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