Silvio Petricciani - University of Nevada, Reno

Background, Early Life and Education
9
took the pains to— well, I’ll never forget my
geometry teacher—I can’t recall her name at
the time—but well, I was actually failing in the
class; and she kept me after school one night,
and she said, “You know,” she says, “I know
you’re capable of better than this, and some
place along the line you’re just not— you’re
not doing what you should be doing.” So she
said—I failed a test as a matter of fact which
was going to fail the subject for me—so, she
says, “I’m going to spend some time with you,
and then you’re going to retake the test.”
And she did, and I took the test, and I got
a hundred in it which passed me in the class.
But she recognized the fact that she wasn’t
trying to teach someone who couldn’t grasp
the subject or wasn’t intelligent enough. She
knew that I was goofing off, as it were, and
she took me and just set me down; and like I
say, it was very simple when I applied myself.
So, consequently in my schooling background
it wasn’t that I wasn’t intelligent enough. If
I got bad grades at any time, why it was my
own fault.
Life in Reno in the twenties—Reno was
always a sort of a metropolitan city. People
weren’t garrulous in any way, shape, or form.
They were good, solid citizens. They worked
hard, and the town really wasn’t a town that
grew big real fast like, we’ll say, Las Vegas in
twenty years just mushroomed out. Reno
was always a conservative town, and it grew
as the years went by; but they didn’t really go
out and solicit rapid growth, and they didn’t
solicit industry in the town. And rightly so
because Reno was a more or less of a oh, a
resort town, and heavy industry and resorts
don’t go hand in hand. And the reason for it,
especially with gaming and stuff, is because
if you get industry mixed up with gaming,
why the first thing you have—gaming per se
is like alcoholism; you can become addicted
to it. And if you had heavy industry here
with a lot of people with families and so on
and so forth, and father didn’t bring home
the paycheck and so on, why pretty soon it
would be like the history of back East and so
on, where they condoned gaming and then all
of a sudden they had to close it up because it
just raised havoc with the family life and so
on and so forth.
Reno always remained more of a resort
town and didn’t solicit heavy industry or
anything like that to come in. They had clean
air, they had a beautiful way of life, and it grew
under those circumstances. And you can go
through today and find that Reno has more
wealth per capita than any city in the United
States, and that only means that people came
here and settled here for their retirement or
whatever and very well-to-do people, and
in so doing they had a place where they
could live the life of more or less peace and
contentment without all the problems that
a big city has—the crime, the poverty, and
so on. And Reno today is still the same way
as you can very well see. We don’t have the
problems that the bigger cities have—they’re
coming as the town grows, but the town was
nice.
It was always more or less a what we
might call a wide open town insofar as even
during the period of Prohibition— I mean
you could always get a drink if you wanted
it. And it didn’t hurt the town any. Of course,
the government itself repealed the Volstead
Act which was, I believe, the Eighteenth
Amendment. They repealed it because it just
didn’t work, period. When you tell a person
they can’t have something, why that’s what
they’re going to go off and get; but we grew
up here—all the children—they always had
liquor in the house, wine, beer, and even the
hard stuff, whiskey, gin, whatever. And there
wasn’t one of us—it was at our disposal from
the time that we knew it was there; we could