Question of the Day - 08 August 2022

First, the telephone. A plaque from 1980 commemorates it: a wall-mounted hand-cranked 1907 Kellogg model with the telephone number, obviously, of “1.” It's on the sidewalk in front of the Golden Gate. A replica of the phone is in the lobby.  

Why the Golden Gate? Charles Pember "Pop" Squires' first office was in the building, originally the Hotel Nevada. 

Charley Squires was born in 1865 in Wisconsin; his family moved west to California from Minnesota when he was 22. Two years later, he married his childhood sweetheart Delphine.

Squires was in the real-estate and title-insurance businesses in Redlands, near San Bernardino. In 1903, he heard that the San Pedro, Los Angeles & Salt Lake Railroad's planned to establish a whistle stop near a watering hole in the southern Nevada desert. He raised the princely sum of $25,000 to invest in the town before it was even founded. The money was earmarked to start up a lumber yard, a real estate office, a 35-bed tent hotel (which ultimately failed miserably in the elements), and even the First State Bank, then hopped a freight train to the site of the new settlement. 

On May 15, 1905, Squires purchased a number of Las Vegas parcels at the railroad auction, including an entire block for residential development.

From then on, everywhere Charley looked, he saw opportunity.

With partners, Squires established the Vegas Artesian Water Syndicate, which dug wells and piped water for residents. He also helped establish the Consolidated Power & Telephone Company, which began electrifying the city and installed its first 50 telephones, his own being number one. And he was one of the earliest directors of the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce.

Then, he and his wife were convinced, after many refusals and the price dropping to pennies on the dollar, to purchase the town's only newspaper, the Las Vegas Age, which he edited and published for the next 32 years (until selling it in 1940 to the owner of the Review-Journal). From his publishing pulpit, he campaigned for the creation of Clark County in 1909, then for incorporating Las Vegas into a city; Charley, who came to be know as "Pop," and Delphine, who was likewise called "Mom," also advocated for women’s suffrage. Squires was also one of the founders of the Nevada State Press Association.

He eventually installed a small weather station behind the newspaper office at Fremont and Fourth, which was also his house. The Age could now report on the weather; Pop also became an official observer for the U.S. Weather Bureau, a post he held for 45 years. On July 26, 1931, he recorded Las Vegas' highest temperature ever, 118 degrees. However, that was on his own thermometer, six years prior to the Weather Service's "official" tracking, from its observation station at what's now Nellis Air Force Base. (The hottest official temperature is 117, recorded in 1942, 2005, 2013, 2017, and 2021.)

In 1920, Squires drafted the original resolution to dam the Colorado River near Las Vegas, then worked tirelessly to implement the Colorado River Compact, which was ratified in 1923. That insured water and electricity to the growing town for all eternity -- or so he believed. At the time, he also started to agitate for a tourism economy. In one of his Age editorials, he wrote, "An up-to-date and not- too-expensive winter resort-hotel in Las Vegas will prove a bonanza, without a doubt."

Pop owned a number parcels of desert scrub on the outskirts of town. For one, a 40-acre plot along Highway 91 to Los Angeles, he paid $350. In 1944, he sold it to Margaret Folsom for $7,500. On 33 of the acres that Folsom resold to Billy Wilkerson for $84,000, Wilkerson began building the Flamingo Hotel-Casino. When Pop met Ben Siegel, while Siegel was finishing the Flamingo, he determined that Bugsy was a "pleasant chap."

Unlike most other pioneers of the southern Nevada desert, Pop lived to the ripe old age of 93. Thus, he witnessed and profited from the introduction of casino gambling, the development of downtown, the burgeoning of the Strip, and the spreading out of a growing city. Fiercely independent till the end, he wasn't confined to his home on S. 7th Street until the last year of his life and cared for himself up until a few weeks before his death, with Mom by his side, in 1958. 

In a eulogy in the Las Vegas Sun, a reporter wrote, “It seems strange that Las Vegas, a modern boomtown, should owe so much to the foresight of one man. But there is little we have today that wasn’t given an initial shove by ‘Pop’ Squires.”