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The other day I was working at the Odeon when I overheard a lady ask her husband if the mount on the wall was a jackalope. Now, this is an old European mount, just the skull and antlers of a deer. Naturally, my ears perked up and I started listening
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From the Odeon Archives I had planned for this story to have a different opening and to share it at a different time. But seeing as there was a bit of an incident at The Odeon, I suppose this is the best time for the retelling of this tale. We
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I had some time to kill this morning while waiting for my Ford, “Burt,” to be serviced by the capable team at Campagni Ford in Carson City. So I stood outside and surveyed the rolling foothills that surround our state capital. As a 38-year impressionist of Mark Twain I have
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D-Day. Normandy, France. Omaha Beach. Third wave. Running out of the landing craft into an ocean where bloated bodies from earlier waves were floating. Getting onto the beach, then heading up the steep hill toward concrete bunkers filled with German snipers. Halfway up the hill, a bullet passed through Robert
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I know I shouldn’t write about things I know nothing about, but this has never been a deterrent to me in the past, so I’m hankering to write about Vivaldi, yes, that Vivaldi. So, recently inspired by Donna Axton’s Holiday Concert with the North Tahoe Community Choir,
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We’re having a very warm, dry winter so far. That’s Nevada for you, extreme, unpredictable, and never quite the same year to year. Just a couple winters ago, many of us were snowed into our homes for days, some without power or heat. In my home, we are
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At eleven years old, my father, Mark King, moved to a farm in Wisconsin near a tribal nation. There he befriended an Indian boy his age, and the two forged a bond grounded in the purest form of childhood friendship: shooting things. Their favorite pastime was target practice with arrows
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Flirting with death releases pheromones that make you feel more alive than before. Or as Winston Churchill put it, “Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.” I’ve only had that feeling once in my life, but it proved true to form… I got
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There is an incredibly important holiday on the calendar this week that we should never have forgotten but largely have. Maybe because of complacency, or just the way humans tend to forget why we have the freedoms we do and allow past mistakes to repeat themselves. On this day in
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The Odd Fellows who built our Odeon (1863) Before Dayton had much of anything official, it had neighbors who showed up. In 1863, the Odd Fellows—Dayton Lodge No. 5—put their money, muscle, and ideals into a brick hall on Pike Street. They called it the Odeon. Upstairs was
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Sometimes history gives you a lesson without ever preaching a word. All it takes is two entries in the same man’s journal, 11 years apart. In November of 1885, Alf Doten is getting ready for Thanksgiving in Reno. He notes the weather, of course, because he always does. Then
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Roaring Camp was not the sort of place where good news happened. In 1850, if a gunfight broke out, nobody paused their card game long enough to notice—French Pete and Kanaka Joe once shot each other clean through right in front of Tuttle’s grocery, and someone simply leaned