Past Pages March 12

130 YEARS AGO

Graphic Recital of a Sinner's Experience at the Saint's Rest: A gentleman at D. McKenzie's meeting at the Temperance Reform Club relates the following Hank Monk tale (in part): Well, friends, I was going up to Lake Bigler (Lake Tahoe) on the stage with Hank Monk, and when we got about three miles from a place called the Saint's Reef, Hank Monk told me I must get off and walk ... as the hill was too steep for the horses.

Well, I climbed over the rocks and brambles, walked on the top of the flume, fell off twice, killed a rattlesnake, met with some tarantulas, then I look off my coat and threw it over my shoulder ... then took off my vest ... threw my hat, coat and vest over the flume. The sun was beating down on my head about two hundred and ten degrees. Pretty soon I struck the Saint's Rest.

When I entered the bar room, my tongue was cleaving to the roof of my mouth and I was panting with exhaustion. A big fat fellow who was behind the counter threw up a towering schooner of foaming beer in plain sight and says, "Stranger, will you take some cool beer?"

"Did you take the beer?" asked Doctor Banks breathlessly.

No, I didn't, shouted the speaker.

"Good for you my brave man," continued Doctor Banks. "What did you do next?"

I told him to set up whiskey straight in mighty quick time - I muzzled the liquor then and there.

120 YEARS AGO

"A Social Session" played to a crowded house. The Company is famous for its good music and laughter-provoking absurdities. But as to plot, or brains, it has them not -

"Laugh and the world laughs with you,

Weep and you weep alone;

For the sad old earth will join in your mirth,

But has sorrow enough of its own."

70 YEARS AGO

Advertisement: Safeway Stores, sliced bacon - 19 cents a lb.; corned beef, 21 cents a lb.; ground round 19 cents a lb.

50 YEARS AGO

Advertisement: Kit Carson Sunday Special - chicken and dumplings 98 cents. 10 lucky nickels - all this and free Bingo - Kit Carson Club

20 YEARS AGO

Nuke weapon rocks desert: The underground shot, code-name Metropolis, buried at a 1,500-foot shaft of Yucca Flat, 85 miles northwest of Las Vegas, was the first nuclear test of 1990 ... having explosive force of 20,000 to 150,000 tons of TNT ... registered 5.1 on the Richter scale at the National Earthquake information center.

10 YEARS AGO

2000-2002 Budget: Carson City supervisors turned a $2.2 million deficit into a $336,000 surplus ... but will result in a 4.2 percent property tax increase for land owners.

• Sue Ballew is the daughter of Bill Dolan, who wrote this column for the Nevada Appeal from 1947 until his death in 2006.