He was a family friend and it is with heavy heart that we send Kenny Guinn on to his next journey.  Here's hoping that he and my dad are having a drink together tonight at Heaven's Bar.

From the Associated Press:

Former Nevada Gov. Kenny Guinn, a two-term moderate Republican whose tenure marked a prosperous era in a state now facing severe budget problems, died Thursday after falling from the roof of his Las Vegas home while making repairs. He was 73.

The predecessor to current Gov. Jim Gibbons was pronounced dead at University Medical Center, where he was taken after the fall, Coroner Mike Murphy said. Authorities were investigating whether the death was from natural causes or an accident.

Billy Vassiliadis, a friend and spokesman for the Guinn family at the hospital, said Guinn had been on the roof making repairs. He said Guinn's wife, Dema Guinn, found him and called 911 . Police received the call just after 10:30 a.m.

"She lost her best friend this morning," Vassiliadis said.

Gibbons ordered flags at state buildings to be lowered to half-staff and issued a statement saying, "On behalf of all Nevadans, I extend our deepest sympathy to his family and friends."

The state Senate minority leader, Bill Raggio, R-Nev., called Guinn "undoubtedly one of the best public servants who has ever served and one of the best governors we've ever had."

"He was an example of someone who was committed to working with other across the party lines," Raggio said, choking on his emotions during a telephone interview. "He still had so much to offer."

Guinn, a former Clark County school superintendent and millionaire bank chairman, was a Democrat-turned-moderate Republican who served two terms as governor from 1998 to 2007. His tenure marked a prosperous era in a state now facing huge tax deficits, the highest unemployment rate, at 14.2 percent, and the most foreclosures per capita in the nation.

"He was the right guy for the times, and he had the guts to stand up and do what was best for the citizens of Nevada," said Greg Bortolin, a former spokesman for Guinn.

Guinn was elected in his first bid for statewide office, defeating Democrat Jan Jones with 52 percent of the vote while drawing criticism that he was the hand-picked candidate of powerful special interests. He departed ranked by Time magazine as one of the nation's best governors.

During his tenure in Carson City, he overhauled government agency operations, revamped budgeting and tax collections, pushed for a major student scholarship program, fought federal plans to bury nuclear waste in the desert outside Las Vegas and sought to diversify Nevada's casino-dependent economy.

Guinn also spearheaded the biggest tax increase in state history, then returned to residents $300 million in excess revenues.

In 1999, during his first term as governor, he pushed the Legislature to approve his Millennium Scholarship program that uses tobacco company settlement funds to help Nevada students pay for their college costs at state schools.

With the state past an economic slump that followed the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, he pushed for a broader tax base and sought more funding for social services and education in the 2003 legislative session.

He was overwhelmingly re-elected in 2002, defeating longtime Democratic state Sen. Joe Neal.

"He was a dynamic force in Nevada politics and our state's business circles for as many decades as I can remember, and he had an extraordinary influence on me," said Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Las Vegas.

Berkley said she helped recruit Guinn as interim president of University of Nevada, Las Vegas, a position he accepted for $1 salary.

Guinn was born in Garland, Ark., raised in Exeter, Calif., as the son of migrant fruit pickers. He once lived in a tin shack and attended almost 30 schools as his parents followed the crops.

He won a college football scholarship and received bachelor's and master's degrees in physical education from California's Fresno State University. He received a doctorate in education from Utah State University in 1970. He taught in Fresno and San Jose while doing graduate work at Stanford University.

He moved to Las Vegas in 1964, starting as a planning specialist for the Clark County School District. In 1969, he was named superintendent of schools. He left the district in 1978 to join Nevada Savings and Loan. He later became bank chairman, president and chairman of Southwest Gas, and interim president at UNLV.

Guinn and his wife, Dema, have two sons.

Okay all you Las Vegas history buffs.  Time to put on your thinking caps.  We have a reader who has been reading a book about Marilyn by Adam Victors.  According to the book, Marilyn (then Norma Jean) lived in Las Vegas in 1946.

The house was at 604 S. 3rd Street.  Today, the plot of land is a parking lot.  Our reader was wondering when the house was destroyed.

Also, he is looking for information about the old Las Vegas Hospital at Ogden and 8th.  The hospital construction was spearheaded by Dr. Roy Martin in the early 1930s.

"He told the Las Vegas Evening Review-Journal that he had retained architect A.L. Warwick to design the hospital, which would be "a two-story structure, built of gypsum blocks, stuccoed outside, finished in white with a red tiled roof, in the typical Spanish style so well adapted for this country." Total cost would be about $100,000. The Las Vegas Hospital was a state-of-the art, 35-bed facility. It had laboratories, maternity ward, an X-Ray machine, five treatment rooms, a tilting operating table, and an advanced lighting system in the operating room. "  (The First 100)

The building stood long after it was abandoned as a hospital.  It burned due to a fire of suspicious nature (too often the case to buildings preservationists are trying to save, it seems) but I can't remember the year.  Can you?

Anyone got any other Marilyn in Las Vegas stories to share?

Our dedicated readers will remember our good friend, Allen Sandquist who goes by the name of RoadsidePictures on Flickr.

A few years back, he broke preservationists hearts by moving to Idaho.  But, because photography is in his heart, he has been preserving via his camera places in Northern Nevada and in southern Idaho.

Some of his photos have been featured in a new book, "Quintessential Boise: An Architectural Journey"

Here are some photos that I really love and I hope you do, too:

Nifty Mid-Century Modern vintqage bowl:

Pole Lamp (we had a similar one in my childhood home in Charleston Heights)

Covey's Little America near Boise

Cal Neva Lodge in Lake Tahoe

Holiday Motel in Elko, NV

Club Silver Dollar in Elko, NV

El Rancho in Wells, NV

The Star Bar and Dining Room, Elko, NV

These cow pokes used to adorn the sign on the beloved but gone Mapes Hotel in Reno.  Today the preside over the Folklore Center in Elko!

Sands Motor Inn in Reno, NV looks like an homage to the famous Sands sign in Las Vegas!

As much as we miss him in Las Vegas, we thank him for letting us show of some of his recent work and congratulate him on his success in Boise!

Barbara Greenspun with her beloved, Hank

(Photo courtesy of the Las Vegas Sun)

She was instrumental figure in the post-war history of Las Vegas.  The wife of the Las Vegas publisher, Hank Greenspun, Barbara Greenspun held her own and helped shape the Las Vegas of today.  She was born in London and grew up in Ireland.  She met Hank at a wedding in 1944 and married him shortly after that.  They came to Las Vegas in 1946.

They started the Las Vegas Sun, built Green Valley, the first master-planned community in Southern Nevada, and when Hank died, Barbara took over as publisher of the paper.

She was known as an elegant lady, opinionated and, most of all, dedicated to causes that were dear to her heart.

She will truly be missed.

From our pal, Johnny Katz, at the Las Vegas Sun:

Even if you didn’t know who she was, exactly, you knew she was someone. There was an air about Barbara Greenspun that made it clear she was a person of high caliber.

You could feel it. She was prim and dignified, even regal. If there could be true royalty in Las Vegas, she was that, elegant and smart and stylish. She seemed from another time and place, when people of her stature would not be seen in public at less than their very best.

I was made aware of this quality when I first started at the Sun in 1998, in what some of us call the “old building” on Valley View Boulevard (though it was not the oldest building in Sun history, by a long shot). One morning I happened upon Barbara Greenspun at the staff coffee machine, of all places.

I introduced myself, telling her I was new to the company, glad to be part of the team, that sort of thing.

She nodded, and noted that she understood I’d come over from the R-J. This is true, I said.

“We won’t hold it against you,” she said, with a hint of a grin.

I remember laughing at that, too loudly to be genuine. It was a forced guffaw from a new employee to a joke made by the founding family’s matriarch. And then I thought that every time Barbara Greenspun would see me in the office, she’d remember two things about me: That I’d worked for the competition, and that I could be counted on to laugh too loudly at her witticisms. I thought, half-joking, that the company handbook should include a protocol entry of how to act when you meet Barbara Greenspun.

A couple of years later, I was promoted to the editor of the Accent section, a huge honor, and headed up the Sun’s A&E and lifestyle coverage. In that role I worked with two of my favorite people for several years: Former Sun food editor Muriel Stevens, and the late Ruthe Deskin, who wrote a weekly column called Back and Forth for Accent almost until the day she died.

First, a little back story.  My husband has been going to the National Association of Broadcasters yearly conventions for over thirty years.  For the last six years, he has been employed by a large motion picture studio and is the engineer for their extreme sports channel, FuelTV.

For the last 14 years between NAB and visiting my parents, we have stayed in many hotels on the Strip from economy (that would be you, Tropicana) to very nice (the Venetian, Thanksgiving 2001).  A few years back, Fox sent the crew up for NAB and we stayed at Bally's, which is actually a very good place to stay as long as you don't eat in any of the restaurants.

For the last two years, we have been staying at the Orleans and the only bad thing we can say about that hotel is the long walk from the parking lot to the hotel rooms feels like a ten mile hike.  We've enjoyed many of the restaurants at the Orleans as well.

This year, in a cost-cutting measure and with the idea of being able to send more people, Fox and the Sahara made a deal for the mid range employees and some of the upper executives to stay there during NAB.

Its' a historic property, one of the last remaining original Strip hotels.  It's had its ups and downs and during the winter closed one of its two hotel towers.

But, it had the advantage of being close to the Convention Center and we could take the Monorail.

So, we thought (and we weren't the only ones), how bad can it be?

Well, I am sad to report, it's pretty darn bad.

We checked in mid-afternoon on Saturday.  The registration desk had three people working and a line that snaked down the hall.  The clerk we got was not polite and I would be truthful in saying that she was not only semi-rude but refused to work with us when we discovered they had messed up our reservation.  They had our room type wrong as well as Jon's check-out date wrong.  After going round and round with her about the wrong check out date she was finally able to sorta fix it in the computer but said we should call down later that evening and confirm that it went through!  (Because really, on your first weekend night in Las Vegas you want to have to plan for calling the hotel to make sure they didn't screw up fixing the screw up on their end, I guess.)  That should have been the first warning sign.

Instead of the king bed we had reserved, all they had to offer (for one night and then we could move) were two queen beds.  We were offered the Hospitality Suite for another $50 a night and felt like victims of a bait and switch.  We declined to spend the extra dough on the suite.

After all, how bad could an average room be?

Turns out, pretty bad.  After we escaped the Clerk from Hell, we stopped by the small shop, Sahara Spirits,  that sold water and sodas.  We were parched and hoping to get some cold water.  The smell from the shop hit us in the face as we walked in.  It was that Vegas sewer smell and we turned around and left without buying anything.

The lobby that once had been brightly decorated with an Egyptian and Casbah motif was now shades of gray.  I am not joking.  Gray.  Because the color is such a pick-me-up?  Whoever thought the grey and brown color scheme works should be fired.

The elevator took us up to our floor.  As we walked down the corridor and got closer to our room we could hear the Ice Machine making enough noise to wake the dead.  A hole was knocked into the wall next to our door.

By the next day we could sympathize with whoever had hit the wall.  They were likely tired of dealing with the staff.

Our room had a view of the Stratosphere Tower (where Fox had tried to house our group but was unsuccessful).  It also had two different types of carpet.  One type was for the entrance and felt like astro-turf.  The other, completely different carpet type, covered the rest of the room.

The telephone was located on the desk across from one of the beds.  This meant if you left a wake up call, you had to get out of bed to answer it.  I am still trying to understand the logic of that one.

The air conditioner made a wailing sound.  Though there was a thermostat on the wall, that didn't work but the old fashioned wall air conditioner did.  It was making the wailing sound.

The box springs had smudges on the top of them where they met the mattress.  We didn't want to know.

There was no remote for the TV and we had to call housekeeping to bring us another.  The guy who brought it implied we had palmed the other.  I guess guests of the Sahara have nothing better to do than rip off remotes that work 20 year old televisions.

We went out Sunday morning about 10:00 am and returned to the room at 3:30 pm.  Housekeeping had not been there.  A call to them let us know that they were working their way towards us and it would probably be another hour.

We walked around, played a few slots (which took our money fairly quickly with no return) and ended up sitting by the pool area, in the wind and cool weather.

Finally, our room was cleaned (or what passes for clean at the Sahara).

That night we had dinner with Jon's co-workers.  Most of them were staying at the Sahara and each of them had their own horror stories they told us about checking in and more.

As the dinner progressed, we began joking about going to Fry's Electronics to buy black lights so that we could run our own CSI-type tests for bodily fluids in our rooms.

We all agreed that we really didn't want to know.

The sad part is that it doesn't have to be this way.  Mike Nolan and the crew at the El Cortez have trail blazed the path for how to restore and rejuvinate an aging hotel/casino.  Yes, it costs some money but the El Cortez is doing a land office business these days and the majority of people who stay there are having a good time.

The same can't be said for staying at the Sahara.

Bottom line, I don't think Fox will be returning to the Sahara (everyone we met was planning on lodging complaints with the Fox Travel office based on their daily experiences with the staff).

I don't see us ever going back as well.

Which is too bad.  The hotel deserves better treatment from her owners and her staff.