Dead or alive, or not at all? Debate goes on about putting people’s names on public places

Martin Kuz

Sunday, Jan. 24, 1999 | 11:02 a.m.

Thomas Jefferson is the man in Virginia. Abraham Lincoln owns Illinois. Martin Luther King is the go-to guy in Georgia.

In choosing a name for a public building, elected officials often turn to their respective state's most beloved historical figure for inspiration -- and for immunity from protests. True, slapping George Washington's name on a school is no more creative than calling it Blah Elementary, but at least it won't set the PTA to picketing outside the principal's office.

Pity, then, forlorn Nevada. By conservative estimate, another couple of centuries must pass before anyone will even suggest the idea of a Bugsy Siegel State Park. As for the Lucky Luciano Community Center, Meyer Lansky Middle School and Tony Spilotro South Regional Hospital, all may be warmly embraced someday. Say, in the millennium after next.

The early history of Nevada, a relatively young state rooted in the morally shaky ground of gambling, is littered with mobsters, molls and the kinds of other mug-shot toughs whose names look good on a rap sheet but less so on a public library.

That quandary occasionally pushes the search for suitable name candidates into the present -- and onto an equally slippery political slope, a lesson learned the hard way in recent weeks by the Community College of Southern Nevada.

Last fall CCSN President Richard Moore recommended that the school's new $5 million computer center on the Western High School campus bear the names of state Sen. Bill Raggio and his late wife, Dorothy. Moore reasoned that Raggio, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, deserved credit for helping scrounge up funding for the project.

The Board of Regents approved the proposal without fanfare in October, and two months later construction workers dutifully affixed the names to the building's facade.

They may as well have attached plastic explosives. No sooner did the names appear than a controversy detonated, with several Southern Nevada lawmakers blasting the decision to honor Raggio. Their claim: The Reno Republican and Senate majority leader, arguably the state's most influential politician, routinely stiffs Clark County when it comes to education funding.

The outcry led CCSN officials to reconsider the choice of Raggio, who, hoping to douse the rancor, requested that someone else receive the distinction. Moore even went so far as to apologize for neglecting to invite community feedback before submitting Raggio's name for consideration.

The regents ultimately opted last week to keep Raggio's name on the center. But in February they will review the university system's naming process, including the practice of christening structures after politicians still in office.

The dispute has left CCSN administrators with a nasty public-relations hangover, and it has prompted a fair amount of head-scratching over exactly how city, county and state entities name public spaces. Also lingering are doubts about the ability of politicians and government officials to handle even the smallest of tasks without screwing up.

"Naming a building sounds trivial," said Assemblywoman Chris Giunchigliani, D-Las Vegas, who along with Assemblyman Wendell Williams, D-Las Vegas, questioned Moore's selection of Raggio. "But it is taxpayers' money. And when you're using taxpayers' money to build and name facilities that will define the community, we need to treat (the process) with some dignity. It shouldn't just be about who's in the limelight."

Dead or alive?

The city of Las Vegas has a straightforward policy, adopted in 1992, for naming its parks and buildings. It largely pre-empts such quarrels: A person's name can adorn a municipal facility -- so long as he or she has had the courtesy to pass on.

The policy -- call it Dead Man Naming -- has at least one exception: William Peccole Ball Field, so dubbed for the local developer whose money helped build the complex at Rainbow Park.

But for the most part, either the deceased or a distinct geographical feature of an area, coupled with public input, inspires the names of Las Vegas' parks, recreational facilities and community centers. The names of city buildings, meanwhile, are generally no sexier than a description of the services provided within. (As for city streets, developers typically pick the names, which are then reviewed by the Planning and Development and Fire Services departments to prevent duplication.)

Clark County hews to a similar philosophy on buildings and parks, sticking with utilitarian and locale-specific names. In recent years the county has asked children who attend school near the site of new parks to provide possible names, a program that has yielded the monikers for Desert Bloom and Peace parks.

The state has no formal procedure for naming buildings, although the Legislature considered adopting one a few years ago. The executive branch usually shoulders the duties, which may explain why more often than not it's the name of past governors -- Henry Blasdel, Lewis Bradley, John Kinkead, Grant Sawyer -- that wind up on state edifices.

In short, the city, county and state tend to recognize those who are six feet under, or those who won't cause any embarrassment before they get there.

The Clark County School District, by contrast, has schools named after, among others, Gov. Kenny Guinn; real-estate developer Irwin Molasky; education maven Elaine Wynn, wife of casino mogul Steve Wynn; and Manny Cortez, president of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority and a former county commissioner. Elementary schools named after state Sen. Joe Neal, D-North Las Vegas; Reynaldo Martinez, former chief of staff to U.S. Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev.; and former Henderson Mayor Lorna Kesterson will open this fall.

The list of rejected name candidates in recent years includes Atlanta Braves pitcher and Las Vegas native Greg Maddux, former Lt. Gov. Lonnie Hammargren and Las Vegas Mayor Jan Laverty Jones.

(In the interest of full disclosure, the name of late Sun publisher Hank Greenspun adorns the School of Communications at UNLV, where there is also the Greenspun College of Urban Affairs. The Hank and Barbara Greenspun Junior High School in Henderson is named for Hank Greenspun and his wife, Barbara, who is the paper's current publisher. Sun Executive Editor Mike O'Callaghan's name appears on a federal veterans and military hospital near Nellis Air Force Base and on a middle school in Las Vegas, as well as on a Henderson city park. And an elementary school and a county activity center are named for Ruthe Deskin, Sun columnist and assistant to the publisher.)

Thanks to Las Vegas' spastic growth and schools sprouting on the hour, the district must tiptoe through the name minefield more often than other public entities. Yet Shirley Barber, a Clark County School Board member and chairwoman of the district's School Name Committee, worries little about political shrapnel being strewn when the living are honored.

Barber noted that the committee solicits nominee applications and public comment before picking a name that it then forwards to the School Board for approval. The process has helped mute dissension by allowing interested parents and students to have their say before the board votes, she said.

The way Barber sees it, in a city where history is imploded almost as soon as it's made, paying tribute to a living person keeps a vestige of Las Vegas' past in the present. More to the point, she said, it's better to celebrate the efforts of upstanding citizens while they're still, well, standing.

"If a school is being named after me, I would like to know. When I'm dead, I wouldn't know. My family will benefit, but wouldn't you like to know?" Barber said, laughing. "As the saying goes, 'Give me my flowers when I'm alive.' "

A former principal at H.P. Fitzgerald and Mabel Hoggard elementary schools, Barber recalled how both of those longtime educators, who have since died, were thrilled to visit "their" respective schools after they retired.

An esteemed school administrator in his day, Fitzgerald would swing by to chat with children for hours at a time, a walking, talking Las Vegas history lesson. Students adored Hoggard, a former teacher, so much that they chipped in to buy a chair with her name on it.

"She'd come to the school and sit there like she owned America," Barber said, laughing again. "I don't think Elizabeth Taylor could've gotten any more attention. And the kids loved her. They would line up and she'd give every one of them a hug. That's really the honor."

Park politics

The road that branches off U.S. 95 and snakes through Floyd Lamb State Park separates two worlds. On one side, several ponds and plentiful serenity attract anglers and waterfowl alike. Across the road, no more than 50 yards to the north, a skeet-shooting range gives birth to the booming report of rifle fire.

Perhaps only in Nevada could you expect to find a park where burly guys take aim at clay pigeons while, a stone's throw away, rosy-cheeked tots feed Doritos to ducks. And perhaps only in Nevada could friends, neighbors and lawmakers become divided over, of all things, a park name.

The 1,800-acre expanse of land, named after former state Sen. Floyd Lamb, has fanned hard feelings since the city of Las Vegas handed it over to the Nevada Parks Division in 1977. Until then the park had been known as Tule Springs; clusters of tules, or bulrushes, speckle the area's ponds. City officials, before deeding the land to the state, changed the name to Floyd Lamb in gratitude for his help in securing funds to preserve the park.

The switch met with grumbling from some area residents who felt -- and still feel -- that Tule Springs better reflects the park's historical standing as a 19th-century rest area for Indians, Mormon settlers and gold prospectors. The murmurs of disapproval crescendoed to a full-throated roar when Lamb was convicted of attempted extortion in 1983, forcing him to step down from office.

The issue has festered in the Legislature ever since. Two years ago Assemblywoman Kathy Von Tobel, R-Las Vegas, pitched a bill to restore the park's original name, igniting an emotional, sometimes ugly debate. The measure died in the Natural Resources Committee, but only after considerable time and breath were expended.

"Children are starving to death around the world, yet that was the hot topic last session," said Assemblywoman Marcia de Braga, D-Fallon, chairwoman of the resources committee and a supporter of leaving Lamb's name on the park.

The upcoming session could hold more of the same. Von Tobel, whose district includes the park, has drafted a bill proposing that the name issue become a statewide advisory question on the 2000 ballot, enabling voters to decide the matter. Hundreds of her constituents have demanded the measure, she said.

The second-term Republican has grown frustrated with longtime legislators -- Raggio and Assembly Speaker Joe Dini, D-Yerington, among them -- who served with Lamb, now in his 80s, and contend he has done his penance. Von Tobel said clashing with the Legislature's powers-that-be over the park's name last session played a part in her ouster two months ago from the Assembly's potent Ways and Means Committee.

"This causes such a controversy in my district, it's not fair for those who don't live in this area to continue to fight this bill," Von Tobel said. "... But trust me on this one: This will be an issue until the name is changed."

Indeed. On a crisp Friday afternoon at Floyd Lamb State Park, Vicki Kopoian watched her two grandchildren chase after geese as her husband, Charlie, fished for trout. The 51-year-old retired cake decorator said the park's name should belong to history, not a felon.

"If you really go back in Nevada's past, this has always been Tule Springs," Vicki Kopoian said.

"From what I've heard about Floyd Lamb, there was a lot of under-the-table dealings with him. ... They just shouldn't name things after politicians. How would you feel if they changed Mount Charleston to Mount Jan Jones?"

Terri Robertson, head of the grass-roots group Friends of Tule Springs, added: "It doesn't have anything to do with Floyd Lamb. It should've stayed Tule Springs."

Others who feel likewise have let their trigger fingers do the talking. Road signs that referred to Floyd Lamb State Park were shot up with such frequency some years ago that the park service replaced them with ones making no mention of the ex-lawmaker. Lamb's name now appears only on a large sign at the park's toll-booth entrance off U.S. 95, while nearby information boards provide no details about him.

The intense reactions to the name have dissuaded both state park officials and past governors from switching it -- despite the fact that they wield the authority to do so without legislative approval. No one wants to get cut down in the cross fire, Roy Orr, regional manager of state parks, said.

"If the governor doesn't want to change it and the Legislature doesn't want to change it, it would be political suicide for us to do it," he said.

"You might as well resign at the same time."

Maybe that's why only one other Nevada park -- Kershaw-Ryan, which honors Samuel Kershaw and James Ryan, early owners of a stretch of land near Caliente later turned over to the state -- is named explicitly for someone. The rest derive monikers from geographical attributes or proximity to towns that were named for their founders.

And, as Orr put it, "That keeps things a lot simpler."

Who really cares?

A few years back former U.S. Sen. Howard Cannon, a widely respected public figure, saw his name removed from the Reno/Tahoe International Airport for tourism's sake. Closer to home, the name of former U.S. Sen. Pat McCarran -- a politician known to have an enemy or two -- continues to grace Las Vegas' airport.

When trying to decipher why a public building carries a certain person's name, it's best to start by tossing logic aside. In that regard, Giunchigliani and Von Tobel agree that naming public spaces for prominent but dead Nevadans remains the easiest way to avoid future Raggio and Lamb fiascoes. Failing that, Giunchigliani said, the university system in particular needs to work on airing out its naming process.

Community college and university presidents make referrals to the board of regents on names for new structures, wings of buildings and even classrooms. Administrators ponder various factors in nominating a person for the honor, from monetary donations to a school to overall civic contributions. School officials may gather public input on whose name to choose -- although state statute does not require as much.

That last step is where CCSN administrators and regents stumbled, Giunchigliani said. Beyond the public posting of the board's agenda and discussions at its meetings, college officials and regents rarely make an effort to advertise the naming of a building until after the fact. They should mimic the school district by pursuing opinions on candidates from residents and neighborhood leaders before ever taking a vote, she said.

"No one wants to see someone embarrassed over something like (the Raggio center) because someone didn't do their homework. It's not something we should legislate. I really just think we need to do a better job of letting people know," Giunchigliani said.

Regent Mark Alden countered that faulting the university system's naming process obscures the true problem. "This is about politics," he said.

"These people are totally wrong about Bill Raggio and now they're trying to say there's something wrong with our procedures."

As for finding names that elicit universal hosannas, public officials maintain that the pool of candidates is plenty deep despite Nevada's young age and outlaw origins. Then again, how many folks -- outside of a handful of politically connected powerbrokers and a smattering of concerned residents -- truly care about the names of public spaces is an open question.

"A hundred years from now," de Braga said, "no one's going to know who Floyd Lamb was."

Harvey Shapiro is already unaware. The free-lance musician, whiling away a few hours at Floyd Lamb park trolling for trout, admitted he knows nothing of the man.

Nor did Shapiro, 47, flinch when told of Lamb's criminal past. He simply smiled and gazed across the pond.

"Even (the name) Clinton Park wouldn't probably stop me from coming," he said.

Hmmm. Bugsy Siegel State Park, anyone?