Silvio Petricciani - University of Nevada, Reno

Background, Early Life and Education
13
But there’s no more respect now for
parents, or parents don’t respect the children,
the children don’t respect the parents. They
all go off on their own way, and there’s just
no rhyme nor reason to life with them any
more. You get exposed to that quite a bit
here, especially in this establishment because
you get these young kids come in and want
to work as busboys, so on and so forth, and
young girls work as waitresses. And I’d, you
know, I ask them sometimes, well, “How old
are you?”
“Eighteen, seventeen.”
I said, “Do you live at home?”
“Oh, no, I left home a long time ago.”
“Where are your parents?”
“Oh I don’t know. My father’s up in Seattle,
and my mother’s down in California.
“They split up?”
“Yeah, they decided to split a long time
ago, and I had no place to go or anything, so
I went to work.”
And again, the boys with their long
hair, there’s just something that’s not manly
about them any more. And they’re unkempt;
they’re really dirty; they’re dirty looking. And
everyone of them’s smoking a cigarette, and
their clothes—I mean they have no desire to
look good. I mean they’re just satisfied to be,
you might say, bums.
Now I notice here you have character
sketches. We had not so many characters in
the town as—not like Damon Runyon would
have in New York or something like that
because everybody sort of went along and did
their thing. And the community was aware of
the gaming. It wasn’t behind closed doors or
anything. It was wide open, condoned, and
that’s it. And nobody said anything about it or
anything. Once in a while you’d get a preacher
would get up and try to shout it down and
stuff, you know, from the pulpit and it would
get in the papers and then that’d be the end
of it. But everybody was aware of it, and it
was just a beautiful way of life really. Nobody
bothered anybody, and everybody knew
everybody in town. Nobody cared what your
business was or anything else. We had our
lawyers and our doctors and our gamblers,
and everybody respected each other, just a
beautiful way of life. So that’s about all of the
observations.
We had our racetrack out here where
the fairgrounds is now; we used to have
horse races during the summertime. And
we had some big name fighters come in on
the Fourth of July. We had our nightclubs,
and I remember one was the—that’s back in
the twenties—was the Willows, was out on
Mayberry Drive. And then we had another,
another club out where the Chef ’s Hat is now,
a nightclub, and I forget what the name of it
was. And then we used to have a nightclub
down at the old Columbo Hotel, and at the
old Toscano Hotel we used to have Italian
dinners, Basque dinners.
Strangely enough what we don’t do as
much of today as we used to do—the families
would all get together—several families would
get together and go out to Galena Creek or go
up to Lake Tahoe at the north shore and have
picnics. And there used to be an old place up
there at Hirshdale, California—used to call it
Camp Scammus—we used to go up there and
have picnics up there along the river.
In the early days my dad used to rent
a horse and buggy and take us to Lawton
Springs which is now where the River Inn is,
and we called it Lawton Springs in those days.
And that was an all day affair, take a horse
and buggy and pack up a picnic basket, go
out there and spend the day, and then come
back at night. This was before anybody had
an automobile.
Oh, incidentally, my dad always prided
himself in he had one of the first automobiles