Things change for LV High’s class of 1950

Saturday, Oct. 7, 2000 | 8:39 a.m.

Fifty years ago cruising Fremont Street was a Saturday night pastime for Las Vegas High School students.

Drag races were won and lost on a dirt road behind the Frontier hotel. Teens danced to orchestra sounds at the Wild Cat Lair, a recreation center downtown, or sipped sodas at the Round Up Drive In on Main Street and Las Vegas Boulevard.

World War II had ended, and like many small towns across the country, everybody knew everybody.

"It was a great Western town," said Marilyn Riggs Schouten, a 1950 Las Vegas High graduate. "It was a great town to grow up in. There was a lot of spirit, a lot of closeness."

Next weekend Las Vegas High's class of 1950 will gather to share memories at its 50th reunion, the first in 25 years.

Seventy-six graduates and their spouses are expected at the three-day event at the Rio hotel. Memory books, including individual biographies and photos -- from today all the way back to grammar school -- will be distributed to rekindle the school spirit.

"It's quite a milestone," said Paul Christensen, who like many of his classmates remained in Las Vegas and watched the railroad town grow into a sprawling metropolitan area.

"It started changing quickly," he said. "We all went away to school and came back, and it was a different place. (But) I don't think anybody ever visualized it like it is today."

In the late 1940s there were only handful of hotels on the Strip, and the town didn't stretch beyond Charleston Boulevard.

"The town was big enough to have all of the services you need, but small enough where you know everybody," Christensen said. The whole town attended school football games, and the hotels were more involved in the community, he said.

Las Vegas High was built in 1930 at Seventh Street and Bridger Avenue. Maude Frazier, Las Vegas Union School District superintendent, pushed a $350,000 bond issue for a high school. Prior to the building of the school, students attended Las Vegas Grammar School with elementary students.

Its graduates include a long list of well-known Nevadans, such as Jack Binion, former Rep. James Bilbray and retiring Sen. Richard Bryan.

In 1993, because of dwindling enrollment and newer schools in the suburbs, Las Vegas High moved to 6500 E. Sahara Ave., and its old downtown building became a magnet school: the Las Vegas Academy for International Studies and the Performing Arts.

Unlike many other old Las Vegas buildings, the school is much like it was when first built. In 1987 Bryan, then governor, signed a bill that would preserve the "Jewel of the Desert" as a historical landmark.

Saturday morning the class of 1950 will return to the old school for a tour and class photo to be taken on the school's front steps as it had been taken 50 years before.

Those who moved away are likely to be surprised, Schouten said.

"In our memory it's still a little cow town."