John F. Cahlan - University of Nevada, Reno

12 John F. Cahlanmy greatest thrills these days is getting holdof Del Webb and telling how I used to chasehim all over the semipro baseball circuit whenhe was playing for Reno and Sacramento andthat area. He had either just left or was justcoming when I was coming or just left. I didplay one ball game with him in Reno. Andnow, he, of course, is president of the Del E.Webb organization, building hotels and hehas a little more money than I have, and Idon’t know whether he made it playing ballor how, but—.During the time that I was in high school,I can remember teachers like Miss AlwineSielaff, Effie Mona Mack, who taught meAmerican history and later became an .authorof books on history. My bookkeeping teacherwas Miss Zetta Underwood. remembermy English teacher was Miss Alma Belt. Iremember the bookkeeping teacher was avery nice-looking and very charming younglady. I don’t think she was more than threeor four years older than the seniors in highschool. This was her first teaching assignment.And I can recall, the latter part of mysenior year, I was pledged secretly to SigmaAlpha Epsilon fraternity, of which my brotherwas a member. My father also was a member,and he was the founder of THPO, the localfraternity, which went SAE nationally. So thewhole family became members of SAE. Mynephew is also an SAE—my brother’s son—and then two other nephews, Mike and JerryMerrill on my wife’s side, also are membersof SAE. All of ’em were at the University ofNevada.Then in 1920, I enrolled at the Universityof Nevada. told you I got kicked out of highschool when I was a senior and did notgraduate at that time.At the time, the University of Nevadahad a classification of “special student,” forwhich you had to be eighteen years old andhave at least fifteen credits of high school. wasseventeen and I had the fifteen credits. All Ilacked was a quarter of a credit of the sixteennecessary to get me into the University, so Itold a little white lie and said I was eighteenyears old. It got me in trouble about thirtyyears later. I tried to get a birth certificate,never having had one because they didn’trecord births legally in Washoe County; atleast it wasn’t required at the time I was born.So I started to get the delayed birth certificate,and I had an awful tough time trying to provemy age, or that I even was born in the stateof Nevada. One of the reasons was when the1910 U. S. Census—when I was eight yearsold, my mother gave the census taker thecorrect information, but in the 1920 Census,when I was eighteen years old, my father gavethem the information, and the two didn’t jibe.My mother gave my right birthday in 1910,but my father said, “Oh, I guess he’s sixteen,seventeen. Put it on there seventeen.” So itwas a year off. So that added a little confusionto my birth records, So then I went to theUniversity of Nevada records and found outthat one year made an awful lot of difference,and I couldn’t prove it, that I was born inReno in 1902. The insurance records that Ihad were correct. So finally, I got the delayedbirth certificate, but it took a lot of doing, andmainly because of the misinformation I gavethe University of Nevada about my birth.But anyway, when I went to the Universityof Nevada, Prohibition was just in its secondyear. And incidentally, I can remember whenProhibition came to the United States, thestate of Nevada went dry about a year beforethe rest of the United States, when Nevadapassed the repealer—I mean the ProhibitionAct—it also passed a Volstead Act of its own.And the state went dry before the rest of theUnited States went dry. Then 1918, the restof the United States went dry, and California