.
He was a very charitable man, and during
the late twenties and early thirties they didn’t
have the organizations such as United Fund
and all those. And he made it a point to
find out some of the needy families in town,
and to my knowledge he always said that he
would never see anybody go hungry. And he
distributed Thanksgiving baskets of turkey
and food to people. Of course, we didn’t have
a restaurant in the club at all at the time—and
of course, we didn’t have the gospel mission
or St. Vincent’s kitchen and all those kind of
things at that time—but he used to have the
old Washoe Cafe next door to us which was
in the building we bought here [the building
to west of original Palace building], and he
used to give a meal ticket to every needy
person that came up to the cashier cage on
Thanksgiving and Christmas. In those days
during the Depression, on a Thanksgiving
we’d probably give out five hundred dollars
worth of meals. Say, figure a meal at that
time was about a dollar and a half, so you
can imagine the people we fed during the
Thanksgiving days. That was custom at the
Palace Club. Or he’d find out that somebody
had a home without heat and he’d send a
ton of coal over to the house and pay for it
or a cord of wood or whatever the people
needed at the time. And these are things that
I find out about now that people remember
and remember him as being that type of a
person. And he was just the type of fellow
that got along good with people, loved them.
Of course, being in this business you almost
have to, you know. You have to love people
to be able to conduct a business such as this.
These things I very vividly remember.
Oh, he was kind of a character in his way.
Lot of times, he’d see a—in those days
in the vernacular we’d call them bums—
walking down the street, dirty, unshaven, hair
unkempt, and he’d send him to the barber
shop, pay for a shave and a haircut for him to
see the man get cleaned up, maybe possibly
to give him some pride in himself.
And he dressed immaculately. He was a
very proud man, and he always walked very
erect, shoulders back and very erect. He was
just a proud man and rightly so—had reason
to be proud.
One thing I can say about my dad and I
say it with pride, he was a very good man, he
was a stern man. He believed in discipline at
home, and he raised his family and he raised
four pretty good kids, [who] never got in
trouble of any kind or anything; and he was
probably as good a provider for his family as
anybody ever was in this world.
How did your father learn to be a slot mechanic
when he went to work for Baroni?
He didn’t know anything about slots when
he went to work for him, but he just came in
and asked for a job. And Baroni asked him if
he knew anything, but of course my dad also
was mechanically inclined such as myself.
It’s just a knack that we have, or he had and
I have also. I’m not afraid to tackle anything
mechanical. I go through the place here, go