Nevada: A Guide to the Silver State

IN NEVADA, as elsewhere, the three great institutions forming public opinion--the press, the church, and the school--have been supplemented in recent years by two others, the movies and the radio. Numerous small towns have at least one movie show a week, attended by audiences largely composed of people from widely scattered ranches. The radio is probably more influential, however, for it can be heard seven days a week without the inconvenience of a long trip to town and ninety-five per cent of the ranches have radios. Nevada has certain reception difficulties; there are a few small areas where no radio will operate, and in the western parts of the State it is sometimes difficult to get any station but Reno's KOH and in the northeastern part Salt Lake's KSL--at least during the day. In the evening it is usually possible to tune in stations in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Salt Lake City, and Denver, and occasionally stations much farther away. KOH, which is the only Nevada station and operates on 630 kilocycles, was set up in 1931 as part of the Columbia network, but in 1940 it joined the red and blue NBC net.

While the publication of newspapers has had its difficulties, the building of churches and schools in Nevada has been a particularly heroic business. Clergymen and teachers would labor to organize churches and schools, promote the building of structures apparently justified by the size of the population and its prosperity--and wake up some morning to find that most of the citizens and their families had disappeared in a rush to some new mining discovery. The State is dotted with deserted public buildings, their window panes broken, the paint peeling from their doors--all monuments to public-spirited people whose zeal survived the wrecking of their plans. Though unable to take their plants with them, as the State's pioneer editors did, they themselves could and did move on to the new camps and start their work over again.

Of the three influential agencies of the early years, the press was

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