Ernest Samuel (Bud) Berney Oral History

Ernest Samuel (Bud) Berney Oral History

Ernest Samuel (Bud) Berney Oral History

Churchill County Museum Association

Churchill County Museum Association

November 22, 1991

Analog Cassette Tape, Text File, Mp3 Audio

English

Cassette Tape

1:33:22

CHURCHILL COUNTY MUSEUM & ARCHIVES
ORAL HISTORY PROJECT
an interview with
ERNEST SAMUEL "BUD" BERNEY, JR.
November 22, 1991

This interview was conducted by Bill Davis; transcribed by Glenda Price; edited by Sylvia Arden; first draft and final typed by Glenda Price; index by Gracie Viera; supervised by Myrl Nygren, Director of Oral History Project/Assistant Curator Churchill County Museum.


Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this interview are those of the interviewer and interviewee and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Churchill County Museum or any of its employees.
PREFACE
Fallon-born E.S. "Bud" Berney [January 12, 1947] was interviewed in his home with his second wife, Imogene (Amy) Baxter, present from time to time. "Bud" talks about his father's blacksmith shop, construction work in nearby areas, including the Cave Rock Tunnel at Lake Tahoe, involvement with the ill-fated sugar beet factory and the establishment of the first cattle-feeding yard in the valley.
Bud's first marriage to Ruth Pierson, whose family lived in Lahontan Valley, produced five children each of whom he is very proud. Following the family's sale of the ranch and feed yard in the 1960's, "Bud" established a successful real estate business which his son, Mike, now manages.
Bud tells about being a board member of the Truckee Carson Irrigation District and the county library and his role in starting the Churchill County Museum. He gives a good history of the naval base and describes the haylift of 1949. Reminiscing of early Fallon he describes the original watering trough in front of the courthouse, the cottonwood trees lining Williams Avenue and the people who donated land for Williams Avenue and Maine Street.

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Interview with Ernest Samuel "Bud" Berney, Jr.
My name is Bill Davis and I'm with Churchill County Museum Oral History Program. Today is November 22, [1991], and I'm at 120 N. Bailey and I'll be talking with Bud Berney.
DAVIS: Bud, we might as well start out at the beginning. What do you remember? Where were you born and that type of thing?
BERNEY: Well, I was born on Center Street here in Fallon. The house is still there next to what is now Cye Cox Garage. My dad had a blacksmith shop there when I was born, right next to it. It was later torn down when Cye Cox had it and later we moved to a house that my father built on South Taylor Street that Doc Woodward has lived in for years and years. And outside of working around on construction work here and there around the country in my youth I've spent all my life right here in Fallon, ranching mostly.
DAVIS: What was generally your father and mother's background?
BERNEY: Well, my grandfather, J.J. Cushman, was probably the second settler here in the valley and came here in 1861. He was descended from Robert Cushman of the Mayflower Company, you know, the Pilgrims. He was the treasurer of the Pilgrim Society. He, later, after he came to the United States on the second trip of the Mayflower, married John Standish's daughter. So much for the Cushmans. My grandfather moved here and he got married and they had several children and his first wife died. He came across the United States by ox team in 1860 and he later married my grandmother, Elizabeth McCulloch. She was a school teacher and she'd come out and she was staying with friends in Virginia City when she met him.
DAVIS: He met her out here then?
BERNEY: Yes, and they had five children, my mother [Madge] and Gertie Kendrick, Irma Allen, Pete Cushman, Frank Cushman, Bert Cushman. And they were in the ranching business.
DAVIS: Where was their ranch?
BERNEY: Well, it's in the southern part of the valley here down by the community pasture. When he took up land here why that was a lake down there what's the community pasture now, Carson Lake. And the ranches of the old timers, the Cushmans and the Wightmans and the Downses, their property bordered on the lake and then as the lake receded they got additional land. And they also had range cattle out in the mountains too.


DAVIS: That area would be what nowadays? Berney Road, Depp Road?
BERNEY: Well. Cushman Road runs right in front of the house. It's owned now by Pete Cushman's son-in-law, Corkill. He had, oh, I think, probably a couple thousand acres of land down there. When I was a kid they'd sold off part of it and they only had about eight or nine hundred. And that's about all. He was county commissioner at one time. In fact, when they bought the phone system here, telegraph system, the phone system, he was one of the county commissioners at the time they did it.
DAVIS: About what time was that? [there is a cut at this point]
BERNEY: The Cushmans came here from Maine and I think they were related in some way, or associated anyway, with the Wightmans and the Allens and a lot of the early old-timers who came at that time and that's all they ever did was just ranching. They never took much part in anything except he was county commissioner. I don't too know much about him. He died before I was born. I knew my grandmother but I never met him.
DAVIS: What are your earliest memories of your family?
BERNEY: The Cushman side of the family was going out and staying at the ranch when I was a kid and then as I got a little older I worked out there in the summers in the hayfields and grain fields, did a little buckarooin', learned to ride a horse and do all that kind of stuff.
DAVIS: What were your brothers and sisters?
BERNEY: There's five of us in the family. I have two sisters older than me.
DAVIS: They are who?
BERNEY There's Madge and Lois, and a brother, Richard, and another sister, Maxine. There was five of us altogether. I was right in the middle and none of them live here except me. They all married and moved away.
DAVIS: What is the order of birth?
BERNEY: Madge was the oldest, Lois was second. There were three years between them and then three years between Lois and me, then two years between me and Richard and then two years between Richard and Maxine. They all went to school here in Fallon and then went away.

DAVIS: Where did you start school at?
BERNEY: I went to school here in what they call the old high school years ago. It's down where the Cottage Schools are now. It was a big two-story building. I went to the first and second grades there and then over to the West End [School]. They had another building which was similar to one where I'd been.

DAVIS: Were they identical?
BERNEY: Um huh, I think so.
DAVIS: 'Cause I remember they were.
BERNEY: They were two-story.
DAVIS: And your dad was a blacksmith, you say?
BERNEY: Well, he was a blacksmith to begin with, of course, but he did a lot of things. He was a very remarkable man.
DAVIS: What did you remember early?
BERNEY: I have a very dim recollection of the blacksmith shop but, you know, some of these things maybe is confused with what people told you because I think I was only about maybe four years old or something like that when they moved from there to the house over on Taylor Street. I really don't have very many memories of real early childhood. And growing up why we were out on the edge of town there. There was nobody between us and the Kendricks which today is three or four blocks. That was an alfalfa field with a big sand hill in the middle of it between us and from there to the edge of town was another alfalfa field.

DAVIS: Who owned that? Was that the Mori?
BERNEY:.. That was before Mori. It was the Williams' estate, old W.W. Williams. And then across the street from us between there and Maine Street, that was Cheapy Verplank's ranch.
DAVIS: What's the first name?
BERNEY: Well, we called him Cheapy. Everybody called him Cheapy. I don't know what his name was. He was an old gentleman with a long white beard, lived by himself, kind of a hermit type. He had a big orchard. He had some alfalfa and some pasture. Well, all of us kids on that end of town, we all learned to swim in the irrigation ditch that carried the water to his fields.
DAVIS: Would that be where the high school is now? It's the junior high now.
BERNEY: Where the football field and track and everything is now clear up to Virginia Street that was all part of his alfalfa fields when I was a kid. That went clear over to Maine Street, that ranch. In World War II Kents bought a part of it. Well, Verplank had divided
part of it. It's called the Verplank Addition anyway. I don't know whether he did it or somebody bought it.
DAVIS: Was he a rancher?
BERNEY: Um huh. He didn't do much in the way of ranching. He had a few cattle, I guess, but he didn't really work at it. He was just a kind of an old hermit type.
DAVIS: And at the time you moved down to Taylor what was your dad doing?
BERNEY: Well, he started in the construction business. He built that house on Taylor Street and he and Mom got married and they were going to move into it but he got a job. He'd been hauling freight as a sideline out to Fairview and whatnot and he had a lot of horses. He started the construction work and he got a job up in southern Oregon at Drew's Dam where he built the irrigation system there. He built the flume from the dam, took about three or four million board feet of lumber. He built his own sawmill and sawed lumber and everything, so he moved Mom up there and that's where my sister, Madge, was born. The first year or two they were married we lived up there. Then he got into the construction business. In fact, he had the first road job that was let in the state of Nevada, job number one. I think probably job number
two also. (laughing)
DAVIS: Now, what was it?
BERNEY: I can't remember whether number one was the highway job at Pancake Summit out by Eureka or the one in Wilson Canyon. He built the first road there in Wilson Canyon. And that job, that picture where he's standing there [points to picture on the wall], he built the first road on the west side of Walker Lake. That's where he's standing there. At that time the only way you got around Walker Lake was on the east side on an old wagon trail. And then he went on to do all kinds of jobs. He built the Mount Carmel highways tunnels and the highway which at that time was the longest highway tunnel in the world.
DAVIS: Now when did you come along in this?
BERNEY: Well, when I was a kid along in the twenties why he had jobs all over, of course, when we'd spend summer on these jobs up in northern California, two summers up on the Sacramento River. He was building highways up there and I worked for him a little bit. The Cave Rock Tunnel, he built that. I worked on that job the first year I got out of high school
What type of work did they have you doing?
I did everything. When I worked on construction work I skinned cat and drove truck, run the shovel, oiled on the shovel, run gravel plant, timekeeper. You name it, I did it. (laughing)
(laughing) The whole routine.
Yeah, I probably didn't do any of it very good, but kind of a jack of all trades. But he did a lot of pretty good-sized jobs. He built several dams and he moved Denny Hill in Seattle which was the largest earth-moving operation up to that time in history. It covered thirty-two city blocks and in one place was 165 feet deep. And he had these big electric shovels that they'd just come out with in those days and they loaded the excavation onto conveyer belts and they ran to a certain central part where they dumped on another big conveyor belt that ran over the city streets of Seattle down to the docks and there it was loaded on self-tilting barges. They were towed out into the bay, the Sound there, and tipped and then come back and loaded again. That's the way he moved it. He built Capitan Dam in Mexico.

DAVIS: Were you working on most of these?
BERNEY: No, those were done before I went to work for him. I was still in high school when he was doing those jobs.
DAVIS: What was your high school like?

BERNEY: I hate to think about it. (laughing) I'm glad I don't have to re-live it. (laughing) I was too much concerned with having a good time. I didn't do too good scholastically but I got through all right. When I went to college I did very good. I got all ones but in high school why, too many good-looking girls, things to do (laughing) like that.
DAVIS: Do you remember any teachers?
BERNEY: Yes. Well, McCracken, of course, you couldn't forget, George McCracken, the principal. He and I got along very well. In fact, he treated me as an adult He's one of the people that really had a great influence on me. I can remember several times he'd come to class and stand in the door and give me this [beckons with index finger] and take me in the office and we'd sit down and talk. (laughing) Quite a man, very good educator, I thought anyway. The other teacher was one named Larson that I used to play tennis with. I don't remember most of them very well.
DAVIS: When did you graduate?
BERNEY: I think I graduated in 1931 if I remember correctly. Then I worked for seven years in construction work.
DAVIS: That was with your dad?
BERNEY: Part of the time. Some of the time was for Dodges, sometimes for Drumm, sometimes Bechtel and Kaiser and other outfits.
DAVIS: What areas were those?
BERNEY: When I worked for Bechtel and Kaiser on a job down in central California. We took up the pipeline and dismantled all the pumping stations on the Standard Oil's pipeline from Bakersfield to Vallejo, California. I ran a riveting gun busting rivets on that kind of a job taking down the big oil storage tanks. I skinned cat for Drumm and Dodges, the.old sixties and thirties, the gas-powered ones, to begin with and then when the diesels came out we were in the diesel.
DAVIS: Some of the those jobs were local?
BERNEY: The only local job that I ever worked on, well I worked on two here. One for Dodges when they built a road from Harrigan Road out toward the east. It was Wildes Road extension. I worked for Dodges on that job and then I worked for another company. I think it was

California Company that built the highway south, Harrigan Road, from Fallon out to the what's now Berney Road. Those are the only local jobs that I worked on. Well, I worked on the water system here. Dad built the water system for the city of Fallon here, put down wells out there in the Rice Ranch and the pipeline from there to Rattlesnake Hill and he built the reservoir on Rattlesnake Hill.
DAVIS: About when was that?
BERNEY: That would be in the thirties, late thirties, I guess.
DAVIS: When did you have your university days?
BERNEY: I think probably about 1935 or 1936. I went to the Polytechnic College of Engineering in Oakland. It was a privately owned college.
DAVIS: How did you find that?
BERNEY: Oh, I probably saw their advertisement somewhere. My dad kept trying to get me to go somewhere else. He got me an appointment to West Point or Annapolis, either one that I wanted. He was in politics, my dad was and had quite a bit of influence. I turned it down, wouldn't take it. And he tried to get me to go to a couple of other colleges but I was too smart and . . . (laughing) So, finally, the Depression got so bad that I couldn't depend on him to send me to school so I just had to wait until I got a few bucks ahead and he helped me, of course, too.
DAVIS: What do you remember about the Depression?
BERNEY: I remember working. I never bought a job or took any help from anybody. I worked all during the Depression. If there wasn't any work where I was, if we finished a job why I either caught a ride with a truck or got on a railroad car or something and went where there was work and got a job. Anyway I worked all the time.
DAVIS: What were things like here in Fallon that you remember?
BERNEY: They weren't bad. There was a lot of complaining going on as there was everywhere else but, actually, there wasn't any manufacturing or any payrolls to amount to anything here. The Kent Company hired more people than anybody else. And the ranches, 'course we all had plenty of help. They didn't make much. You got thirty dollars a month and your board at the most, if you got that much. But they didn't feel the Depression very

much here in Fallon that I could tell. Down in the San Joaquin Valley when I was working for Bechtel and Kaiser, down there why you'd go down the wine district there, the grape district, and there'd be great big signs out along the highway, come in and pick all the grapes you want for nothing. Anything to get rid of them, they couldn't sell them. Things were tough, but these people here didn't know it. They probably made less money. Their cattle didn't bring as much and what few things they had to sell but there wasn't much sold out of the valley. It was all consumed here.
DAVIS: How was the construction business?
BERNEY: Well, my dad went broke along with the rest of the contractors (laughing) here too. They all went broke.
DAVIS: Just closed down then.
BERNEY: Yeah, finally just got too much. But he did a lot of other things too. He was one of the instigators in taking over the sugar beet factory out here in Rattlesnake Hill. It was built by the Utah-Nevada Sugar Company and they ran it one year, something like that, and then gave it up.
DAVIS: Was it a community group?
BERNEY: No, no, they were a Utah group.
DAVIS: I mean that took it over?
BERNEY: Yeah, yeah, Dad and I.H. Kent and Andy Haight, George Kenney, oh there was several people. Dad was the president of it. And they took it over and renovated the whole thing. They spent a lot of money on it and they ran it for, I think, two years. But the beets got curly top and something else and they all died and they couldn't harvest enough to run the thing so they just shut it down and junked it. But he was into anything that'd make a buck.
DAVIS: How did things come out of the Depression?
BERNEY: For him?
DAVIS: For you and him and so forth.
BERNEY: He had a couple of ranches that he'd bought when he was in the construction business.
DAVIS: Where were they?

BERNEY: One of them was right at the intersection of Harrigan Road and Berney Road.
DAVIS: Was that on the northeast corner?
BERNEY: No, it was on the north of Berney Road and on the east of Harrigan Road. I think [Donald R.] Travis owns that ranch now. It was 160 acres in there he owned. And then he owned another 160 down where he eventually built a brick home, that two-story brick home down there that George . . . [present George Ernst home]
DAVIS: Did they touch each other or not?
BERNEY: No, there's a couple of miles between them.
DAVIS: And when was that home built?
BERNEY: Probably 1932, I think, 1933, somewhere along in there. He moved to San Francisco. They sold the house to a fellow named [Allan] Inman and they moved to San Francisco, Mom and Dad. He'd done so much work in California he thought he should have an office down there. They tried it but it didn't work out.
DAVIS: Do you remember or know who he bought those places from?
BERNEY: No, before my day. Well, one of them he bought from Gobel and Bassett. Louie Erquiaga owns the old Gobel and Bassett place now. That's where he lives.
DAVIS: That's the south side of Berney.
BERNEY: And then the ranch where we built the feed yard, that was originally the old Dillard place years and years ago.
DAVIS: Is that the same area that the feed yard is now?
BERNEY: The same one, yeah. When Dad bought it, it was called the Sam Frank Ranch.
DAVIS: And he bought it from Dillard?
BERNEY: No, Frank bought it from Dillard. Dad bought it from the Bank of America. They had foreclosed on it.
DAVIS: But it was a ranching property at that time?
BERNEY: Oh, yeah, yeah, about 650 acres, something like that. He heard that they'd been offered five thousand dollars for it by the guy that made the first canned dog food. I can't remember his name now. So he went up to Reno to the fellow who was in charge of these repossessed ranches for the bank and told him what he'd heard and he said, "Well, we didn't offer it for that." He said, "That's what the guy offered us for it. But he said he didn't want to pay cash. He wanted to stretch it out over several years and we wouldn't do that." And Dad said, "Well, I'll give you five thousand cash for it." So they took it. (laughing)

DAVIS: Sounds like a good deal then. (laughing)
BERNEY: (laughing) It was. It'd been let run-down. It took me years to ever get it back in shape. I went to work for him down there in the lower half of the ranch. A lot of it hadn't been farmed and grown back up in sagebrush and whatnot.
DAVIS: What were you doing for him?
BERNEY: Well, I guess, ran the outfit and worked. I went to work for him just after I got married and I think that was about 1938 or 1939, somewhere along in there.
DAVIS: How did your marriage come about? How did you meet?
BERNEY: Well, the gal that I married, she was visiting her folks who had just moved up here and she met my mother at church. Mom was looking for somebody to help her in the kitchen cooking for the hay men. It was first-crop haying.
DAVIS: And her maiden name?
BERNEY: Pierson. Ruth Pierson. And so after I met her, three days later we got married.
DAVIS: Kind of a whirlwind courtship.
BERNEY: Everybody said that it would never work and it didn't. After thirty-seven years she died (laughing) and that ended.
DAVIS: (laughing) Never can tell.
BERNEY: No, you never know. That was my marriage. So then we moved down on the ranch down there.
DAVIS: What kind of a house did you move into?

BERNEY: It was adobe house.
DAVIS: Is it not still there?
BERNEY: No, it's not but they've got pictures of it down at the museum. In fact used to have something they gave away down there, a book or something that that was on the front page--a picture of that.
DAVIS: And where was it located?
BERNEY: Right where the feed yard is now. And we built that feed yard several years later. We fed cattle, of course, all the time and the cattle feeding industry had just started big in California. A lot of the people down there had feed yards that were just feeding the cattle for the manure. They'd furnish the feed and they got the manure and they'd sell it to the big ranches down there. Anyway, it looked like a good deal so instead of feeding our own we were feeding about five or six hundred of other people's a year.
DAVIS: That was the first one in the valley, right?
BERNEY: Yeah. So we built a feed yard. I went down to California and looked all of the feed yards over down there to see how they did and what they did and then I went to Los Angeles and made a deal with a firm.
That's what they did was design and build these mills.
DAVIS: What was the name of that outfit?
BERNEY: Paulson was the fellow that I made the first deal with. He built the first mill, but we were unhappy with it and a year or two later why we hired this Williamson outfit which was famous all over the West. They even made the machines themselves, big hammer mills and hay, and we had them redesign it and rebuild it.
DAVIS: What were the main problems with the feed yard?
BERNEY: Just no money in it, that's all. Not enough. (laughing)
DAVIS: Well, that's a problem. (laughing) You got most of
the cattle locally?
BERNEY: No, we fed a lot of cattle for Moffitt and we fed a lot of cattle for a packer in northern California named Minch. We used to feed Bing Crosby's cows each year, his culled cows. He usually had six or eight hundred cows to feed.

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DAVIS: They were from Elko?
BERNEY: Elko and we had people in Oregon that shipped cattle for us to feed and Tonopah, all over the country. We fed several thousand head of cattle every year. We had corrals for about five thousand head by the time that we sold out.
DAVIS: Which was about when?
BERNEY: 1960, somewhere around there, I guess. Things just got too tough, too tough!
DAVIS: You married and you moved onto the place. When did the family begin or what was the progress?
BERNEY: I think it was about two years before our first child was born, Margot. She grew up here, went to school here, went to the University [of Nevada, Reno], and married Roger Mills. They live on a ranch. Second oldest boy, Sammy, went to college here and got his master's at University of Nevada and then he went to Arizona and got his PhD. He's a professor at the University of South Dakota now, South Dakota School of Mines or whatever they call it in Rapid City. Then the next youngest one, Peter, he went to the University of Nevada and got his master's degree there. Then he went to Texas to get his PhD, but he never did write his dissertation so he doesn't have a PhD, (laughing) but he got a lot of knowledge anyway.
DAVIS: It's all there.
BERNEY: Yeah, he teaches in a community college in Prescott, Arizona. The next one was Mike [and Peggy Berney Lakey]. We had two kids in our old age, my wife and I.
DAVIS: When was he born? About when?
BERNEY: He's thirty-four. He went to the University of Nevada and he couldn't make up his mind what he wanted to do. He finally decided he'd rather come home and work for his dad in the real estate business, so he did. When I retired I just turned it over to him and he's run it ever since.
DAVIS: After the feed yard, what was the events then?
BERNEY: Well, I didn't know what to do. [tape cut] When we sold the feed lot and the ranches we didn't end up with very much and I had to get a job to support my family.

DAVIS: At that time you had three, right?
BERNEY: No, the last two had come along, too. I put in some applications at different feed yards and with banks getting maybe a job as a farm appraiser. So they told me, "Well, if you'll get a little real estate experience we'd be interested in hiring you as an appraiser." So I went to real estate school and went into real estate with my sister-in-law, Barbara Ponte, for a year, then started my own real estate.
DAVIS: That was about when then?
BERNEY: It was in the early sixties. It was real good to me. I made a lot of money, had a lot of fun, made a lot of friends, and I took part in everything going on all my life here in the valley.
DAVIS: Like what?
BERNEY: I put in four years, two years as president on the board of directors for the T.C.I.D. [Truckee Carson Irrigation District].
DAVIS: What were your activities or memories of that part of your involvement at that time?
BERNEY: The thing that impressed me the most was that T.C.I.D. had been run for years by a bunch of old farmers who had never made a thousand dollars in their life and they were handling all this money and they had no idea. They wouldn't spend a dime. By the time I got there the original redwood boxes that had been put in the canals, instead of concrete, were all disintegrating at once because nobody'd ever done any repair work on them or started a project to replace them, such things as that. The manager of the T.C.I.D. was Phil Hiibel. The car that he rode around in was an old 1928 Ford pickup that the CCC's, when they were here, had given Truckee Carson Irrigation District. And I was on the board and finally raised a kick and made them buy a decent automobile. They were putting the seventh engine in that old pickup, if you can imagine. (laughing) And that's the type of administration they had down there. That's my thoughts of the T.C.I.D. when I was on the board was continually fighting with these people to try and get them to come up to the present day instead of living in the past. But we did a lot. We built the Sheckler Reservoir when I was there. We built the twenty-six foot drop and power plant while I was on the board and Harmon Reservoir and the Stillwater Reservoir and the one out north of town.

DAVIS: Who was on the board at that time?
BERNEY: John Conlan, he was the president at the time I first went on and I can't remember the fellow's name from Fernley, Hank . . . had a ranch down in Stillwater. I
just don't recall their names. He had the ranch and he sold it to Dodges down there, the covered swimming pool. The Weishaupts' boys, two of them married two of his daughters. Phil Hiibel, of course, was the manager.

DAVIS: How long were you on the board?
BERNEY: Four years. And last year I moved from the feed yard up to the brick house where my dad had lived so I was in a different district and so I couldn't run for my seat again. So the rest of the directors offered to redistrict the district if I would run again but I wouldn't do it. (laughing) I didn't think that was quite kosher. So that was the end of my tour there.
I served on the library board at the time we designed and built the new library here in Fallon. I was the chairman of the committee that started the museum. In fact, Bob Kent was the president of the Chamber of Commerce that year and I was on the board of directors. He called me up one day and he said, "I'm assigning committee jobs to all of you directors and," he said, "I've got two left. You can have either one you want. There's the museum" and something else committee, and then I forget what the other one was. I'd known they'd never done anything about a museum before. That was the safest place to be, so I said, "I'll take the museum." Well, he fouled me up. He appointed Grace Kendrick and Sam Beeghly and Willie Capucci to serve on this committee with me. So I called a meeting here at home and had them all in and by the time that they left they were just all fired up. "We're going to have a museum. That's all there is to it."
DAVIS: What was that meeting like?
BERNEY: Well, we doubted whether we could do anything or not and what should we do and we got to get a building the first thing. So we looked for a building. We thought we'd found one and about that time why . . .
DAVIS: What was your prospects there. Do you remember?
BERNEY: No, I don't remember what the building was, but we
looked into every big building in town even it was just a shed. And this fellow, [Alex] Oser, had bought the old Safeway building on South Maine Street and Hammie Kent called me up me night and he said, "Say, this friend of mine, Oser, said that he would donate that building that he bought down there, the old Safeway building, to the county for a museum if they wanted it. So," he said, "that should solve your problem." Grace and I went to the commissioners and told them what we thought about it and have to be x number of dollars spent there. And they said fine and dandy, they'd go along with it. So he did give them the building.

DAVIS: What was Oser's background?
BERNEY: Well, he was junkman down in California, made millions of dollars in the junk business. And he came up here and duck hunted and goose hunted with Hammie Kent all the time so he had friends here. And he bought quite a bit of property around Fallon just as investment. So we started in and Grace and I sent away through the library from all over the United States for books on how to operate a museum and start a museum. She took half of them and I took half of them and after a few days we decided that it wasn't for us. They weren't talking about the kind of museum we were interested in at all.
DAVIS: What was the main focus?
BERNEY: The first thing they told you to do in these books was that you had to have, I forget, how many times more storage space than you had exhibition space to begin with which was out of the question with us, of course. So we decided we'd just do it ourselves, so we went down and looked the building over and got the furnace repaired and the roof fixed and there was a carpenter here in Fallon named Moore who was a recovering alcoholic. And he had kind of a bad reputation for drinking and was having a hard time getting work. So I knew him and I hired him and we took him down there and showed him what we wanted him to do and we had him build all of those cabinets that are on the north side of the building in there with the glass doors and whatnot. He built those and at.night why my wife and I'd go down there and we painted them all and she wallpapered them inside, Ruth did. And we got Doris Drumm interested and Doris talked the telephone company into giving us some of those great big spools that their cable comes on and we had him build platforms. We put those on and, out of her own pocket, Doris went to Reno and bought all this expensive velvet cloth and covered the top of them for display tables. We got donations from here and there of different cases.

DAVIS: How did those donations come about?
BERNEY: Well, we just asked for them. Of course, Willie Capucci was out everyday scrounging around (laughing) trying to talk anybody out of anything they had that you could use as a shelf. And we decided right off the bat after we started on this thing that we weren't going to have a museum like most of these local museums where they'll have a glass-fronted case with maybe fifty revolvers in there on three or four shelves piled on top of each other. We said no way. If we're going to show anything we're going to show one of it and we're going to show it so the people can take their time and look at it and see what it is and enjoy it. So we did. The Fish and Wildlife got interested and said, "Well, we have an exhibit of stuffed birds that we take around the state and exhibit them in different towns for a few months every year and if you'd like, why we'll loan that to you for a year." So we said fine and they loaned it to us and never came and got it. Far as I know it's still there.
DAVIS: Do you know where their exhibits came from?
BERNEY: No, I don't. So we picked up all kind of stuff like that. Grace was very good with. 'Course she's quite artistic and she got some of the Indians enthused and brought them in. We had this carpenter build big areas in the front there out of wood and then Drumm hauled in sand for us. We filled them full of sand and on there they built old Indian wigwams--they're out of tules, you know.
DAVIS: Do you remember any of the Indians that worked on that?
BERNEY: No, I don't. Grace would know. So, we did pretty good, I thought. In fact, I think it was about the second year after we had that thing open we won some kind of a national award.
DAVIS: Do you remember the year?
BERNEY: I think it was either the second or the third year we were open. I don't remember what the award was except that there was only two of them awarded each year in the United States. And people flew out here from New York or something and had some kind of a deal. I remember I was president of the association, of course, at that time so I remember having our picture taken and whatnot but I never did know what it was all about. We were quite proud of it. (laughing) Dummies that didn't know anything about a museum and we had people come from California, too, that had heard about the museum and come from back around Bishop and somewhere in northern California, Redding, I think it was and come and look at our museum and take pictures and ask us how we did it.

DAVIS: How did the funding operate?
BERNEY: The funding was a little tough to begin with. We went to the county commissioners and they said the first year they would give us five thousand dollars. "That's it, period. We don't care what you do with it. You've gotta repair the roof or put in air conditioning or whatever you have to do or painting, why that's all you're going to get the first year." So we talked to the local painters in town and they volunteered their time and the contractors volunteered to paint and we painted the whole building. We got the roof fixed. Willie Capucci talked somebody into doing that. He can be pretty persuasive (laughing) when he wants
something. So anyway we all put in a lot of time on the thing. I was president of it for several years and finally decided somebody else can . . .
DAVIS: Who were the ones that kind of followed along with you and continued on?
BERNEY: Well, there was Sam Beeghly. He was on the board for a long time. Grace Kendrick, Doris Drumm, Tiny [Nina] Kent, Hammie Kent's wife. That was about the whole deal of the board of directors the first few years, I think. We had a lot of help. Palludan['s Fallon Mercantile], for instance, they donated the plate glass for the doors and in the front of the building there, for instance. Kents donated a lot of stuff.
DAVIS: And were there voluntary donations or money-raising events or . . . ?
BERNEY: No, we didn't have any money-raising events then although we did charge . . . formed this organization and charged dues and everybody paid so much a year. Most of it was just contributions. Usually one of us out on the trail trying to talk somebody out of some money or something. The commissioners were very good. Warren Hursh was chairman of the county commissioners at that time and he took quite an interest in it and he was very good about getting us money when we needed it. And they included us in their budget every year for the
first few years. We did have to buy a few things, not very much but most of it was donated by local people here. Willie Capucci, of course, he had a museum of his own to begin with so he just transferred part of it over there and Doris Drumm the same way. Then there were quite a few people like Grace Kendrick and the two brothers [Lukes] down by Stillwater with their arrowhead collections and the glass people with their collections and Mrs. Bob Dodge or Mrs. Carl Dodge, one of them, had dishes and things of that kind. Anyway if you just got the word out why the first thing you know people all wanted to get in and help.

DAVIS: Now prior to that you were on the library board, right?
BERNEY: Yeah.
DAVIS: At the beginning.
BERNEY: Yeah.
DAVIS: What do you remember about that project? Dora Witt probably was . . .
BERNEY: Well, Dora was a librarian and, of course, the library at that time was up in the old brick building there on Maine Street, the Fraternal Hall.
DAVIS: What was that old library like?
BERNEY: It was pretty dark and crowded and cramped and there wasn't room for the books at all.
DAVIS: Under the stairway, huh?
BERNEY: (laughing) Right. So we had this one designed and built and we applied to the Fleischmann Foundation. They put up part of the money, the state put up part, the county put up some, and they did a beautiful job. In fact, again, we got an award the first year for that building. The person who was in charge of giving the award told me, he said he can't begin to believe the difference between your library and the one over in I think it was Minden. They were both built at the same time and he said, "All they've got over there is a big barn and you've got a beautiful building here." (laughing) Of course, I didn't have anything to do with it. I just happened to be on the board at the time. We had a lot of good people that were serving and those type of things in those days. Lots of imagination and get up and go.

19
DAVIS: What has ensued following your involvement with the museum? You retired, or you've stayed with your real estate, right?
BERNEY: No, I retired from real estate several years ago and haven't done much of anything since then to be truthful with you.
DAVIS: When did your first wife pass away? Was it 1976?
BERNEY: We were married thirty-seven years so I'd say probably 1975, 1976.
DAVIS: Did she have relatives in the valley?
BERNEY: Um huh. Her father was a diesel mechanic and worked for Dodge's.
DAVIS: And you said you worked with her sister?
BERNEY: To begin with, the first year.
DAVIS: When did you move into this home?
BERNEY: Twenty-six years ago I had it custom built.
DAVIS: Let's review now the children's birth dates. They were all born in Fallon?
BERNEY: Yes. Margot was born in 1939 in Reno; Sammy in 1941 in Fallon; Peter in 1944 in Fallon; Michael 1957 in Fallon; Peggy in 1959 in Fallon.
DAVIS: What are each of them doing now and what are their families like?
BERNEY: (laughing) Well, they're all, except Michael, teachers on the college level and they all teach math, for some reason or another. And Margot has three children and several grandchildren; Sammy has two children; [One was born in August this year] and Peggy just had her first child a few weeks ago. Michael is expecting his first child in a couple of months and my son, Peter, is not married.
DAVIS: You have all together how many grandchildren then?
BERNEY: Six.
DAVIS: And one soon?
BERNEY: Yeah.

DAVIS: And you've got some great grandchildren?
BERNEY: Yeah, several. Three, I guess.
MRS.BERNEY: You got five and one coming up.
BERNEY: I'll be darned.
DAVIS: Five and another one coming up.
BERNEY: It shows I don't keep very good track of them. I'd like to tell you who my new wife is. She isn't very new, she's getting a little shop worn by now because she's been around for . . . (laughter)
DAVIS: (laughing) When was that marriage?
BERNEY: July, 1979
DAVIS: How did that meeting take place?
BERNEY: Well, she came to work for me in my real estate office, so one thing led to another. First thing you know we were married.
DAVIS: And that year was?
BERNEY: 1979. So she never had any children of her own and she married five of them and she's done an excellent job with them, believe me.
DAVIS: I think we've pretty well covered everything. If there's anything else that comes up we'll sure make a visit.
BERNEY: Well, the only hobby that I have that I do much about is roses. You can see I won a few prizes for my roses at the fair.
DAVIS: How long have you been raising roses?
BERNEY: Four or five years, I guess.
DAVIS: Have you done a little vacation traveling from time to time?
BERNEY: Oh, yes, yes. We've been to England and Africa a couple of times to the Hawaiian Islands. Like to do more but . . . We had a ball in Africa.

21
DAVIS: That's wonderful. Well, I sure want to thank you, Bud,
for sharing this information with us.

Mrs. Berney: Did you get your fascinating father in there?
BERNEY: Yeah, I told him quite a bit about Dad. Oh, a few things I didn't tell him. He was mayor of Fallon; he was assemblyman for several terms, a state senator.
DAVIS: What do you remember about him being mayor?
BERNEY: I don't remember when he was mayor because I was a little young then, but I remember when he was in the assembly and the senate. He swung quite a bit of power over there at that time
DAVIS: How old were you?
BERNEY: I was in high school then. But he was a very remarkable man for somebody that . . I don't know whether he even finished high school but he did a lot of important things. He was a president of the associated contractors one time.
DAVIS: That's in Nevada?
BERNEY: No.
DAVIS: United States?
BERNEY: It may have been regional, western region. Yes, he had lots of big jobs and little ones. Built part of the railroads for the Western Pacific through the canyon there, the Feather River Canyon.
DAVIS: The house that you were born in is still on Taylor?
BERNEY: No, no. It's on Center Street right next to the old Cye Cox garage, but I was raised in the one on Taylor Street where Dr. Woodward lived.
DAVIS: And that hasn't changed a great deal, has it?
BERNEY: Well, not much. They had a fire in the top story and burned part of it off and rebuilt it. They didn't rebuild it just like it was. But since Doc died why his heirs haven't done anything with the house and they asked my son, Mike, to come and give them an appraisal of what they could get for it. My older sisters were here visiting and we thought it'd be nice if we could go through that old house. Nobody there now since Doc died so he had them leave it open for us and we all went over and went through it the other day.

DAVIS: That must have been quite an experience.
BERNEY: Yeah, you bet.
DAVIS: Your father built that, right?
BERNEY: Um huh.
DAVIS: So he was a good carpenter too.
BERNEY: Well, I don't know as he did all the work himself. Probably didn't, but he was a good carpenter though. Out at the ranch, before we built the big feed mill, why we put in a alfalfa mill and built a huge big, big wooden building that we blew the hay into and we'd drive our horses and wagon underneath and draw the hay out of it. Dad built all that himself with me packing nails for him, I guess. I wasn't much of a carpenter. He used to get a little annoyed at me because I was such a poor blacksmith. (laughing) You'll have to check this because my memory may not be exactly right.
DAVIS: Okay, we're talking about the water tank, watering trough in front of the courthouse. Can you describe it?
BERNEY: It was built in a flower shape and there was a pillar of some kind that went up in the middle of it. I don't remember whether it was a statue or what it was and it was for horses to water and there was all these places they could come in, you know, the petals went out like this and they could come in there and drink. I think it was torn out when they paved the streets of Fallon. Andy Drumm had the paving job and they paved a strip twenty feet wide from the city limits on Williams Street down to Maine Street and then down Maine Street to the corner of Richards, I guess it is, where the bank is and Penney's.
DAVIS: What were the city limits on Williams?
BERNEY: They were one block up from here, I guess.
DAVIS: That would be about what?
BERNEY: Venturacci.
DAVIS: Venturacci Lane.

BERNEY: So they built it twenty feet wide. It's concrete. I worked on the job for Drumm. I was in high school at the time and I think that's when that was torn down, moved. I know it was paved through there.

DAVIS: Now, there was a faucet and or?
BERNEY: It was just a great big concrete tank. It was built out of concrete.
DAVIS: I'm thinking of the plumbing.
BERNEY: I don't know where the water came from, you know, from underneath, but I suppose it was automatic that it had a float valve or something that regulated the water in it.
DAVIS: You remember when Williams Avenue was lined with cottonwood trees?
BERNEY: Oh, yeah, you bet. Broke my heart when they cut them down and the limbs'd meet right over the middle of the street. It was always shady and cool in there in the summertime.
DAVIS: What was the history of those trees?
BERNEY: They were fence posts. Nearly all of the cottonwood that you find lining these streets and roads out in the country were all fence posts. They'd have a ditch that ran along there and then for their fences they'd just cut off cottonwood and stick it in the ground for posts and, of course, the water table was right there and water from the ditches irrigated them and those posts all grew into trees. That's why we had all these beautiful lanes all over the valley here for years.
DAVIS: How far west did they stretch? Do you remember?
BERNEY: Just to the city limits.
DAVIS: That'd be about to Venturacci Lane, then?
BERNEY: Yeah.
DAVIS: Did that just happen to be a fence line or did the city maybe encourage it?
BERNEY: I think they were fence lines. At least the one on the south side was and then when they formed the city of Fallon, incorporated it, old W.W. Williams, this was his ranch here, he donated that strip of land there for

Williams Avenue and John Oats donated that strip of his land for Maine Street. So I don't know, I suppose maybe some of those cottonwoods on this side of the street were planted after that. I couldn't tell you. It may have been a country road through there. Well, it probably was 'cause there was a road come into Fallon, and I suppose that it was a country road… Probably was because there was a road to come into fallon with trees on both sides.
DAVIS: There's been a lot of changes.
BERNEY: Oh, god, yes.
DAVIS: I wanted to ask you also about the advent of the Navy and the Navy base. What do you remember and your attitudes towards it?
BERNEY: Well, what was first- [cuts out, end of tape]
DAVIS: Okay, this is the beginning of our second tape, Bud, and we were talking about the advent of the Navy in Fallon, and how it began.
BERNEY: I don't know who instigated it, whether the Navy themselves instigated it or whether some of our politicians tried to get the government to build something here in Fallon. They were building air bases and such all over everywhere else and you know how politicians are. We got to get some for our area too. I remember Carl Dodge was very instrumental in getting the original Navy air base built here. And after the War [World War II] they dismantled the biggest part of it. They gave a lot of the buildings to the Indians and carted them away to the various Indian reservations around the state here and there wasn't an awful lot left. And when they decided to reactivate it, at first there was a little opposition from some of the people here in the valley but most of the people that I knew were all for it because they knew it was going to create a lot of jobs.
DAVIS: What do you remember about the first base and what was it like?
BERNEY: When they built the air base we had a feed lot and ranches just south of the air base, adjoined the air base, and I got the garbage contract. I bid on it and got it for the whole time that the Navy was here and we built a lot of pens and fed hundreds of hogs on this garbage.
DAVIS: Out at the feed yard?
BERNEY: Yeah, yeah. The main runway was north and south to begin with and the planes, when they'd take off, they would turn to their left and they would come out over our corrals and the same way when they came in to land after they'd done their mission, why they'd come over

25
our house and our corrals and make a left-hand turn to land.
DAVIS: This was probably in what 1940…?
BERNEY: Well, that was during the War.
DAVIS: 1941, 1942?
BERNEY: Yeah, somewhere in the forties anyway. So I got a good friend who was executive officer over at the base and I complained to him about this left turning bit and he said, "Well, we can't help it." In those days they were all piston-powered planes, you know, with propellers.
DAVIS: Hell cats?
BERNEY: Well, no... Well, I don't know what they were originally. The last ones were the ones that had the bent wing on them. I forget what you called them. But, anyway, he said, "We can't help it because the propeller pulls the plane to the left and the throttle is on your left." And he said, "It's just natural, you don't really have to do anything to turn the plane left. A lot of times we turn to the left." So he said, "I don't think it's going to do you any good. You're just going to have to live with it." (laughing) And they did bother the cattle some to begin with but they finally got used to it. I couldn't see where it hurt them any. Then after they dismantled it and came back again, of course, then they…
DAVIS: Do you have an idea about the complement of men?
BERNEY: No, I don't.
DAVIS: They had a pretty good-sized dining hall?
BERNEY: Yeah, there were quite a few people there but I don't remember how many.
DAVIS: You said they dismantled it and it was dispersed?
BERNEY: Yeah. Somewhere along in that time I threw my hat in the ring and ran for county commissioner and the Navy gave what was left of the air base back to the county. The county owned it. So one night, George Coverston called me up--he owned the Chevrolet garage here in Fallon--and he said, "I understand you're running for county commissioner." And I said, "Yes." He said, "Is it all right if I come out tonight? I want to talk to you." And I said, "Sure." So he came out and he told me that he wanted to lease the air base from the county

and his son, Marshall, was going to start a flight school out there and they wanted to lease the whole thing and he wanted to know if I was elected how I would look at it. And I told him as far as I know why I'd be all for it. Anything except just having it sit there going to waste. Well, anyway, I didn't get elected but he did lease what remained of the air base in between World War II and when the Navy started up again why he had a lease on it.
DAVIS: That was a pretty good business or do you know?
BERNEY: I don't think it ever amounted to very much. They did give some flying lessons over there and they had some planes for rent. One time we were moving a bunch of cattle from the Freeman Ranch that we owned down by Stillwater down to the ranch there by the feed lot and one of them was wilder than the devil and we couldn't do anything with him. He'd just get in the drain ditch and stand in there belly deep in water and threaten you, so we finally just left him. And then the next day I took a couple of cowboys and we rode all the way between Stillwater and Fallon back and forth there. We couldn't find him anywhere so I went out to the base and hired a plane and this guy flew all over out there. We'd go down and examine the brands on all the cattle we'd see out in the brush. We didn't find him, by the way, but he did show up later. Anyway, it's been a big help to the town of Fallon.
DAVIS: How did it come about that they reactivated it or do you remember what went on there?
BERNEY: I think that the Navy just ran out of anywhere to train these pilots and they had to have somewhere where it was close enough to the coast so that the airplane carriers could put into port down there and the pilots could fly the planes up here for refresher courses in gunnery and bombing. That's all this place did, does now as far as that's concerned.
DAVIS: What's your awareness of the land that the Navy took over or has control of in the valley?
BERNEY: I think it was a good thing. In.fact, I was appointed on the committee and served as the chairman of it, of the zoning committee that was in charge of the zoning laws around the Navy base, the original ones. And anytime anybody wanted to build anything they had to come to our zoning committee and ask for permission and we'd have a hearing and see whether it interfered with the rules and regulations. You couldn't build any new houses or anything there. Pete Cushman and somebody else and I served on it for. I think there was four or five of us.


DAVIS: Were there problems concerning that?
BERNEY: There were some, yes.
DAVIS: What type of problems would that be?
BERNEY: People would complain that the planes were bothering their chickens and the hens wouldn't lay eggs and so forth. So then they would complain to the Navy so, of course, the Navy didn't want any new installations built or if anybody did build there why they had to sign a deal saying they wouldn't complain about the noise of the planes. And one fellow started a subdivision there right next to the Raffetto Ranch off of Harrigan Road.
DAVIS: Now where would that be today?
BERNEY: Um, I’m just trying to think…
DAVIS: Would that be Drumm Lane?
BERNEY: Well, I’m trying to think if that was where it was or whether it’s down further south. I’m not sure, no. But anyway, he just went ahead and did it without asking anybody about it. He'd never heard of this ordinance. He didn't do anything to try to break the law. He didn't know he was breaking the law. Well, he'd already sold five or six lots before we ever heard about it so, of course, we let it go. But I think of all the people who asked for a variance from our board, I think there was only one that we ever turned down and that one a guy wanted to drill for oil about a quarter of a mile below the end of the runway on the south end of the base. We turned him down. (laughing) And then they did away with that ordinance and I lost my job. Didn't pay anything anyway, so. (laughing) It's been a good thing for the town of Fallon, I think.
DAVIS: Well, we've seen a lot of changes recently with the base.
BERNEY: Yeah, well, there are inconveniences. I ran that feed yard down there and there's times when planes were taking off or coming in to land that no way you could get me on the telephone. If I was trying to call long distance, I just might as well drive there. (laughing)
It'd be an hour or two when you couldn't hear anything and it was kind of annoying and sometimes at night it'd bother you when you were trying to listen to the radio or television.
DAVIS: Were you aware of difficulty between the Navy personnel and local people, youngsters or anything like that?
BERNEY: Not really. The only problems that I've been told about is what's in the papers. Actually as far as I was concerned my kids and family and the people, we always get along real good. I hired quite a few Navy boys on the ranch over the years. Our relations were very good and we never asked for anything that they didn't do if they could. When they were spraying-¬this is before they stopped DDT spraying, when they were spraying for mosquitoes, the Navy for years--they had a plane that they sprayed with and they'd come and spray our feed corrals for me everyday when they sprayed.

DAVIS: What was your awareness of the haylift at that time?
BERNEY: I was involved in it. I loaded a good many tons of hay over there at the base onto the planes.
DAVIS: And how did the haylift come about?
BERNEY: We had a cold spell come in and it snowed. It was about eight inches or twelve inches of snow on the ground right here in Fallon and it got cold and as I remember there was a period of a couple of weeks where I don't know whether it even got up to zero in the daytime. It just stayed cold and there was a fog settled in over this valley here. You could drive out toward Reno and you'd get to Hazen and it would be clear. You'd drive the other way and get to Salt Wells. It would be clear but in here it was just all foggy. We had a terrible time at the feed lot with the frozen pipes and water tanks. You'd keep everyday trying to chop the ice out of them but pretty soon you couldn't because the whole thing was solid to the bottom. There was a period there of several days when I had to take the cattle a corral at a time out of the feed lot and drive them down the drain ditch and water them in the drain ditch. It was tough. And, of
course, the people out on the ranches, they had all this snow out there in the mountains and the cattle couldn't get to any grass or anything else to eat and they couldn't get to them to feed them. So they loaded the hay up on these big cargo planes and went out and found the cattle where they were grouped together and just dropped the hay where they could get at it and eat it.
DAVIS: Where did they locate the hay?
BERNEY: They bought it here in the valley.
DAVIS: Was this a government [project]?
BERNEY: I think the government probably put up the money or if
they didn't, why the people who got the help got special loans at low interest rate and there was a lot of stuff donated. I know I took myself and several of my men over and we helped load hay on the planes.
DAVIS: That was probably about 54? 56? Or?
BERNEY: Gosh, I don’t remember.
DAVIS: Cold winter.
BERNEY: It was a cold miserable thing. I never want to live through it again, (laughing) I'll tell you.
DAVIS: Let's go back and talk a little bit about your wife and her relatives and the family and so forth.
BERNEY: Her father worked on ranches in California.
DAVIS: His name was?
BERNEY: Ed Pierson. He was a very good Caterpillar mechanic and he worked on the threshing machines and the tractors that pulled them, the old steam tractors to begin with and then the horse-drawn ones.
DAVIS: And which area was this?
BERNEY: This was down in southern California down around the Calexico area down there to begin with but most of the grain harvesting they did was up in Oregon and Washington. And they would go with the crops, he and his family, from whatever crops were first to be picked down in southern California. They'd follow the harvest north and they'd end up harvesting grain up in northern California, southern Oregon, southern and eastern Washington. And they picked apricots and apples and you name it. They worked in the packing sheds, even his little kids, Ruth and her sisters. They helped along with it and everybody got paid and they lived in tents most of the time. Some of the ranches had kind of shacks that workers could live in but most of them took their own tent and lived in that. It was kind of a tough life, no running water, you know, all that kind of thing and no sanitary facilities. Hell of a way to raise kids but they never complained to me about it. They didn't think they were too bad off.
DAVIS: Was your wife active in the community?
BERNEY: Well, yeah, she belonged to bridge clubs and the Rebekahs. She wasn't into politics or anything like that. She was very popular. (Short tape break)
DAVIS: We're talking about some of the older days here.
BERNEY: At one time this was back in, oh, I'm just going to guess and say around 1910, or maybe 1912, somewhere in there. Somebody bought the Sand Mountain out here – Oh, Libby Owens Glass Company - and they were going to build a factory to make glass. So my dad organized a Fallon Electric Railroad Company and they bought up right-of-way and started building, he did, a railroad from Fallon out there. Some of the old grade is still in existence and the State Highway Department took over part of it when they enlarged Harrigan Road a number of years ago. Anyway, he built, I forget, eight or ten miles of the grade bit for that before the people that were going to build the glass company folded up or decided not to go ahead with it.
DAVIS: They never did get anything started then?
BERNEY: So Dad paid off all the debts out of his own pocket. It was quite a loss to him at that time but anyway, like I said, he was always willing to try anything. (laughing)
DAVIS: Sounds like it.
BERNEY: Well, you know, he came to me one time when we were at the feed lot and he said, "You know it's going to be the big thing around here in the next few years is this natural gas." He said, "What do you think about forming a company and see if we can't get a exclusive franchise from the state of Nevada to deliver natural gas in the state of Nevada?" So I said, "Fine." We got on the horn and we got together a group that included us and Felix Bernedo, Walt Whitaker, George Swallow from Ely, bigwig over there, Newt Crumley from Elko and we formed Nevada Pipelines, we called it. Judge Ross from Reno, which is Paul Laxalt's father-in-law, was our attorney and so we went to the state and we tried to get this exclusive franchise. At first they talked like they would and then they said, Well, you don't have any gas supply so I'll tell you what we'll do. We'll consider it if you get a gas distribution system." In other words, somebody's distributing gas in the state here now like Tedford here in Fallon. So we went to Reno and we tried to make a deal with the biggest outfit up there that had a gas distributorship. They're still in business, by the way. And he wouldn't sell out. So one day Dad came out to the office where I was working and he said, "Well, doesn't look like we're going to get anywhere that way." He said, "Why don't we go to the Navy and see if we can't get the Navy to finance a pipeline from the district up here and we can furnish the gasolineand jet fuel to the air base and we'd be natural gas alongside once we get the right-of-way." So we get together all our partners and they said well, that's fine. So Dad went back to Washington, D.C., and the Navy got really excited about it because they were hauling all that stuff in by tank trucks, and when they came in with these tank trucks if the storage tanks they had wouldn't hold the whole thing, they'd just pull it out in the desert and dump the rest of it because you can't drive one of those things over a mountain road when they're not full. Those tank trucks get to sloshing and throw you right off the road. So they ran with a terrible waste there. So they were all hot for it but they didn't want to put up any money. Dad was very good friends with Steve Bechtel of the Bechtel Corporation which was the largest construction firm in the United States. So we went down and talked to Steve and they did some preliminary engineering work for us that Dad paid for and decided it was going to cost, I forget what, twelve million dollars or something like that. Through some contact we got ahold of a guy in Los Angeles that looked like might finance it but he backed out on the deal and so one day Steve Bechtel called Dad up and he said, "I think I've got somebody to finance that pipeline for you." So he said, "If you can come down next week why we'll meet with them." Steve was on the board of directors of the Southern Pacific Railroad, of course, amongst many other things, and so when Dad went down there he told him it's the Southern Pacific Railroad. He said, "They're building a fuel line now from Los Angeles to somewhere in Texas"--I forget where--"going through Arizona and Nevada." He said, "It never occurred to them to build one here, but," he said, "I sounded them out the other day at a board meeting and I think they'd like to go in partnership with you."
We said, "Fine and dandy," because, hell, they already had the railroad right-of-way. You didn't have to buy any right-of-way. So we said, "Fine and dandy," and Dad met with the representatives of the railroad two or three times and then one day somebody called him--I don't know whether somebody from the Bechtel Corporation or whether it was from the railroad company, but, anyway, they said that they decided they were going to build the pipeline themselves and they didn't need us. There wasn't very much we could do about it, not going to fight the Southern Pacific Railroad. You could take them to court and tie them up for years if you had a lot of money. But anyway Steve Bechtel felt real bad about it so he told Dad, "I just feel real bad I think it's my fault, of course, for even mentioning it to them. So I'll tell you what Iwant to do. I'm going to put you on our payroll, the Bechtel Corporation, as a consultant for the rest of your life at twelve thousand dollars a year." And Dad wouldn't do it, but anyway that's how bad they felt. (laughing) So a little later on he got ahold of Dad again and he said, "I've just been talking to somebody in Southern Pacific and they said what they'd like to do, they would like to keep the pipeline but give you the distribution system. If you want to build a tank farm up there why they'd say that's fine and dandy. They'll let you have that." So we said, "All right. We'd be satisfied with that." So we got all the specifications from the Navy of what they needed and Bechtel drew up all the plans for us. In fact it just so happened we got a hell of a good buy on tanks. There was six tanks in Chicago that had been built for some refinery somewhere and the people'd gone broke and the steel company still had these tanks. They were unassembled but ready to put up. We could get them for about ten cents on the dollar. We put in a bid to the Navy and as I remember now why we'd a made a fortune out of the God damn thing, but, anyhow, to make a long story short, the fellow who was in charge of the letting of the bids--his headquarters were in Missouri¬-he was an attorney and he called me up one day and he said that the Nevada Pipelines had put in the low bid for the storage facilities for the Navy fuel up here and there'll be a representative to meet with us on such and such a day. And so a couple of days later he called back again and he said well, "I'm sorry to tell you that we've rejected all the bids and the Navy is going to build their own storage system." (laughing) And so, you know, these things happen and this is the story of my dad's life. He made millions, he lost millions. He was always coming up with some new idea. When he first came to Nevada here he was quite young. He filed on some of the best dam sites in the state here over to . . . well, what's the lakes down south by Bridgeport, he had a dam site there that later sold to the irrigation district there. He had a dam site up in Hope Valley, I think, that he sold to Sierra Pacific or their predecessor. But anyway he was always looking into the future. Pretty smart man.

DAVIS: Sounds like it.
BERNEY: Yeah, I really admired him. Very proud of him.
DAVIS: You should be.
BERNEY: I doubt there'll ever be another one.
DAVIS: Never can tell here. This is going to be the end of this interview and on behalf of the Churchill County Museum, I want to thank you for sharing these memories with us.
BERNEY: A pleasure.
The End

Bill Davis

ERNEST SAMUEL "BUD" BERNEY, JR.

120 N. Bailey
Fallon, NV