Stories That Live In Us

Nevada: The Well-Worn Path | Episode 83

• Crista Cowan | The Barefoot Genealogist • Season 2 • Episode 83

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Crista Cowan:

Stories That Live in Us is a podcast that inspires you to form deep connections with your family, past, present, and future. I'm Crista Cowan, known online as The Barefoot Genealogist. Counting down to the upcoming celebration of America's 250th birthday, you'll meet families from each state whose stories are woven into the very fabric of America. Tales of immigration, migration, courage, and community that remind us that when we tell our stories, we strengthen the bonds that connect us. So join me for season two as we discover from sea to shining sea the stories that live in us. I am well aware that there are more places in the state of Nevada than Las Vegas. But when we were planning out our 50 state episodes and Nevada came up on the list, all I could think about was how many times I had driven back and forth from Utah to California and back on I-15, always going through Las Vegas. Now it's about five hours from my house to Vegas and five hours from Vegas to my grandmother's front door. And so it was a common thing for me to make that trip. But I thought about it a little bit. I've got friends, a dear friend who's a brilliant songwriter, and she's from Reno. And I could have invited her to come and tell some of her stories. My oldest nephew's boyfriend is from Elko, and his family is all there, and there could have been stories there. But I just kept coming back to this vision of me sitting in a Marie calendar just off the Las Vegas strip with my dad and two of my siblings and two of my nephews back in 2010 with my dad's uncle Don. And I turned to him and I said, I'm gonna need you to tell me the story about the time you got shot in a casino. And first he chuckled nervously, and then he blushed to the roots of his hair, and then he teared up. And for just a moment, I was afraid I had offended him or that I had opened up some wound I didn't want to open. But then he proceeded to tell me the story. And it wasn't just that story, but for the next three years until he died, every time I went through Vegas, which was often, and would stop and see him, he would tell me more stories. So you're gonna get a story today about I-15 and Las Vegas and my Uncle Don. Okay, do we start with Uncle Don or do we start with I-15? I think we should start with I-15. I know it seems strange to tell a story about a freeway. But my parents were both born and raised in Los Angeles. And if you remember, way back in the Valentine's Day episode where I talked about the love stories in my family, I told the story of how my parents met. If you haven't listened to that, you're gonna want to go listen to it. Their love story, the story of how they met, it's just amazing to me. Headline four-day blind date. And that four-day blind date took them from my mom's house in Long Beach, California, up to Salt Lake City and back. And the way my mom tells the story, sitting in the backseat of the car with my dad, who she had just met five hours earlier, she knew by the time they got to Vegas that she was going to marry him. And so that became a part of our family story. After my parents got married, they lived in Los Angeles for a while. At the time, my dad was working for Howard Hughes as part of his security detail. He was a driver for him. My mom was working in the FBI office in Los Angeles. And because of both of their jobs, there were sometimes random perks that they got. And they got tickets to go see Wayne Newton, I think it was, in Las Vegas. And they got escorted down to the front row of a dinner show. And everybody was wondering who this cute young couple is and why are they so important? And I love hearing my parents tell that story. I think my dad also got tickets to see Elvis in Vegas. My Aunt Rhonda used them. And I remember when I was cleaning out her apartment after she died, I found her program from that night in Vegas at the Elvis concert. Now, my parents eventually moved up to Provo, Utah, where they were attending Brigham Young University. And I am the only member of my family born in Utah. Parents both born and raised in California, all four of my younger siblings born and raised in California. But I was born in Utah because my parents were going to BYU. And so the road from California to Utah played another role in my life. As my mom's mom, my Nana, who was a widow and a little timid of a woman, was stuffed in the car by her older sister, my Aunt Betty. They stopped in Vegas on the way up to Utah to buy a teddy bear for my Nana's first granddaughter, as they came up to see me shortly after I was born. And again, that story has been told to me my whole life. I think I still have that teddy bear. My Aunt Rhonda and my Uncle Brad, who are my dad's younger siblings. I think my Uncle Brad was like 16 at the time, hopped in my Aunt Rhonda's little MG convertible. And for Thanksgiving weekend, the month I was born, they drove from Los Angeles up to Utah to see their first and newest nibbling. And my Aunt Rhonda's MG broke down in Nevada on the way. Actually, they may have made it across the Utah border, but either way, my dad had to go get them and bring them up to spend the weekend while her car got fixed. Then Father's Day weekend, so the next June, my dad was in the middle of some school stuff and some work stuff. And so my mom grabbed a couple of riders off the ride board at the university and stuck me in the car, and they drove down to Los Angeles to spend Father's Day with my grandfather. And often they would go back and forth on that road with me until they finished school when I was a year and a half old. And then we packed everything up and went back to California for good. We didn't come back on that road until I was 13 on a family vacation. And I remember driving into Vegas for the first time in my memory and just being so overwhelmed by how this city just sprung up out of the middle of nowhere. Because if you've ever driven that road, it is desert four miles on both sides. And you, whether you come in from the south or whether you come in from the north, it just springs up out of nowhere. My freshman year of college, I went to school up in Idaho. And I convinced a bunch of my roommates one weekend and some of the guys that we knew that we should all pile into this car and drive the 14 hours from where we were going to school in Idaho down to my grandparents' house in Los Angeles. And so we did. And we broke down somewhere on that road. And my grandparents had to drive up from LA to pick us up and get us safely to spend our vacation with them. I went back and forth dozens of times over the next decade as I finished school in Idaho. Ultimately I went and worked in California for a little while and then went and spent some time with my parents in Oregon and then came and went to school and worked in Utah and just back and forth and back and forth through Vegas. And Vegas was always the halfway point. It was always, you know, where we went to rest or to eat a meal. Sometimes we would spend the night there. It was just an easy way along the road. And it became a very well-worn path. In 1996, that summer, I was working, and I was working with a program out of Brigham Young University, and I was traveling all over the country when I got word that my grandparents had been in a car accident. And they had been in that car accident just outside of Las Vegas. And they had both been taken to the hospital. And my grandfather had been released fairly quickly, but my grandmother was in the hospital for a while. And again, if you go back to that Valentine's Day episode, you can hear their love story. One of the things they prided themselves on is that after my grandfather got home from World War II, they never spent a night apart. Like he said, he had had enough of that after he came home from the war. But while she was in the hospital, um, he ended up having to spend a few nights away from her. And it's interesting to me that that was the thing that bothered him. But by that time, we had family in Vegas. My grandmother had a nephew and his children and grandchildren that lived there. And her brother, Don, lived in Vegas. And so they took care of my grandfather. They gave him a place to stay. They shuttled him back and forth to the hospital when my grandmother was there. When my grandmother was finally released, they helped my grandparents get home to LA. And I just remember the anxious phone calls and the emails back and forth with my family during that period of time, just wishing I was at a place where I could drive that road down to Vegas to visit them. But because of my work schedule, I wasn't able to. But I was so grateful for the family there and the friends that had taken good care of them. I remember about a year or two later, 20 of my friends piled into a bunch of cars and trucks and vans, and we caravanned down to California. Some of my friends had never been to Disneyland, which was unconscionable to me, having grown up practically at Disneyland and having worked there the summer after my freshman year of college. And I just like I couldn't stand the fact that they hadn't been. And so we gathered up all of our friends who hadn't been, and some of us who had, and we caravanned down to California from Utah and we stopped in Vegas on the way. And I got to share with them some of my favorite haunts. We rode the roller coaster at the New York, New York Hotel. And uh we stopped and ate and tried not to melt because sometimes you feel like you're gonna melt when you're standing outside in Vegas. And then we went and spent the week in California. And on the way back, we stopped at State Line. State Line is actually the name of the little town. It's not even a town, is it? Uh on the border of California and Nevada. There's another roller coaster there. There's some restaurants. And we ended up staying the night there because we had just been having so much fun that we weren't going to make it the rest of the way home with some of the tired drivers. Um, and so this little tiny bottom corner of Nevada has just held so many memories for me. The last couple I can think of uh in the Thanksgiving of 2000, my twin brother and sister, they're just three years younger than I am. The three of us hopped in my little red Fortis Spire with no air conditioning, but it was Thanksgiving, so hopefully we were gonna survive through Nevada. And we drove down to my grandparents' house for Thanksgiving. And on the way, there was an accident on I-15. And because it's the desert, and because there's often nothing, you know, from Mesquite to Vegas, you've got like Bunkerville and Calliani, like a couple of little tiny towns that are sometimes far off the freeway. And then from Vegas to state line, there's nothing, then there's no exits off the freeway. And so when there's a bad accident and the freeway gets shut down, you're parked on the freeway. And we sat parked on I-15 Thanksgiving weekend on our way to grandma and grandpa's house in my little red Fort Aspire with no air conditioning and no radio for six hours. And we tried to sleep in the car. And at one point, my brother got out and ran up and down, I think, the lines of cars talking to the other drivers, because what had happened was so far ahead of us that we weren't even sure how long it was going to be or how bad the accident was. And there were some truckers who were passing information back. And um, and I just remember very vividly um what an adventure that was for the three of us. That particular trip became poignant when after Thanksgiving weekend, uh as we said goodbye to my grandparents on their front lawn and hugged them both, my grandfather just held us extra long, one at a time, and told us that he loved us. And as we drove away, my brother turned to me and he said, That's probably the last time we're gonna see him alive. And it was. He died just a couple weeks after that. Um, and so that drive home up I-15 through Vegas back to Utah was um was a little bit more somber because we'd had that particular realization. Um that was in 2000. By 2004, my first nephew would come along. And when he turned five, uh, I gave them the choice of whether they wanted to drive or fly to Disneyland, and he wanted to drive. And we took my little BMW Z4 convertible and put the top down. And um, in in echoes of Aunt Rhonda and her MG, we drove the roads down to California and did not break down, thankfully. Um, but that was a core memory. There were genealogy conferences in Las Vegas, in Southern California that required back and forth driving. There were more trips to Disneyland. And then over the course of the next, you know, that 18-year span of time from 2000 to 2018, I went back and forth often because now my grandmother was alone and she lived alone. And my Aunt Rhonda bore the brunt of a lot of her care. And so I tried to get down there every other month or every two months to spend some time with her and to relieve my aunt and to, you know, just strengthen those bonds, hear her stories, do whatever I could. And often driving was just easier. A 10-hour drive after work got me there in the early, early morning hours. And, you know, a late night drive again on the way back on Sunday night got me home in time for work on Monday. Um, and it became a well-worn path. There is one other memorable trip. I had had a genealogy conference to go to in Europe. And just as I was packing, I realized that my passport was about to expire. And you can't travel on a passport if it has more uh less than six months left on it. And so I had to get my passport renewed in kind of an emergent situation because my flight was in just a few days. And so I contacted the passport office and they said, well, if you can get to one of the passport offices, we can we can take care of that for you. It'll take a full day, but we can take care of it in a single day. Well, the passport offices nearest to us, one in San Francisco, which is a 13-hour drive across the top of Nevada, one down in Los Angeles. Um, and so I chose to go to Los Angeles and drove all night and spent all day at the passport office, got my passport at four o'clock and headed back home to catch my flight out of Salt Lake City over to Paris. And I made it. But again, just this idea that this well-worn path uh between my house and my grandma's house always passed through that little corner of Nevada. Well, during the 2000s, the the early uh, well, the first two decades essentially of the 2000s, as I was going back and forth, uh, particularly with my grandmother and um like to see her and spend time with her, um, she is she got old enough that she wasn't traveling. Well, her brother, Don, lived in Las Vegas. And so one of the things she asked me to do is she would ask me to check in on him. And so I did. And he lived alone. Uh there's a whole story, we'll get there. He lived alone and he felt a little bit estranged from a lot of his family. And so the fact that I would make this effort um was so appreciated by him. There was other family around, and people would check on in on him occasionally, but I would bring messages from his big sister, and he just always was so grateful for that. And I got to know him, which was so important to me to be able to develop that relationship. My earliest memories of my Uncle Don were family reunions when I was probably eight, nine, ten years old. We would go every summer. Um, there would be a family reunion for my grandma's mom's side of the family, and then a family reunion for my grandma's dad's side of the family. And sometimes Uncle Don would show up. And he was always a little bit of a mysterious character. Like he didn't come to Thanksgiving dinner with everybody else. He didn't show up at Christmas time while we were there during the holidays. He'd like, but he would sometimes just show up at the family reunion. And so I didn't know a lot about him, but I always felt comfortable around him because he reminded me so much of my grandma. Now, my grandma is the oldest of five children. She was born in 1922. Her next sibling was born 13 months later. And then Don came along like five years after that. And then they had another child like five years later, and then another child, like a lot later, because my grandma's youngest brother was born when she was 16. Um, but Uncle Don was the oldest of the three boys, and he just looked just like my grandma. A giant shock of red hair and freckles and a big grin and a kind of pudgy nose, just like I have. Um, and and that just made me feel comfortable around him because he looked so much like here, like her. I knew he was family. But it wasn't until I started making these visits to him in Vegas that I really got to know him outside of some of the family lore that I had heard surrounding the mysterious Uncle Don until then. Here's the deal with Uncle Don. He joined, I think it was the Merchant Marines. Uh, he ended up serving in the Korean War in the 1950s. And when he came home from the war, my grandmother told him she was married and had children. By then, she told him she would make him whatever he wanted for his first Sunday home. Now, my my grandma and her siblings grew up in East Los Angeles in a very Hispanic neighborhood. And so they grew up eating a lot of Mexican food. And that's what he asked for. He asked her to fix tacos and chicken enchiladas and chili rellano, and so she did. And then the next week he called her and he said, Hey, some of my buddies are coming home from the war this week. Could we do that again? And so she did it again, made a whole feast, a whole fiesta, if you will, a spread of Mexican food. And, you know, he invited his buddies over and and she fed them. The third time he called uh to ask if she would do it again, she said, no, I will make tacos and that's it. And you will all show up and help cook. And thus was born a family tradition. So my grandma used to make tacos for her family. They would eat Mexican food on Sundays. That was just kind of the family tradition. And so when my dad and his brother started having their own families, they decided to carry on that tradition. Cowan Taco Sunday. And everybody's invited because it's a meal that you can kind of stretch and everybody can pitch in and help. And the unique thing in our family is that uh we pan-fry the tortillas. Um, my dad, my grandma would do it, my dad does it. Um, we still make my dad do it when he comes to visit. But now that tradition has carried on into the next generation. And now the next generation is starting their own households, and I'm curious to know if they'll carry on that tradition for themselves. Maybe not every Sunday, but maybe a little reminiscent of Cowan Taco Sunday when my grandma would fix tacos for her family because Uncle Don asked for them when he came home from World War II. So when I talk about family lore around Uncle Don, that's one of the stories that gets told. And one of the stories that was told my whole life before I really had a relationship with him. One of the other stories that got told about him was about some of his less than savory behavior. Uncle Don later would describe himself as a bit of a scoundrel. Um he had a gambling problem. I think at one point he probably had a drinking problem. Um, he got married. Um, I pulled I pulled it up in my tree so that I could make sure I got the dates right. Because when I look at his um, when I look at his page in my tree on ancestry, he married a woman uh when he was 23 years old, a woman named Madeline. I don't know anybody in the family that knows her or remembered her. Um my dad was only three at the time, and so he doesn't really have any memories of her. My dad's first memories of Uncle Don actually are from when he was five years old, because that year that Uncle Don was 26, he married a 16-year-old named Charlotte in my grandparents' living room. My dad was five years old and he remembers the wedding. And that was another story that got told about how Uncle Don brought home this girlfriend and married her in my grandparents' living room. Uncle Don and Charlotte went on to have four children, two girls and two boys. And for a few years, uh, they kind of worked through some things. Charlotte was young. Don had some issues. Uh, at one point, I think Don was in and out of prison. And eventually Charlotte had had enough and she took the kids and she left him. And so again, the lore that got spread through the family was that Don had lost his family and that Charlotte wasn't gonna allow the kids to see him. She remarried shortly after that. All the children took their stepfather's name. I don't know if he ever formally adopted them or not. Um, but I know the stories told that my great-grandmother was so sad that she didn't get to have as close of a relationship with those grandchildren. And my dad talks about how much he wishes he could have had a relationship with those first cousins of his that were, you know, that they could have been closer. He was so close to so many of the other cousins in the family. But those four, because of the choices that their dad made, weren't really a part of the family growing up. And so Uncle Don, by the 1980s, would show up at these family reunions every once in a while, kind of mysteriously breeze in and breeze out. And yet we didn't know any of his children or their children. And so that was always this little mystery in our family about who they were. And one day, one of them showed up at my grandmother's house. She's their aunt, showed up at my grandmother's house because she lived not far away and and started to heal or reconnect some of those family relationships, and that was a beautiful thing. And so we were able to kind of reconnect a little bit with that branch of the family. Um, I had the opportunity to um be in close proximity when I was living uh in a town here in Utah to another one of Uncle Don's sons, and I reached out to him and I was shut down. And when I went to my dad, I said, like, what's going on with this cousin? And he said, you know, we invited him to a family reunion once uh back in the 80s, and he sent us a formal letter telling us that he wanted nothing to do with us, that he was no longer a Mulliner, um, and that we weren't to contact him again. And I said, Oops, I didn't know that was a thing, right? Um, and I had tried to reach out and didn't know the full backstory. And that was probably in my own family, one of the first really serious encounters with the concept that families are messy and all families are messy, and families have always been messy. And just the nature of the fracturing of those relationships and the feelings that went along with it, um, it was hard. It was hard to watch my dad kind of grieve this relationship he didn't have with his cousins and to watch my grandma grieve this relationship she didn't have with her nieces and nephews. And then as I finally got to know Uncle Don, because I was stopping at his house every time I drove through Vegas, I watched him grieve the choices that he had made in his life that had led to some of these circumstances. And he was always really quiet about it, and sometimes he'd tear up. But he talked about his kids and his grandkids. And one of his sons, I think, did establish a relationship with him, and so I think that's how he got photos of the kids and grandkids. And he had them proudly displayed in his house right next to a picture of his parents, and I would ask about them, and he would tell me what little he knew, what little had been shared with him. And it just broke my heart that here sat this lonely old man, broken and still struggling with a gambling addiction, um, living in Vegas, far away from uh most of his family. And I'm certainly not the only family member that would visit him, but I think he felt that isolation. We have family that lives in southern Utah, and they would see him when they would drive through. And there is one of his nephews, one of my dad's cousins, that lives in Vegas, the ones that took care of my grandparents after the car accident, and they would try to check in on him and visit. But people's lives are busy. And I think sometimes as people get older, like they it's easy for them to be forgotten. It's easy for people not to make time for them. And so no matter how inconvenient it was, as long as it wasn't the middle of the night when I was driving through Vegas, I would stop and see Uncle Don. Well, um, that's how I found myself sitting in a Marie Calendar's off the Las Vegas strip, asking him about getting shot in a casino. I had been doing some research on newspapers.com, and my grandmother's maiden name is fairly uncommon. Common. It's Mulliner, M-U-L-L-I-N-E-R. And so it's one of the names that I use when I'm kind of just doing preliminary research just to see. And so I had done a search in newspapers and searched for this last name, and I've been looking through some things, and up popped this newspaper article. And Uncle Don was mentioned. The headline reads: Shooting victims identified, admitted for treatment to the hospital were. And then it lists Donald Benjamin Mulliner, shoulder, and back. And so I turned to Uncle Don. Sitting in the booth at the Marie Calendars were my dad, uh, one of my brothers, my sister, and my two oldest nephews, who were just little at the time. I think they were probably three and five, maybe. Um, and we had all been on a family vacation down in southern Utah and St. George, and we'd hopped in the car and driven a couple of hours to Vegas to visit Uncle Don and take him out to lunch. And I said, I need you to tell me the story about the time you were shot in the casino. And like I said, he chuckled a little bit, kind of nervously. He blushed to the roots of his red hair, and then he teared up and he just said, I wasn't a very good man. He said he had been gambling um all day and all night, and there was a guy at the table with him, and at about two o'clock in the morning, he'd left the table and left the casino. And about two hours later, Uncle Don was still there at 4 a.m., still gambling. And this man had come back, and Uncle Don had been injured in that. And he said, You'd think I would have learned from that experience. And then he just kind of cried. And he said, You'd think I would have learned from a lot of experiences, but I didn't. And I hugged him and told him that I loved him and thanked him for sharing that story. And it was interesting talking to my dad about it on the way back up to our hotel in Vegas or in St. George. Um, just about how sometimes some people just become so identified in their own minds by their addictions or by the choices that they've made that they can never really see a way out of that. And he never could. But the one thing that I loved about Uncle Don was how much love was in his voice and that came pouring out of him when he would talk about his family. He would tell me stories about his parents, my great-grandparents, and stories about my grandma and her sister when they were little, and stories about his younger brothers, one of whom I never knew because he died when my dad was a kid. And I just loved that he wanted to be better than he was. So when he died in 2013, um, one of the cousins, uh, I don't remember if it was one of the St. George cousins or one of the Las Vegas cousins, called me to let me know. He was going to be buried in a military cemetery, and they were gonna apply to the VA to get a headstone. But his uh third or fourth wife, I don't remember what she was, she had already died. Um, we didn't know anybody who was gonna write an obituary or anybody who would need an obituary, and so nobody wrote an obituary, and that really bothered me. And so I wrote one and I wrote it on my blog at the time, and I was thinking about the fact that I was headed to Vegas for another work trip and he wasn't gonna be there. And so this is what I wrote about my Uncle Don. Tomorrow I drive to Las Vegas where I will give a presentation on Ancestry.com Products and Services to the Jewish Genealogical Society of Southern Nevada. Tomorrow, for the first time in 22 years of trips to and through Vegas, a trip I take several times a year, my Uncle Don won't be there. Donald Benjamin Mulliner was born the 10th of March 1929 in San Bernardino, California. He was the third child and oldest son of Victor June and Mary Heaps Mulliner. Raised in Los Angeles during the Depression and through the years of World War II, Don was constantly surrounded by family. Both of his parents came from large, close-knit families. His Mulliner grandparents had 33 grandchildren. His Heaps grandparents had 35 grandchildren. That's a lot of first cousins. When he became an adult, Don joined the military and served his country during the Korean War. Shortly after returning, he married, and within six years, four children were born to the couple. The final daughter born after his wife's 21st birthday. Don and his young wife struggled a lot during those years and made a series of bad choices that led to the breakup of their marriage. When his ex-wife remarried, his children took their stepfather's last name, and from then on, Don had virtually no contact with them. This was always one of the biggest regrets of his life. Later in life, some of his children did reconcile with him and would send pictures of their families. These photos were displayed in a prominent place in his home. He would often talk of his children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, the ones he never had a chance to meet. He would talk about what a scoundrel he had been and tearfully explained how he believed God was allowing him to live long enough to repent. Later in life, Don developed a relationship with his beloved Betty and loved her two children as his own, children who called him dad and were a great comfort to him. Betty passed in 2001. Her daughter, who was Don's caretaker for many years, passed away last year. Donald Benjamin Mulliner died this morning, the 15th of March, 2013, at the VA Hospital in Las Vegas. Today, I've spent a lot of time thinking about my Uncle Don. I'm sad I won't be able to visit him this weekend. I was so looking forward to seeing his big smile and his familiar shock of fading ginger hair. I was looking forward to talking with him more about his mother, a great grandmother I never knew. I was looking forward to sharing with him the love that so many of his family members have for him simply because he is a part of us. I never knew the Uncle Don that drank and gambled and made poor life choices. I only knew the Uncle Don who looked so much like his older sister, my grandmother, that I felt comfortable in his presence from my earliest memories because he was so clearly family. I only knew the Uncle Don that loved being around his family, laughed at my silly jokes, and teared up when we spoke of his parents or his children. I only knew the Uncle Don that blushed to the roots of his red hair when I would tease him, or when the genealogist in me tried to ask questions about his checkered past. That's the Uncle Don I knew, and that's the Uncle Don I will think of and miss every time I drive to or through Las Vegas. It's not a deep earths Nevada story, but it's my Nevada story. And I still find myself driving to and through Vegas. And as I pass the exit where I would get off to go to Don's house, I think of him. I haven't yet been out to his grave site in the valley there, but we did finally get the VA tombstone placed. And I did finally reconnect with one of his sons. And that son told me that he and his dad had reconnected. And I'm excited to meet Scott. We haven't met yet in person, but we're Facebook friends now, and I'm Facebook friends with two of Don's grandchildren. And I don't know what stories they've been raised with, but I hope that I get to share a little bit of my perspective about who Don was and what his heart was because of all that time I got to spend with him in that little corner of the bottom of Nevada. Studio sponsored by Ancestry.

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Crista Cowan | The Barefoot Genealogist

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