Barbara Greenspun has died

Barbara Greenspun with her beloved, Hank

(Photo courtesy of the Las Vegas Sun)

She was instrumental figure in the post-war history of Las Vegas.  The wife of the Las Vegas publisher, Hank Greenspun, Barbara Greenspun held her own and helped shape the Las Vegas of today.  She was born in London and grew up in Ireland.  She met Hank at a wedding in 1944 and married him shortly after that.  They came to Las Vegas in 1946.

They started the Las Vegas Sun, built Green Valley, the first master-planned community in Southern Nevada, and when Hank died, Barbara took over as publisher of the paper.

She was known as an elegant lady, opinionated and, most of all, dedicated to causes that were dear to her heart.

She will truly be missed.

From our pal, Johnny Katz, at the Las Vegas Sun:

Even if you didn’t know who she was, exactly, you knew she was someone. There was an air about Barbara Greenspun that made it clear she was a person of high caliber.

You could feel it. She was prim and dignified, even regal. If there could be true royalty in Las Vegas, she was that, elegant and smart and stylish. She seemed from another time and place, when people of her stature would not be seen in public at less than their very best.

I was made aware of this quality when I first started at the Sun in 1998, in what some of us call the “old building” on Valley View Boulevard (though it was not the oldest building in Sun history, by a long shot). One morning I happened upon Barbara Greenspun at the staff coffee machine, of all places.

I introduced myself, telling her I was new to the company, glad to be part of the team, that sort of thing.

She nodded, and noted that she understood I’d come over from the R-J. This is true, I said.

“We won’t hold it against you,” she said, with a hint of a grin.

I remember laughing at that, too loudly to be genuine. It was a forced guffaw from a new employee to a joke made by the founding family’s matriarch. And then I thought that every time Barbara Greenspun would see me in the office, she’d remember two things about me: That I’d worked for the competition, and that I could be counted on to laugh too loudly at her witticisms. I thought, half-joking, that the company handbook should include a protocol entry of how to act when you meet Barbara Greenspun.

A couple of years later, I was promoted to the editor of the Accent section, a huge honor, and headed up the Sun’s A&E and lifestyle coverage. In that role I worked with two of my favorite people for several years: Former Sun food editor Muriel Stevens, and the late Ruthe Deskin, who wrote a weekly column called Back and Forth for Accent almost until the day she died.

Mid-Mod Wowzem at Nevada State Museum, Las Vegas

From Dennis McBride at the Nevada State Museum, Las Vegas:

The April 24 opening reception for the Mid-Modern Las Vegas exhibit at the Nevada State Museum was a hit, drawing more than 130 people. The exhibit had been eagerly anticipated by Las Vegas’s community of Mid-Modders, as well as architects, historic preservationists, and realtors. The museum’s docents served a buffet from Mid-Century Modern dishware and several of them dressed the part. Many of those who attended the reception also dressed from the 1950s and ‘60s. Among the notable guests were realtor “Uncle Jack” LeVine; artist and Mid-Mod collector Diane Bush; Atomic Age Alliance founders Mary-Margaret and Carey Stratton, whose restored home in Paradise Palms was featured in the exhibit; Las Vegas Night Beat publisher Bill Schafer; realtor “Downtown Steve;” and curators from the Las Vegas Springs Preserve and the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

In addition, Bill Mitchell, his wife, Barbara, and son Scott flew in for the reception from Florida and New Jersey: Bill is the son of Jay Florian Mitchell, whose historic photographs of Mid-Century Las Vegas compose most of the exhibit. Steve Cochran, grandson of Mid-Century Las Vegas designer and builder Lee Cochran, attended with his family. Lee Cochran’s 1964 Mason Manor home development is featured in the exhibit; homeowners from Mason Manor were also on hand to meet the Cochran family and talk about the history of their homes.

Scott, Barbara and Bill Mitchell

Ray and Steve Cochran

Mid-Century Modern Las Vegas is the last big exhibit the Nevada State Museum, Las Vegas will present before its 2011 move into a new building at the Las Vegas Springs Preserve.

Nevada State Museum, Las Vegas Director David Millman and Mid-Century Modern buff

Diane Bush studies the Pyrex

Studying more of the Exhibit

Dennis McBride and Tom Dyer

"Uncle" Jack Levine with some of his favorite buildings

Mid-Century Modern Las Vegas at the Nevada State Museum: How the Exhibit Works

Dateline:  Las Vegas

Guest Blogger:  Dennis McBride, Curator of History, Nevada State Museum, Las Vegas

 

When Lynn asked me to guest blog about the Nevada State Museum’s upcoming Mid-Century Modern Las Vegas exhibit, she wanted me to share how I chose the images that will be exhibited, and how I decided what examples of Mid-Century domestic and decorative arts to use in the cases.

Museum patrons who see finished exhibits don’t know what goes into building displays--they either like what they see or they don’t, and that depends upon how well or how badly the curator has put everything together. I work with a great deal of intuition, but once in awhile--accidentally, it seems--I work deliberately. Lemme see what I can tell you about our new exhibit.

To be frank, I didn’t know very much about Mid-Century Modern architecture and style until the Lynn and the museum sponsored the Mid-Century event last October 3. I got hooked, and wanted to do something with material that no one had seen before, or had not seen in more than a generation. The museum has in its archives the photograph collection of J. Florian Mitchell, who was renowned as a photographer in New York in the 1920s, ‘30s, and ‘40s, before coming to Las Vegas in the early 1950s.

When I came to work here in 2007, part of my self-appointed task was to reorganize the photo collection and make it more accessible. When I dug through Mitchell’s thousands of prints and negatives in the museum’s vault, I was astounded at the breadth of his Las Vegas subjects, which included images photographers ordinarily wouldn’t care much about recording. In addition to hotels, casinos, and Las Vegas celebrities, I found images of long vanished shopping centers, banks, motels, restaurants, schools, and government buildings. Nearly all of these were taken in the 1950s and ‘60s, during the height of the Mid-Century Modern movement. I saw images that gave me an entirely different idea of what Las Vegas once looked like, and how perfectly it fit into the Mid-Mod style for a relatively brief period of time. How could I publicize these photos in a way that would inspire Las Vegans to look at their city’s past in a different way? Motivated by Lynn’s enthusiasm, I started planning a Mid-Century Modern exhibit of Las Vegas’s past.

With so many images to choose from, how would I pick what best represented Las Vegas architecture in the 1950s and ‘60s? Lynn made an initial search through the collection, and I made a second and third, mining the negatives for what I thought people might like to see. Rather than choose images of familiar landmarks, I largely chose photos of buildings that are either vanished or so changed that their present appearance bears no resemblance to the original. For example, the original McCarran International Airport today seems mysterious, alien, and beautiful in its Mid-Modern simplicity. The original rotunda of the Las Vegas Convention Center seems far more substantial than the present stack of boring blocks. Maude Frazier Hall at UNLV sits behind its lawn looking cool, elegant, and more inviting than the gravel lot that replaced it last year. With these and other images, I’ve tried to show that Las Vegas then was far more architecturally daring and beautiful than it is today.

So far, so good for the images--but I also wanted the exhibit to ground patrons in that period in a way that two-dimensional images cannot. I needed artifacts that people could relate to personally. I decided to include an exhibit of Mid-Century “domestic and decorative arts.” Think dishes, pots and pans, utensils, ashtrays, vases, cook books and recipe boxes. How would such objects convey a sense of Mid-Century modernity? Through their shape, their material, and their use. When people think of the 1950s and ‘60s from this perspective, they think of Pyrex, Tupperware, and Melmac; they think biomorphic, boomerangs, parabolas, rounded squares, domes; they think pink, turquoise, and chartreuse. We took those shapes and colors as the frame for the exhibit hall, and then I went on a six-month search through Goodwill, Salvation Army, Savers, and whatever yard sales I drove by for exhibit items. I built a case of colorful melamine dishware; fanciful Pyrex casseroles, carafes, butter dishes and nested bowls; bright orange Tupperware measuring spoons; a set of Russel Wright’s American Modern dishes in chartreuse, with their strange biomorphic shapes; a vintage Teflon-coated sauce pan with a sweeping lid; a garish green-and-gold leaf dish from a California pottery; and a black, understated Hyalyn pottery bowl.

These are artifacts to which people can relate: Grandma cooked green-bean casseroles in a Pyrex bowl just like that Moon Deco piece with the big red dot; Mom kept a pair of Scandinavian Modern candlesticks just like those on the sideboard in her dining room; my uncle, who smoked Chesterfields, kept an ashtray like that on his nightstand; we thought nothing of eating chicken rolled in bleached white flour and fried in Crisco.

That’s how we did it, and we hope you like it. Mid-Century Modern Las Vegas will be the last major exhibit the Nevada State Museum presents before its move in 2011 to new digs at the Las Vegas Springs Preserve.

Mid-Century Modern Exhibit at the Nevada State Museum, Las Vegas

This is going to be a wonderful event.  Dennis McBride, Tom Dyer, Wes, Paul and the crew at the State Museum have been working on this exhibit for months.  Some of the decorative arts on display are from Dennis' own fabulous Mid-Century Modern collection.

The photos, of course, are from the wonderful J. Florian Mitchell collection that we have talked about here and that were part of the inspiration for our wonderful Mid-Century Modern day last fall.

I am hoping that Dennis can do a blog piece about choosing the photos and items for the exhibit so stay tuned.

In the meantime, be sure to RSVP to Stacy Irvin as you don't want to miss this wonderful homage to Mid-Century Modern Las Vegas!