Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Genstel, widow of Nellis Air Force Base’s namesake, dies

While walking out of Las Vegas' El Portal movie theater in the weeks following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Shirley Nellis' 25-year-old husband, Bill, asked her: "Should I join up?"

His job as a brakeman for the Union Pacific Railroad gave him an exemption from serving in the military during World War II, but the longtime Searchlight resident and father of a toddler and an infant also had taken flying lessons and thought he would make a good military fighter pilot.

Shirley told him to do what he thought was best and that she would support him.

On Feb. 24, 1942, William "Bill" Nellis left for military flight school and a date with destiny.

Nellis Air Force Base is named for the war hero who was killed when his P-47 Thunderbolt was shot down over Luxembourg on Dec. 27, 1944.

Shirley Nellis Genstel, who worked more than 20 years as a cocktail waitress at the old Desert Inn to support three children and outlived two other husbands, died Saturday at Valley Hospital of a heart ailment. She was 82.

Services for the Las Vegas resident of 50 years and Palm Springs, Calif., resident of the last 26 years will be 10 a.m. Thursday at Palm Mortuary-Eastern.

A graveside service will be at noon Thursday at Southern Nevada Veterans Memorial Cemetery in Boulder City. Visitation will be 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. today at Palm Mortuary-Eastern.

"If my mother had any problems, she kept them to herself and, despite Dad dying around Christmas, she always gave her children happy Christmases," said son Gary Nellis of Henderson. "There was always food on the table and a roof over our heads. She was a very good mother."

Gary Nellis' younger sister, Andriana Takas, a Las Vegas hairdresser, agreed, noting, "She would work 10- to 12-hour shifts and still have the time to take her children water-skiing on Lake Mead.

"Once when I asked her how she got over the loss of her first husband, she told me, 'The past is the past. You live your life in the present, putting one foot in front of the other, always moving forward.' "

Shirley married chef John Takas, Andriana's father, in 1948 and divorced him in the early 1950s. He died in 1983.

She married Bert Genstel, owner of the old Panorama Market at Hinson Street and West Charleston Boulevard, in 1969. The couple moved to Palm Springs in 1978. He died in 1998.

In 1992 Genstel flew to the Belgian village of Henri Chapelle to visit the military gravesite of Bill Nellis for the first time. Gary said she cried and it brought her a degree of closure.

Born Shirley Fletcher on Sept. 19, 1921, in Oakland Calif., she was the only child of pianist Richard Fletcher and the former Harriet Clark. The family moved to Ely in 1922 and to Las Vegas in 1928.

At age 15, while a freshman at Las Vegas High, she married 20-year-old Bill Nellis, a Las Vegas High graduate who was a standout academically and on the school's football team.

The couple lived for a while in Searchlight, where Bill's grandmother Olive owned the Searchlight Hotel. He worked in his Uncle Jasper's mine in Searchlight for $5 a day before landing the lucrative railroad job in Las Vegas.

During the war Nellis was shot down three times, the last while clearing a path for Gen. George Patton's armored division at a crucial juncture of the war.

Six years later Shirley and her children attended the dedication ceremony when the local Air Force base was named for her late husband.

Genstel was a longtime advocate for animal rights, a community volunteer who read to the blind and a volunteer at major golf and tennis tournaments in Nevada and California. She opened her home to junior tennis players, giving visiting teenagers a place to stay during tournaments.

A week before she died, Genstel returned to Las Vegas. On her death bed she touched Andriana's face and said, "Don't you worry about me. I've lived a wonderful life."

In addition to her son and daughter, Genstel is survived by another daughter, Joyce Nellis Cisnero; seven grandchildren; and 18 great-grandchildren.

The family said donations can be made in Genstel's memory to the Animal Foundation of Nevada or the Nevada Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.

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