Columnist Tom Gorman: Clashing lifestyles that look good together

Friday, Oct. 28, 2005 | 9:01 a.m.

For a bunch of reasons, this could be a tale about the collision of old Nevada and those pesky newcomers from out of state who are crowding the valley floor and overflowing into the foothills.

On one side of this particular fence are the Popes, George and Barbara, who moved here from Ventura, Calif., to retire. They're a very nice couple, as Californians go, cheery and friendly. Even though they're in their 70s, they put up Halloween decorations for the neighborhood kids.

They live in a three-bedroom, two-bath tract home, similar to about a million others in town. When I stopped by the other day, George was mowing the front yard, and I think it took him all of 30 seconds.

Across the back fence lives Jill Thacker, who favors Western-cut blouses, long skirts, soft boots and her daddy's cowboy hat to hide her long braids.

She's not only a Nevada native, but has lived in that same house since the day she was born in 1951. The house has stucco on the outside, but is held up by steel, not wood. It was built by her father, Ernest, a welder who learned his trade in the mines of Death Valley.

Jill picked up the skill at home and today creates steel sculptures and other artwork that involves welding.

An old aerial photo shows nothing but bare hills around the house, which is on Fort Apache Road, a couple of blocks north of Cheyenne Avenue. Jill remembers that, when she was a child, the nearest homes were about four miles away.

Today, Jill's 5-acre homestead -- encircled by homes that were built cheek-to-jowl -- includes a pump house, guest house and barn that serves as her art studio.

Outside are chickens and roosters, mustangs and goats and two very old, plump Labrador retrievers, one black and one yellow.

She is mourning the death of her 33-year-old Milton Burro.

Inside the house, walls are covered by old family photographs, mining tools, branding irons, old rifles and about 100 animal trophies, including a grizzly bear, a polar bear, deer, elk, bighorn sheep and antelope.

Out front there's an ore hopper, ore cars and a rusty compressor that used to pump air into mine shafts. There are some fake tombstones, too, for kids to giggle over.

So you might think that the Popes from new California and Jill from old Nevada might not get along, given the clash of lifestyles. But they, in fact, get along famously.

"I love waking up to her roosters," Barbara said. "We're living next to a ranch, and her home is a museum."

Jill said she was initially saddened by encroaching suburbia.

"It was hard to adjust to, at first, but they've ended up being the best possible neighbors, just lovely people," she says of those whose homes abut her property. "I am blessed."

The neighborhood children, she said, walk to school alongside her chain-link fence and call out to the animals by name. "Hi, Miss Piggy!" "Good morning, Cinderella!"

So I think the children are blessed, too.

Passers-by might think Jill's some crazy ol' hoot who's refusing to sell her land until she gets top dollar, or is in denial that America's most modern city is growing up around her.

"Developers have stopped asking me about it," she told me. "They know that for me it's an issue of quality of life, not money.

"I miss the tortoises and the tarantulas and the donkeys," she said. "But I'm always going to keep this house and the property, out of respect for my family."

"Not everything in this town that gets old has to be torn down or blown up," she said.

Her neighbors wouldn't stand for it.