1950 homecoming queen loses 20-year battle with MS

Friday, March 12, 1999 | 11:16 a.m.

During Phyllis Hinrichsen's final months of a 20-year battle against multiple sclerosis, friends visited her at her longtime Las Vegas home, hoping to console her.

Instead, they walked away feeling unburdened and happy after talking with the courageous former beauty queen.

"People would come to my mother and tell her their problems and she would listen and talk with them and they would feel so much better," Brent Hinrichsen said. "Her legacy is the happiness she gave people. She had a gift."

Phyllis Vivian Hinrichsen, the 1950 Las Vegas High School homecoming queen and the daughter of the owner of one of Las Vegas' first Italian restaurants, died Wednesday of complications from multiple sclerosis. She was 65.

Services for Hinrichsen, who lived in Las Vegas 49 years, will be 11 a.m. Monday at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Sixth Ward Chapel, 3400 W. Charleston Blvd. Visitation will be 4-7 p.m. Sunday at Palm Mortuary-Jones and 10-11 a.m. Monday at the LDS chapel. Burial will be in Woodlawn Cemetery.

"My wife liked Las Vegas from the first day she came here because the people were so friendly and her classmates readily accepted her," Clarke Hinrichsen said. "Even after she got ill, she attracted people to her."

Born Phyllis Rizzo on Dec. 22, 1933, in Los Angeles, she was the youngest of two children of Phillip Rizzo and the former Grace Frank. The Rizzos moved to Las Vegas just before Phyllis' senior year of high school to open Rizzo's Italian restaurant on what was then 5th Street but today is Las Vegas Boulevard.

Phyllis was in school just a couple of months when her classmates voted the spirited 5-foot-5-inch brunette homecoming queen on Thanksgiving Day 1950.

During a ceremony before a packed house at Butcher Memorial Field, Las Vegas High football team captain Don James placed the crown on Phyllis' head. Then the Howard Bonnett-coached Wildcat squad went on to defeat White Pine High of Ely, 20-6.

"People took an immediate liking to Phyllis because of her genuine, warm and loving personality," said Barbara Rowan, the Las Vegas High homecoming queen of 1951 and a longtime friend.

"Phyllis had an inner beauty that shined through her exterior beauty. And she kept that beauty right to the end."

As the years passed, the bond of friendship between Rowan, who was Barbara Chase when she attended Las Vegas High, and Hinrichsen grew.

"Phyllis didn't often get discouraged, but one day she told me she wondered what she was still doing here because she could not help her family anymore," Rowan said. "I told her 'You are here because you bring great joy to people and that has great value.' "

During high school, Hinrichsen was a member of the Girls Club and the Thespian Club, where she performed in the 1951 spring school play "Cinderella."

After graduating, Phyllis attended business school locally and worked as a teller at the First National Bank.

In 1952, she was introduced to Clarke Hinrichsen and married him two years later. They settled in Las Vegas, where she was a homemaker who raised three children.

In 1974, at age 41, Hinrichsen, who was born and raised a Catholic, converted to the Mormon faith. Her church duties included serving as a member of the LDS Relief Society. She enjoyed cooking and writing poetry.

In 1979 she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, a chronic degenerative disease of the central nervous system.

In addition to her husband and son, both of Las Vegas, Hinrichsen is survived by another son, Drew Hinrichsen of Las Vegas; a daughter, Lisa Wach of Duarte, Calif.; a sister, Gloria Russo of Burbank, Calif.; and four grandchildren.