Pioneering Clark County Clerk Reed dies at 99

Thursday, Jan. 20, 2000 | 11:46 a.m.

When Helen Scott Reed was appointed Clark County clerk in 1948, she was in charge of an elections department that, when necessary, used garages and chicken coops for polling places.

When reminded of that as she prepared for the 1964 elections, Reed told a Sun reporter: "We try now to use only public buildings."

It was one of several innovations Reed brought to the county, including the installation of the first mechanical pull-lever voting machines and the extension of the polling hours to 7 p.m. -- the time the polls close to this day.

Also during Reed's tenure, when the valley experienced its first significant growth spurts, a separate marriage license bureau and election department were created under the auspices of the county clerk's office.

Helen Louise Scott Reed, who was Las Vegas city clerk before serving 17 years as county clerk, died Jan. 12 of complications from old age at a convalescent home in Hemet, Calif. She was 99 -- just three weeks shy of her 100th birthday.

Twice widowed, Helen was married to noted local attorney William Scott and later to prominent Las Vegas real estate executive Carl Reed.

There will be no services for Reed, who lived in Las Vegas 54 years. She donated her body to the Loma Linda University School of Anatomy so that her longevity -- including how she beat cancer eight years ago -- can be studied.

"Helen meant a lot to me because she was a great teacher who was well versed in the laws," said Reed's longtime chief deputy clerk, Loretta Bowman, who was appointed to fill Reed's unexpired term in 1965 and went on to serve eight full terms as county clerk until her retirement in 1998.

"She was one of the best people I ever worked for because she knew what the job was all about."

Longtime local attorney George Foley Sr., who was district attorney in the late 1950s, called Helen, "a real pleasant woman who would sit at the (courthouse) counter and greet attorneys as we came in to file papers. She gave everything a personal touch."

Pat Mansell, Scott's niece, remembered Reed as "a strong, opinionated woman who would not back down from an argument if she felt she was right. She was proud that she ran a clean office. And she was very sharp right up until about a week ago."

Reed supervised the switch from paper ballots to the first electronic machines produced by the Shoup Voting Machine Corp., of New York. She brought to Clark County 600 such machines that stood 6 feet high and weighed 900 pounds.

Reed found it was necessary to use public buildings as polling sites because they were among the only structures with floors that were strong enough to hold the weight of the new voting machines.

"The press had a field day with those machines nationwide," Mansell recalled. "They made a big deal of the fact that people in Las Vegas gambled (with one-armed bandit slot machines) and voted (with automated pull-lever machines) the same way."

Reed defended the then-controversial machines as a necessity in such a growing community. She noted that without them in the 1964 general election her office would have had to print 36 different paper ballots instead of the 12 ballots the machines required.

Also that year, Clark County began opening the polls an hour earlier and closing them an hour later -- 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. -- to give voters more opportunity to cast their ballots on Election Day.

Born Helen Louise Boyd on Feb. 5, 1900, in the now extinct mining town of Mercur, Utah, she was the eldest and last surviving of 10 children of miner Walter Boyd and the former Annie Louise Mullins.

Helen lived in the Nevada mining towns of Rhyolite and Delamar and the California mining community of Skiddoo, before settling in Las Vegas in 1911 -- five years after Las Vegas was incorporated. The town's population was about 800 at the time.

Helen graduated from Las Vegas High School in 1918, when it was then part of what became the old 5th Street Grammar School next to the Foley Federal Building.

During World War I, Helen worked as an oiler on the railroad and later held jobs as a baby-sitter, dental assistant and legal secretary.

In the 1930s Helen was a secretary in the law partnership of Roger T. Foley, George's father, and her first husband, former County Clerk William Scott. Roger Foley and Scott had become good friends years earlier when Foley defeated Scott for the Clark County district attorney post and then appointed Scott his assistant DA.

When Scott died in the early 1940s, Helen was working as a deputy clerk under then-County Clerk Lloyd Payne. Widowed and raising two sons, Lynn and Walter Scott, Helen was appointed to the vacant city clerk seat in the mid-1940s.

On July 1, 1948, Helen left the city post to finish Payne's unexpired term as county clerk. She won the 1950 election and went on to be re-elected in 1954, '58 and '62.

During Reed's years at the helm, the county clerk's office grew from 17 deputy clerks to 60 deputy clerks. Today, there are 215 deputy clerks under County Clerk Shirley Parraguirre.

When Carl Reed retired in mid-1965 from Baker Realty, Helen decided to step down as well. During their retirement, the Reeds traveled. They kept a residence in Arizona and spent winters at Lake Mead and summers in Idaho. Reed was a resident of Bullhead City and Kingman, Ariz., for 25 years and Hemet for the last 10 years.

She is survived by a grandson, Jeffrey Scott of Indonesia and two great grandchildren. She was preceded in death by her two sons, five brothers and four sisters.