Columnist Susan Snyder: New museum recalls life in Boulder City

Tuesday, Feb. 1, 2000 | 9:10 a.m.

Susan Snyder's column appears Tuesdays and Sundays. Reach her at snyder@vegas.com or 259-4082.

Ila Clements Davey says she was betrayed by a hollyhock bush.

When shadows were long and the sun baked Boulder City like an oven, Davey would creep under Mrs. Picket's hollyhock bush next door and rest in its shade.

She was little -- no more than 4 or 5 -- and the bush offered plenty of entertainment for a child growing up during the Great Depression.

"I would curl up underneath there. It was like being in a nest. I'd watch the little bugs go up and down," Davey, 69, recalled. "Of course, that should have told me something."

Oh, it did one day. Loud and clear.

"Fire ants," she said, chuckling at the memory. "There were fire ants. I was bitten everywhere. I felt so betrayed. I didn't ever go under the hollyhock bush again."

Davey said her older brother Jim Godbey, who dropped by her Boulder City home for a visit, probably had different memories.

"Yeah," he teased. "I didn't do anything that stupid."

They laughed and talked of snaring tarantulas in the desert, looking forward to Shirley Temple's next movie and playing kick-the-can until bedtime.

Such was the existence for children whose daddies built a dam that's considered a feat of engineering to this day.

Of course, such significance faded for a child like Davey, who spent her days following the thin shade cast by her family's home.

Tales of how the Hoover Dam was built are plentiful and no farther away than the neighborhood library. But a trip to Boulder City's new history museum can help the curious feel what it was like to hoist a pail of concrete or hear the stories of the town's people.

The 2,700-square-foot exhibit opens Friday at the rear of the historic Boulder Dam Hotel. Two years and $500,000 in the making, the museum promises to tell visitors about life beyond the work crews.

Visitors can stroll through one of the "Ragtown" tent-houses many families called home. A blast of scorching desert air hits them in the face when they open the window, said Paul Adams, of the museum's board.

Davey and Godbey's family lived in one of the lean-to tents when they first moved from Colorado to Nevada's southern tip in 1931.

"Mother used to wet sheets and hang them around to keep cool," Godbey said.

In several locations visitors will be able to hear recorded oral histories of the town's first residents. Most of the original recordings, made by the residents themselves, are too old and scratchy to use now, Adams said.

Actors re-recorded the stories, copying each person's voice as closely as possible, Adams said.

Visitors can hear the histories at an old telephone switchboard, eavesdrop on an old-fashioned Boulder City party line at the manager's desk or hear tales from residents who were children at the time.

"A lot of them people are still here kicking around town," Adams said.

Davey and Godbey said the hot, hardscrabble existence sounded harsh to outsiders. But it was paradise.

"For us kids it was a Shangri-La. We were totally insulated from all the problems of the world," Godbey said. "I had no idea what poor was. To me, everything was just peaches and cream."