Small town has a way of luring former residents back

By Jean Reid Norman

Monday, Sept. 7, 2009 | 2:05 a.m.

As a high school senior in 2003, Lindsay Stevens could not wait to get out of Boulder City. She was heading to junior college in San Diego to play volleyball and was ready to leave her small-town roots behind.

Her brother Terry had already done so, traveling the world with the crew of a Formula 1 speed boating team, then a water ski racing team. He was in such a hurry to get out of town, he said, that at age 17, he moved from his parents’ house to a mobile home they owned.

Less than 10 years later, both siblings have returned to Boulder City, working in their parents’ downtown cafe, the Coffee Cup. And they plan to stick around.

Demographers call such movement “return migration.” The Economic Research Service of the U.S. Agriculture Department has tracked the trend and now is trying to figure out why people return to their hometowns, said senior geographer John Cromartie, who is doing the study with University of Montana colleague Christiane von Reichert.

The desire among young people to leave is universal, Cromartie said. The 10 years after high school are the most concentrated age of migration, with restless people in their 20s accounting for half of all moves in the nation, he said.

What separates growing towns from dying ones is the ability to either draw new people in or to attract some of those young people back, he said.

Boulder City, with its steady but slow growth over the past two decades, appears to have done both. It has become known as an attractive choice for retirees, but it also has drawn its share of return migration.

Tim Tilman and his son Chris were among those who found their way back to Boulder City over the years. Tim’s father, Lee, was an original 31er, moving his young family to Boulder City in 1931 to help build Hoover Dam.

Tim Tilman graduated from Boulder City High in 1962 at age 17 and caught a bus to Los Angeles to join the Merchant Marines.

“I left disgusted with everything,” he said. “I was tired of Boulder City.”

Instead of becoming a sailor, he ended up at Disneyland, where he met his wife, Jody. They married and moved back to Las Vegas, where he got into the hotel business.

His wife wanted to move the family back to Boulder City, Tim Tilman said, and he reluctantly did so.

“We moved out, and I fell in love with Boulder City all over again,” he said. “I knew it was going to be a good place to raise the boys.”

The Tilmans’ two sons, Chris and Brandon, experienced the same wanderlust.

“I never thought I would live in Nevada again, let alone Boulder City,” said Chris Tilman, who headed to Denmark as an exchange student before going to college. “I just wanted to see it in a rearview mirror.”

One summer during law school, he met his future wife, Devon, while working at the Excalibur. She was a Southern Californian who was attending UNLV. When he finished law school, he couldn’t find a job in the San Francisco area, their first choice, so they came back to Southern Nevada.

After living in Las Vegas and Henderson for almost 15 years, they moved to Boulder City last year. The recession made a home affordable, and their two boys wanted to be able to ride their bikes to school, Chris Tilman said.

“They wanted to have some of the freedoms you can have in a small town,” he said.

The small-town life is ultimately what drew Terry and Lindsay Stevens back to Boulder City — somewhat to the surprise of their parents.

Coffee Cup owners Al and Carrie Stevens had put the downtown diner on the market four years ago. They didn’t expect their two grown children to return, Al Stevens said, and the workload was wearing them down.

They had a buyer but backed out of the deal when they realized it would put them out of work, he said. Instead, they pared back the hours to make it more manageable.

It wasn’t long before Lindsay came home from college and started putting her mark on the cafe. She painted bright colors on the walls and redesigned the menu.

She had realized she was homesick on the Fourth of July in San Diego.

“It was packed and crazy, but it wasn’t here” with the annual Damboree parade and festivities, she said. She called her parents.

“I asked, ‘What are you doing?’” she recalled. “They said, ‘Watching the parade.’ And I wanted to be home.”

Terry Stevens knew he was done traveling when he and his racing crew partner got stuck in Mexico with a flashy but broken-down tractor-trailer carrying an expensive ski boat. On one of the calls home, he told his family he wasn’t sure he would make it back because of the dangers. By that time, he had met a Boulder City woman who would become his wife, and he knew his future would be here.

He worked construction and got on with the Boulder City Fire Department reserves. Late last year, when his father was diagnosed with throat cancer, Terry took his place at the restaurant. His father has recovered, but the son plans to stay put.

Lindsay Stevens has found a new home in Boulder City as well.

“Once I got back, I totally had a whole new appreciation for it all,” she said, adding that most of her high school friends also left and have returned. “I liked it a lot better when I moved back.”

Terry Stevens said he laughs now when young people complain to him.

“When they say ‘I’m moving away,’ I say, ‘You’ll be back.’”

CORRECTION: This story was updated to correct the spelling of Jody Tilman's name. | (September 9, 2009)