MARK WAITE / PVT The windmill and some old farm equipment still stands on the old Mankins Ranch on Manse Road and Vicki Ann Road, where they homesteaded 120 acres in 1955. It was sold off years ago. Advertisement

Youths in Pahrump complain today there isn't enough to do in town.

They would have been amazed to hear an account of growing up in Pahrump during the 1950s by Roy Mankins Saturday, the first in a monthly series of lectures scheduled at the Pahrump Valley Museum.

To hear his account, it was a hearty but carefree time straight out of the Old West, riding on horseback, jumping in cottonseed piles, swimming in canals and ponds.

Mankins recalled how his father, Leslie "Bill" Mankins, and his friend built a septic tank using bricks at their ranch on Vicki Ann Road and Manse Road. Before that they used an outhouse on the 120-acre family homestead they settled in 1955.

"As kids, if you can imagine, when there was nothing to do in Pahrump, nothing," Mankins told an audience at the museum, "we used to play in the cottonseed pile at the gin. They were huge, 85-, 90-feet tall. You could climb up to the cottonseed pile, do a swan dive off of it, and it was like landing in pillows."

Roy's parents, Leslie and Pat Mankins, took over the former Union 76 service station and cafe on the corner of highways 160 and 372 from Leroy and Mary Vaughn in 1961, which Mankins said enabled his dad to quit his full-time job at the Nevada Test Site.

Fortunately, the Nevada Ginning Co., located across the street where the Pahrump Nugget Casino is now, had a large generator they could use to run the gas pumps, he said.

When electricity came to the valley in 1964 or 1965 -- Roy Mankins said he's not that good remembering years -- it helped them fix probably 30 truck tires a day from traveling on the rough roads.

"I did Pahrump's first newspaper route. I was delivering on a horse," Mankins said. It was about six and a half to seven miles per day, using saddle bags, he said.

"There were probably six boys in Pahrump my age," Mankins recalled. They included the Bowmans at the south end and the Harrises at the north end.

"We were little kids, 8 years old. So we rode our horses to go up there in a half-hour's time. We had no telephones so we really couldn't communicate what we were going to do. If we were smart enough to make a plan a day before, we were OK," he said.

In the summertime, Mankins said he helped the Bowmans gather cows on their grazing allotment in the Spring Mountains.

"It was really a great way to grow up. We didn't have a lot of stuff called modern conveniences but so what? You're 11 years old, you've got a great Thoroughbred, nice tack, rifle in the scabbard, a breakfast kit in the back, saddlebags, take off and go three or four days, just running around. There wasn't a problem, parents didn't worry about us because we were the only people there."

When telephones came to Pahrump, initially they were party lines, where a user had to wait for their turn.

Like many farm families, Mankins learned to drive at an early age.

"When we were 10 years old we all had our own pickups. The cop was Larry Bolling. That was Bobby's dad. He didn't give us a hard time, he told us we had to stay off the blacktop. So we were able to drive all the back roads back and forth to the ranches. At 14 years old you got your farm license so you could drive anything," Mankins said.

He remembered when race car driver Parnelli Jones and actor Steve McQueen got stuck racing on the dry lake bed at the south end of the Pahrump Valley.

Mankins also remembered a colorful character named Doby Doc, who drove a Rolls Royce but wore bib overalls, toted two Colt 45s and carried thousands of dollars in bills wrapped in a roll with rubber bands.

"He'd come into Pahrump and at that point gas was 21 cents a gallon, something like that. I'm working the station, he'd come in and say 'Fill 'er up.' So what you'd do, you'd put $2.20 worth of gas in the car and he'd hand me a $100 bill. We had no change," Mankins said. "We'd save all week so we could give him his change."

Once Doby Doc asked Larry Bolling to store a big box for him. When curiosity got the best of them, they opened it and found it was stuffed with $100 bills.

Not a bill was missing when he recovered it.

When Leonard Cohen and other executives of Preferred Equitites Corp. started aggressively marketing Pahrump in the 1970s for the Calvada project after they bought the 10,000-acre Pahrump Ranch, Mankins said they attempted to rename Pahrump as Palm Springs, since Pahrump didn't sound too good on their sales brochures. They met resistance at a town board meeting from locals dressed in Levis and work shirts, he recalled.

Mankins said the local attitude was, "Well, you may own everything but you don't have the votes."

"It really soured the relationship between Pahrump and Calvada," Mankins said. "They did bring us into the growth but there were hundreds of miles of roads we had to pave they didn't pave. They didn't set up the mechanisms to do the golf courses and recreation facilitiles in order, they saddled us with billions of dollars in debt, took their money and left."

While he applauded having some regulation today, Mankins said it's coming at a higher price than people can afford.

Attitudes were different in the old days, Mankins said. He recalled their favorite swimming hole, where Mountain Falls is now located, where they dug up buckets full of arrowheads. They swam with the Pahrump pupfish. One day, he recalled a group from the University of Nevada, Reno, came by on a field trip and suggested they might be an endangered species. Mankins said tongue in cheek, that night, a barrel of malethion mysteriously fell in the pond and the pup fish disappeared. But he said the fish were prolific enough they appeared elsewhere.

"We were a real strong, farming community and if they would've shut off that spring, that would've pretty much shut off, taken care of that south end of the valley," Mankins said.

He recalled a pond fed by an artesian well near Mesquite Avenue and Highway 160.

"That was a great ditch though, we used to love it when we were kids. We'd hop in it, there was a bunch of algae growing on it and you'd just slide right in," Mankins said to some laughter.

Mankins' father bladed Homestead Road himself down to Gamebird Road, then went over to Vicki Ann Road and bladed it. He recalled when one storm parked over Pahrump for days in late fall, roads filled up with three and a half feet of water. Nobody heard from the Harris family for a week, so he drove up there in his International Harvester tractor with water up to the transmission case.

"You live in the desert, you're either tough or you get out, quite frankly," Mankins said.