Silver Tradition

Three things which the public mind associates vividly with the State of Nevada are divorces, silver ore, the Mackay family. Divorce and the Mackay name were once "linked" in public prints, in 1914 when Mrs. Katherine Alexander Duer Mackay took the notion to leave her telegraph tycoon husband, Clarence Hungerford Mackay, and marry a surgeon named Blake whom she later divorced (TIME, Aug. 5). But that happened in the East. In Nevada, where the Reno divorce mill grinds exceedingly fast and the ways of women are an old story, the matter caused little comment. In Nevada the Mackay name rings with a sound of pure silver because it was there that the late John William Mackay, Irish pioneer, struck the Comstock Lode in 1873, earning $1,850 for every 15-c- he had invested. And it is there that Clarence Hungerford Mackay has been endowing the State University in his father's memory ever since 1908. He gave a School of Mines that year, followed by a series of gifts whose total reached $1,500,000 when, last week, he gave a Mackay Science Hall. Therein Nevada undergraduates will be taught the chemistry, physics and mathematics necessary for admission to Mackay School of Mines.

Endow as he will, the present Mr. Mackay will never be able to give back to Nevada the color of its oldtime mining days, when his high-spirited mother, Marie Louise Hungerford (Bryant), widow of a shacktown doctor, ran a shacktown boarding house, married her Irish boarder and zoomed with him to riches indescribable. Today a Nevada "miner," before he makes his mark, is a smooth-faced youth in flannel or corduroy trousers (lately bell-bottomed) and a woolen sweater, with a stack of books in his dormitory room, instead of pick, pan and shovel. Instead of rip-roaring oldtime dance halls there are night clubs and roadhouses nowadays, built up around Reno to accommodate the transient (divorce-seeking) trade. Discreet enough to be considered proper for the University of Nevada's young people, these places bear such idyllic names as "The Willows" and "Idlewild,'' though at a place called Lawton's Springs there is sometimes heard an echo of "the West that was."

President of the University of Nevada is Walter Ernest Clark. He personally planned the science school which Mr. Mackay has now endowed with $500,000. In a way the endowment was a certification of President Clark's fitness for office. Last year a scandal-mongering element tried to effect his removal on the allegation that he did not properly protect the students' morals. Investigation suggests that the scandal-mongering originated from the stories of cynical divorce lawyers who have taken out of Reno tall tales of the university students "working their way through college by performing as rich women's gigolos." The only ascertainable basis for such scandal is the appearance at Reno's railroad station, from time to time, of clean-cut young college men come to say goodbye to ladies from far parts whom they knew in Reno while they (the ladies) were being accommodated on domestic matters by a State more sympathetic than most.