As Reno continues to be changed by development and growth, we bet there are at least a few people on your gift list who could use a dose of back-in-the-day local flavor. Lucky for you—an author, two artists and a former city of Reno employee with an eye for midcentury charm have just what you need this holiday season.
Remember to get your holiday orders in ASAP, as these creators are not megaretailers with giant distribution centers or two-minute shipping.
Motel life
A self-published book of midcentury memories
Jackie Schalberg remembers what Reno looked like before the freeway was built. She remembers when Plumb Lane was a dirt road.
She grew up in Yerington, and in 1970, she moved to Reno—“before casino towers,” she noted.
From 2008-2018, she worked for the city of Reno as a senior engineering tech. Around 2010, she recalled, the city was ordering dilapidated mid-century motels to be demolished.
“One of my duties was to do demolition permits for the engineering site, abandoning utilities and whatnot,” Schalberg said. She’d never thought much about the motel’s iconic signs until she started issuing the permits.
“I would go out, and I’d have to do a site visit, and I’d look at this sign and go, ‘My God, this is going to go away,’” she said. “And I thought that these signs were so cool. … So I just started taking pictures.”
She started carrying her camera in her vehicle and shooting every motel sign she could find. “I just did it, because I just love the whole idea,” said Schalberg, noting that she’s not a professional photographer. “I’d just snap a shot.”
She kept snapping for years, and in 2023, she compiled photos of signs from 92 motels into a self-published, 120-page paperback coffee-table book. It’s an appealing archive of neon tubes, starbursts and custom shapes—intact or broken—from motels long-gone or still in business. It’s a loving portrait of a city on its way from one era into another.
“It has to evolve,” she said. “I really hate losing the history out there. But you, you know, you’ve just got to move on.
You can order a copy of Reno Vintage Motel Signs—A Pictorial Tribute ($29.99) by emailing Jackie Schalberg at jackie@renovintagemotelsigns.com.
Campus compendium
A new book on UNR’s 150-year history
John Trent is senior editor at the Office of Marketing and Communication at the University of Nevada, Reno. That’s one reason he was selected to write a history of UNR upon the university’s sesquicentennial. The other reason is that Trent is a former Reno Gazette-Journal sports reporter, so administrators knew he’d be able to laugh in the face of tight deadlines.
With the help of archivist Laura Rocke, Trent spent two years—that’s lightning-fast for a 240-page research project—poring through photos and various other materials, consulting UNR’s 50-year history book from 1924 and centennial history book from 1974.
“We’d always known that Stella Mason Parson was the first female African American graduate of our university from 1952,” Trent said. “It was never quite apparent—or at least nobody had really pursued—who was the first male African American graduate.” He put the question to UNR’s librarians.
“They dug out the fact that it was a gentleman by the name of Theodore Miller who graduated in 1932 in engineering,” Trent said.
“I tried my best to try to find people who were emblems of larger themes,” he added.
Among the people is Frankie Sue Del Papa, a student government president in the early 1970s who later became Nevada’s first female secretary of state and attorney general.
Among the themes is diversity. Trent tells the story of Gov. Kenny Guinn using tobacco-settlement money in the 1990s to found the Millennium Scholarship, which allowed the university system to include students from a wider range of income brackets. Trent said the measure has been a game-changer.
“From 2000 on, essentially, not only the University of Nevada, Reno, but UNLV as well, became incredibly diverse, because suddenly education was open to everybody,” he said.
John Trent’s new book, The University of Nevada, 1874-2024: 150 Years of Inspiring Excellence ($39.95), is available online from the University of Nevada Press.
Signs of the times
A deck of motel-sign playing cards
Jenny Kane is another former Reno Gazette-Journal reporter. She grew up in Reno and moved away for college and work for about a decade. When she returned in 2015, the urban landscape looked a little different than she’d remembered. Downtown-adjacent weekly motels were being razed at a fairly steady clip.
As a journalist, circa 2015-2022, Kane had a close-up view of a fast-changing city. She reported on the demolition of the Best Bet Motel, the removal of the Burning Man sculpture park across from Circus Circus, and Jacobs Entertainment’s bid to purchase the Benham-Belz House—“The old Victorian with mustard yellow porch columns” on West Street—deemed to be likely the oldest house in Reno.
Kane took up watercolor painting in recent years, specializing in pictures of Reno motel signs rendered in muted colors. In her images, the signs are mostly removed from their buildings, isolated against plain white backgrounds that highlight their midcentury quadrilaterals, swooshes and arrows.
Eventually, she had enough paintings to make for an entire deck of playing cards. It consists of 52 separate images—tiny prints of the signs from places like the Castaway Inn, Stardust Lounge and the Merry Wink Motel—plus a joker, the sheet-metal-and-neon Topsy the Clown who’s stood guard outside of Circus Circus since it was built in 1978.
If you want to give a lavish version of this gift, it would not be a bad idea to send it with 53 tiny frames.
To purchase Jenny Kane’s deck of motel sign playing cards ($20), visit The Radical Cat bookstore, 1500 S. Virginia St., or contact her at jennykanearts@gmail.com, or on Instagram @jennykane88. Local, free delivery for orders of two or more decks is available. Cards can be shipped to out-of-town buyers; the shipping cost will be added.
Facades forever
Photos of a city’s architecture in transition
Emily Najera is a Michigan native whose mother first gave her a camera at age 13. She took to photography immediately and passionately, and soon developed a specialty—shooting architecture.
In her high school and college days, she was inspired by some of the prominent photojournalists from the 1930s (like Walker Evans and Berenice Abbott) who were documenting a rapidly changing New York. Since then, she’s made a career as both a photojournalist and an artist, documenting the changing neighborhoods of Detroit, Grand Rapids and Reno.
When the New York Times covers a Nevada story, there’s a good chance that the crisp, obsessively well-exposed photos that accompany it have her byline, and her work is shown in the region’s galleries on occasion. (Her current show, Nevada Roadsides, in on view through Jan. 30 at the Courthouse Gallery inside the Carson City Courthouse, 885 E. Musser St., in Carson City.)
Eleven of Najera’s Nevada images are available for purchase on her webstore. They include big-city and small-town neon, and Reno buildings we’ve seen change hands over the last several years, like the Sands Casino and the Nystrom Guest House. Motels, of course, feature prominently.
Prints of Emily Najera’s photographs ($50-$120), some framed and some unframed, are available on her webstore. Najera recommends ordering in the first week of December for delivery by Christmas; local drop-off is available.