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Nevada: The Well-Worn Path | Episode 83 · Stories That Live In Us

• 0:00
  Crista Cowan: Stories That Live in Us is a podcast that inspires you to form deep connections with your family, past, present, and future.
• 0:08
  Crista Cowan: I'm Crista Cowan, known online as The Barefoot Genealogist.
• 0:12
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 0:23
  Crista Cowan: Tales of immigration, migration, courage, and community that remind us that when we tell our stories, we strengthen the bonds that connect us.
• 0:32
  Crista Cowan: So join me for season two as we discover from sea to shining sea the stories that live in us.
• 0:39
  Crista Cowan: I am well aware that there are more places in the state of Nevada than Las Vegas.
• 0:47
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 1:09
  Crista Cowan: Now it's about five hours from my house to Vegas and five hours from Vegas to my grandmother's front door.
• 1:15
  Crista Cowan: And so it was a common thing for me to make that trip.
• 1:20
  Crista Cowan: But I thought about it a little bit.
• 1:23
  Crista Cowan: I've got friends, a dear friend who's a brilliant songwriter, and she's from Reno.
• 1:28
  Crista Cowan: And I could have invited her to come and tell some of her stories.
• 1:33
  Crista Cowan: My oldest nephew's boyfriend is from Elko, and his family is all there, and there could have been stories there.
• 1:40
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 1:59
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 2:09
  Crista Cowan: And first he chuckled nervously, and then he blushed to the roots of his hair, and then he teared up.
• 2:19
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 2:25
  Crista Cowan: But then he proceeded to tell me the story.
• 2:29
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 2:43
  Crista Cowan: So you're gonna get a story today about I-15 and Las Vegas and my Uncle Don.
• 2:53
  Crista Cowan: Okay, do we start with Uncle Don or do we start with I-15?
• 2:58
  Crista Cowan: I think we should start with I-15.
• 3:01
  Crista Cowan: I know it seems strange to tell a story about a freeway.
• 3:06
  Crista Cowan: But my parents were both born and raised in Los Angeles.
• 3:11
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 3:23
  Crista Cowan: If you haven't listened to that, you're gonna want to go listen to it.
• 3:25
  Crista Cowan: Their love story, the story of how they met, it's just amazing to me.
• 3:31
  Crista Cowan: Headline four-day blind date.
• 3:33
  Crista Cowan: And that four-day blind date took them from my mom's house in Long Beach, California, up to Salt Lake City and back.
• 3:41
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 3:54
  Crista Cowan: And so that became a part of our family story.
• 3:59
  Crista Cowan: After my parents got married, they lived in Los Angeles for a while.
• 4:04
  Crista Cowan: At the time, my dad was working for Howard Hughes as part of his security detail.
• 4:10
  Crista Cowan: He was a driver for him.
• 4:11
  Crista Cowan: My mom was working in the FBI office in Los Angeles.
• 4:16
  Crista Cowan: And because of both of their jobs, there were sometimes random perks that they got.
• 4:21
  Crista Cowan: And they got tickets to go see Wayne Newton, I think it was, in Las Vegas.
• 4:28
  Crista Cowan: And they got escorted down to the front row of a dinner show.
• 4:31
  Crista Cowan: And everybody was wondering who this cute young couple is and why are they so important?
• 4:37
  Crista Cowan: And I love hearing my parents tell that story.
• 4:39
  Crista Cowan: I think my dad also got tickets to see Elvis in Vegas.
• 4:43
  Crista Cowan: My Aunt Rhonda used them.
• 4:45
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 4:56
  Crista Cowan: Now, my parents eventually moved up to Provo, Utah, where they were attending Brigham Young University.
• 5:04
  Crista Cowan: And I am the only member of my family born in Utah.
• 5:07
  Crista Cowan: Parents both born and raised in California, all four of my younger siblings born and raised in California.
• 5:13
  Crista Cowan: But I was born in Utah because my parents were going to BYU.
• 5:17
  Crista Cowan: And so the road from California to Utah played another role in my life.
• 5:24
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 5:37
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 5:51
  Crista Cowan: And again, that story has been told to me my whole life.
• 5:54
  Crista Cowan: I think I still have that teddy bear.
• 5:57
  Crista Cowan: My Aunt Rhonda and my Uncle Brad, who are my dad's younger siblings.
• 6:01
  Crista Cowan: I think my Uncle Brad was like 16 at the time, hopped in my Aunt Rhonda's little MG convertible.
• 6:08
  Crista Cowan: And for Thanksgiving weekend, the month I was born, they drove from Los Angeles up to Utah to see their first and newest nibbling.
• 6:21
  Crista Cowan: And my Aunt Rhonda's MG broke down in Nevada on the way.
• 6:27
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 6:38
  Crista Cowan: Then Father's Day weekend, so the next June, my dad was in the middle of some school stuff and some work stuff.
• 6:49
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 7:05
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 7:13
  Crista Cowan: And then we packed everything up and went back to California for good.
• 7:18
  Crista Cowan: We didn't come back on that road until I was 13 on a family vacation.
• 7:23
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 7:34
  Crista Cowan: Because if you've ever driven that road, it is desert four miles on both sides.
• 7:40
  Crista Cowan: And you, whether you come in from the south or whether you come in from the north, it just springs up out of nowhere.
• 7:48
  Crista Cowan: My freshman year of college, I went to school up in Idaho.
• 7:55
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 8:11
  Crista Cowan: And so we did.
• 8:13
  Crista Cowan: And we broke down somewhere on that road.
• 8:17
  Crista Cowan: And my grandparents had to drive up from LA to pick us up and get us safely to spend our vacation with them.
• 8:26
  Crista Cowan: I went back and forth dozens of times over the next decade as I finished school in Idaho.
• 8:36
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 8:48
  Crista Cowan: And Vegas was always the halfway point.
• 8:50
  Crista Cowan: It was always, you know, where we went to rest or to eat a meal.
• 8:56
  Crista Cowan: Sometimes we would spend the night there.
• 8:58
  Crista Cowan: It was just an easy way along the road.
• 9:02
  Crista Cowan: And it became a very well-worn path.
• 9:05
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 9:23
  Crista Cowan: And they had been in that car accident just outside of Las Vegas.
• 9:27
  Crista Cowan: And they had both been taken to the hospital.
• 9:30
  Crista Cowan: And my grandfather had been released fairly quickly, but my grandmother was in the hospital for a while.
• 9:37
  Crista Cowan: And again, if you go back to that Valentine's Day episode, you can hear their love story.
• 9:44
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 9:51
  Crista Cowan: Like he said, he had had enough of that after he came home from the war.
• 9:56
  Crista Cowan: But while she was in the hospital, um, he ended up having to spend a few nights away from her.
• 10:02
  Crista Cowan: And it's interesting to me that that was the thing that bothered him.
• 10:07
  Crista Cowan: But by that time, we had family in Vegas.
• 10:12
  Crista Cowan: My grandmother had a nephew and his children and grandchildren that lived there.
• 10:17
  Crista Cowan: And her brother, Don, lived in Vegas.
• 10:22
  Crista Cowan: And so they took care of my grandfather.
• 10:24
  Crista Cowan: They gave him a place to stay.
• 10:26
  Crista Cowan: They shuttled him back and forth to the hospital when my grandmother was there.
• 10:29
  Crista Cowan: When my grandmother was finally released, they helped my grandparents get home to LA.
• 10:35
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 10:50
  Crista Cowan: But because of my work schedule, I wasn't able to.
• 10:53
  Crista Cowan: But I was so grateful for the family there and the friends that had taken good care of them.
• 10:59
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 11:13
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 11:25
  Crista Cowan: And I just like I couldn't stand the fact that they hadn't been.
• 11:29
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 11:40
  Crista Cowan: And I got to share with them some of my favorite haunts.
• 11:45
  Crista Cowan: We rode the roller coaster at the New York, New York Hotel.
• 11:49
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 11:59
  Crista Cowan: And then we went and spent the week in California.
• 12:02
  Crista Cowan: And on the way back, we stopped at State Line.
• 12:04
  Crista Cowan: State Line is actually the name of the little town.
• 12:07
  Crista Cowan: It's not even a town, is it?
• 12:09
  Crista Cowan: Uh on the border of California and Nevada.
• 12:11
  Crista Cowan: There's another roller coaster there.
• 12:13
  Crista Cowan: There's some restaurants.
• 12:14
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 12:24
  Crista Cowan: Um, and so this little tiny bottom corner of Nevada has just held so many memories for me.
• 12:35
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 12:46
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 12:55
  Crista Cowan: And we drove down to my grandparents' house for Thanksgiving.
• 13:00
  Crista Cowan: And on the way, there was an accident on I-15.
• 13:05
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 13:21
  Crista Cowan: And then from Vegas to state line, there's nothing, then there's no exits off the freeway.
• 13:29
  Crista Cowan: And so when there's a bad accident and the freeway gets shut down, you're parked on the freeway.
• 13:35
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 13:50
  Crista Cowan: And we tried to sleep in the car.
• 13:52
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 14:05
  Crista Cowan: And there were some truckers who were passing information back.
• 14:08
  Crista Cowan: And um, and I just remember very vividly um what an adventure that was for the three of us.
• 14:15
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 14:33
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 14:44
  Crista Cowan: And it was.
• 14:46
  Crista Cowan: He died just a couple weeks after that.
• 14:49
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 15:04
  Crista Cowan: Um that was in 2000.
• 15:07
  Crista Cowan: By 2004, my first nephew would come along.
• 15:10
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 15:17
  Crista Cowan: And we took my little BMW Z4 convertible and put the top down.
• 15:22
  Crista Cowan: And um, in in echoes of Aunt Rhonda and her MG, we drove the roads down to California and did not break down, thankfully.
• 15:33
  Crista Cowan: Um, but that was a core memory.
• 15:35
  Crista Cowan: There were genealogy conferences in Las Vegas, in Southern California that required back and forth driving.
• 15:42
  Crista Cowan: There were more trips to Disneyland.
• 15:43
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 16:00
  Crista Cowan: And my Aunt Rhonda bore the brunt of a lot of her care.
• 16:04
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 16:20
  Crista Cowan: And often driving was just easier.
• 16:22
  Crista Cowan: A 10-hour drive after work got me there in the early, early morning hours.
• 16:28
  Crista Cowan: And, you know, a late night drive again on the way back on Sunday night got me home in time for work on Monday.
• 16:35
  Crista Cowan: Um, and it became a well-worn path.
• 16:38
  Crista Cowan: There is one other memorable trip.
• 16:41
  Crista Cowan: I had had a genealogy conference to go to in Europe.
• 16:46
  Crista Cowan: And just as I was packing, I realized that my passport was about to expire.
• 16:52
  Crista Cowan: And you can't travel on a passport if it has more uh less than six months left on it.
• 16:58
  Crista Cowan: And so I had to get my passport renewed in kind of an emergent situation because my flight was in just a few days.
• 17:05
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 17:13
  Crista Cowan: It'll take a full day, but we can take care of it in a single day.
• 17:17
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 17:25
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 17:39
  Crista Cowan: And I made it.
• 17:40
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 17:52
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 18:10
  Crista Cowan: Well, her brother, Don, lived in Las Vegas.
• 18:15
  Crista Cowan: And so one of the things she asked me to do is she would ask me to check in on him.
• 18:19
  Crista Cowan: And so I did.
• 18:21
  Crista Cowan: And he lived alone.
• 18:23
  Crista Cowan: Uh there's a whole story, we'll get there.
• 18:26
  Crista Cowan: He lived alone and he felt a little bit estranged from a lot of his family.
• 18:32
  Crista Cowan: And so the fact that I would make this effort um was so appreciated by him.
• 18:39
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 18:49
  Crista Cowan: And I got to know him, which was so important to me to be able to develop that relationship.
• 18:57
  Crista Cowan: My earliest memories of my Uncle Don were family reunions when I was probably eight, nine, ten years old.
• 19:07
  Crista Cowan: We would go every summer.
• 19:09
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 19:16
  Crista Cowan: And sometimes Uncle Don would show up.
• 19:18
  Crista Cowan: And he was always a little bit of a mysterious character.
• 19:21
  Crista Cowan: Like he didn't come to Thanksgiving dinner with everybody else.
• 19:25
  Crista Cowan: He didn't show up at Christmas time while we were there during the holidays.
• 19:29
  Crista Cowan: He'd like, but he would sometimes just show up at the family reunion.
• 19:33
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 19:44
  Crista Cowan: Now, my grandma is the oldest of five children.
• 19:48
  Crista Cowan: She was born in 1922.
• 19:50
  Crista Cowan: Her next sibling was born 13 months later.
• 19:54
  Crista Cowan: And then Don came along like five years after that.
• 19:59
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 20:07
  Crista Cowan: Um, but Uncle Don was the oldest of the three boys, and he just looked just like my grandma.
• 20:16
  Crista Cowan: A giant shock of red hair and freckles and a big grin and a kind of pudgy nose, just like I have.
• 20:26
  Crista Cowan: Um, and and that just made me feel comfortable around him because he looked so much like here, like her.
• 20:33
  Crista Cowan: I knew he was family.
• 20:35
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 20:50
  Crista Cowan: Here's the deal with Uncle Don.
• 20:53
  Crista Cowan: He joined, I think it was the Merchant Marines.
• 20:57
  Crista Cowan: Uh, he ended up serving in the Korean War in the 1950s.
• 21:02
  Crista Cowan: And when he came home from the war, my grandmother told him she was married and had children.
• 21:10
  Crista Cowan: By then, she told him she would make him whatever he wanted for his first Sunday home.
• 21:14
  Crista Cowan: Now, my my grandma and her siblings grew up in East Los Angeles in a very Hispanic neighborhood.
• 21:19
  Crista Cowan: And so they grew up eating a lot of Mexican food.
• 21:21
  Crista Cowan: And that's what he asked for.
• 21:23
  Crista Cowan: He asked her to fix tacos and chicken enchiladas and chili rellano, and so she did.
• 21:29
  Crista Cowan: And then the next week he called her and he said, Hey, some of my buddies are coming home from the war this week.
• 21:36
  Crista Cowan: Could we do that again?
• 21:38
  Crista Cowan: And so she did it again, made a whole feast, a whole fiesta, if you will, a spread of Mexican food.
• 21:45
  Crista Cowan: And, you know, he invited his buddies over and and she fed them.
• 21:49
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 21:57
  Crista Cowan: And you will all show up and help cook.
• 21:59
  Crista Cowan: And thus was born a family tradition.
• 22:02
  Crista Cowan: So my grandma used to make tacos for her family.
• 22:07
  Crista Cowan: They would eat Mexican food on Sundays.
• 22:09
  Crista Cowan: That was just kind of the family tradition.
• 22:12
  Crista Cowan: And so when my dad and his brother started having their own families, they decided to carry on that tradition.
• 22:18
  Crista Cowan: Cowan Taco Sunday.
• 22:20
  Crista Cowan: And everybody's invited because it's a meal that you can kind of stretch and everybody can pitch in and help.
• 22:26
  Crista Cowan: And the unique thing in our family is that uh we pan-fry the tortillas.
• 22:31
  Crista Cowan: Um, my dad, my grandma would do it, my dad does it.
• 22:35
  Crista Cowan: Um, we still make my dad do it when he comes to visit.
• 22:39
  Crista Cowan: But now that tradition has carried on into the next generation.
• 22:43
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 22:52
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 23:06
  Crista Cowan: So when I talk about family lore around Uncle Don, that's one of the stories that gets told.
• 23:11
  Crista Cowan: And one of the stories that was told my whole life before I really had a relationship with him.
• 23:17
  Crista Cowan: One of the other stories that got told about him was about some of his less than savory behavior.
• 23:26
  Crista Cowan: Uncle Don later would describe himself as a bit of a scoundrel.
• 23:32
  Crista Cowan: Um he had a gambling problem.
• 23:36
  Crista Cowan: I think at one point he probably had a drinking problem.
• 23:40
  Crista Cowan: Um, he got married.
• 23:42
  Crista Cowan: Um, I pulled I pulled it up in my tree so that I could make sure I got the dates right.
• 23:46
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 23:59
  Crista Cowan: I don't know anybody in the family that knows her or remembered her.
• 24:03
  Crista Cowan: Um my dad was only three at the time, and so he doesn't really have any memories of her.
• 24:10
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 24:23
  Crista Cowan: My dad was five years old and he remembers the wedding.
• 24:27
  Crista Cowan: And that was another story that got told about how Uncle Don brought home this girlfriend and married her in my grandparents' living room.
• 24:34
  Crista Cowan: Uncle Don and Charlotte went on to have four children, two girls and two boys.
• 24:40
  Crista Cowan: And for a few years, uh, they kind of worked through some things.
• 24:46
  Crista Cowan: Charlotte was young.
• 24:48
  Crista Cowan: Don had some issues.
• 24:51
  Crista Cowan: Uh, at one point, I think Don was in and out of prison.
• 24:54
  Crista Cowan: And eventually Charlotte had had enough and she took the kids and she left him.
• 25:00
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 25:12
  Crista Cowan: She remarried shortly after that.
• 25:15
  Crista Cowan: All the children took their stepfather's name.
• 25:17
  Crista Cowan: I don't know if he ever formally adopted them or not.
• 25:20
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 25:31
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 25:40
  Crista Cowan: He was so close to so many of the other cousins in the family.
• 25:44
  Crista Cowan: But those four, because of the choices that their dad made, weren't really a part of the family growing up.
• 25:53
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 26:01
  Crista Cowan: And yet we didn't know any of his children or their children.
• 26:07
  Crista Cowan: And so that was always this little mystery in our family about who they were.
• 26:13
  Crista Cowan: And one day, one of them showed up at my grandmother's house.
• 26:19
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 26:31
  Crista Cowan: And so we were able to kind of reconnect a little bit with that branch of the family.
• 26:36
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 26:50
  Crista Cowan: And when I went to my dad, I said, like, what's going on with this cousin?
• 26:53
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 27:08
  Crista Cowan: And I said, Oops, I didn't know that was a thing, right?
• 27:12
  Crista Cowan: Um, and I had tried to reach out and didn't know the full backstory.
• 27:17
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 27:31
  Crista Cowan: And just the nature of the fracturing of those relationships and the feelings that went along with it, um, it was hard.
• 27:40
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 27:51
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 28:09
  Crista Cowan: And he was always really quiet about it, and sometimes he'd tear up.
• 28:16
  Crista Cowan: But he talked about his kids and his grandkids.
• 28:20
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 28:31
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 28:43
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 29:01
  Crista Cowan: And I'm certainly not the only family member that would visit him, but I think he felt that isolation.
• 29:08
  Crista Cowan: We have family that lives in southern Utah, and they would see him when they would drive through.
• 29:12
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 29:21
  Crista Cowan: But people's lives are busy.
• 29:23
  Crista Cowan: And I think sometimes as people get older, like they it's easy for them to be forgotten.
• 29:29
  Crista Cowan: It's easy for people not to make time for them.
• 29:32
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 29:40
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 29:52
  Crista Cowan: I had been doing some research on newspapers.com, and my grandmother's maiden name is fairly uncommon.
• 29:59
  Crista Cowan: Common.
• 30:00
  Crista Cowan: It's Mulliner, M-U-L-L-I-N-E-R.
• 30:04
  Crista Cowan: And so it's one of the names that I use when I'm kind of just doing preliminary research just to see.
• 30:10
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 30:18
  Crista Cowan: And Uncle Don was mentioned.
• 30:20
  Crista Cowan: The headline reads: Shooting victims identified, admitted for treatment to the hospital were.
• 30:26
  Crista Cowan: And then it lists Donald Benjamin Mulliner, shoulder, and back.
• 30:31
  Crista Cowan: And so I turned to Uncle Don.
• 30:37
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 30:50
  Crista Cowan: I think they were probably three and five, maybe.
• 30:53
  Crista Cowan: Um, and we had all been on a family vacation down in southern Utah and St.
• 30:58
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 31:08
  Crista Cowan: And I said, I need you to tell me the story about the time you were shot in the casino.
• 31:13
  Crista Cowan: And like I said, he chuckled a little bit, kind of nervously.
• 31:18
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 31:27
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 31:42
  Crista Cowan: And about two hours later, Uncle Don was still there at 4 a.m., still gambling.
• 31:49
  Crista Cowan: And this man had come back, and Uncle Don had been injured in that.
• 31:55
  Crista Cowan: And he said, You'd think I would have learned from that experience.
• 32:00
  Crista Cowan: And then he just kind of cried.
• 32:04
  Crista Cowan: And he said, You'd think I would have learned from a lot of experiences, but I didn't.
• 32:10
  Crista Cowan: And I hugged him and told him that I loved him and thanked him for sharing that story.
• 32:19
  Crista Cowan: And it was interesting talking to my dad about it on the way back up to our hotel in Vegas or in St.
• 32:28
  Crista Cowan: George.
• 32:29
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 32:46
  Crista Cowan: And he never could.
• 32:49
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 33:03
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 33:17
  Crista Cowan: And I just loved that he wanted to be better than he was.
• 33:23
  Crista Cowan: So when he died in 2013, um, one of the cousins, uh, I don't remember if it was one of the St.
• 33:31
  Crista Cowan: George cousins or one of the Las Vegas cousins, called me to let me know.
• 33:35
  Crista Cowan: He was going to be buried in a military cemetery, and they were gonna apply to the VA to get a headstone.
• 33:43
  Crista Cowan: But his uh third or fourth wife, I don't remember what she was, she had already died.
• 33:50
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 34:02
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 34:17
  Crista Cowan: And so this is what I wrote about my Uncle Don.
• 34:21
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 34:30
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 34:41
  Crista Cowan: Donald Benjamin Mulliner was born the 10th of March 1929 in San Bernardino, California.
• 34:47
  Crista Cowan: He was the third child and oldest son of Victor June and Mary Heaps Mulliner.
• 34:52
  Crista Cowan: Raised in Los Angeles during the Depression and through the years of World War II, Don was constantly surrounded by family.
• 34:58
  Crista Cowan: Both of his parents came from large, close-knit families.
• 35:01
  Crista Cowan: His Mulliner grandparents had 33 grandchildren.
• 35:05
  Crista Cowan: His Heaps grandparents had 35 grandchildren.
• 35:08
  Crista Cowan: That's a lot of first cousins.
• 35:10
  Crista Cowan: When he became an adult, Don joined the military and served his country during the Korean War.
• 35:15
  Crista Cowan: Shortly after returning, he married, and within six years, four children were born to the couple.
• 35:21
  Crista Cowan: The final daughter born after his wife's 21st birthday.
• 35:26
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 35:32
  Crista Cowan: When his ex-wife remarried, his children took their stepfather's last name, and from then on, Don had virtually no contact with them.
• 35:40
  Crista Cowan: This was always one of the biggest regrets of his life.
• 35:44
  Crista Cowan: Later in life, some of his children did reconcile with him and would send pictures of their families.
• 35:49
  Crista Cowan: These photos were displayed in a prominent place in his home.
• 35:52
  Crista Cowan: He would often talk of his children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, the ones he never had a chance to meet.
• 35:58
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 36:06
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 36:15
  Crista Cowan: Betty passed in 2001.
• 36:17
  Crista Cowan: Her daughter, who was Don's caretaker for many years, passed away last year.
• 36:22
  Crista Cowan: Donald Benjamin Mulliner died this morning, the 15th of March, 2013, at the VA Hospital in Las Vegas.
• 36:30
  Crista Cowan: Today, I've spent a lot of time thinking about my Uncle Don.
• 36:34
  Crista Cowan: I'm sad I won't be able to visit him this weekend.
• 36:37
  Crista Cowan: I was so looking forward to seeing his big smile and his familiar shock of fading ginger hair.
• 36:42
  Crista Cowan: I was looking forward to talking with him more about his mother, a great grandmother I never knew.
• 36:46
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 36:54
  Crista Cowan: I never knew the Uncle Don that drank and gambled and made poor life choices.
• 36:59
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 37:09
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 37:17
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 37:25
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 37:33
  Crista Cowan: It's not a deep earths Nevada story, but it's my Nevada story.
• 37:43
  Crista Cowan: And I still find myself driving to and through Vegas.
• 37:47
  Crista Cowan: And as I pass the exit where I would get off to go to Don's house, I think of him.
• 37:53
  Crista Cowan: I haven't yet been out to his grave site in the valley there, but we did finally get the VA tombstone placed.
• 38:03
  Crista Cowan: And I did finally reconnect with one of his sons.
• 38:09
  Crista Cowan: And that son told me that he and his dad had reconnected.
• 38:14
  Crista Cowan: And I'm excited to meet Scott.
• 38:18
  Crista Cowan: We haven't met yet in person, but we're Facebook friends now, and I'm Facebook friends with two of Don's grandchildren.
• 38:25
  Crista Cowan: 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.
• 38:45
  Crista Cowan: Studio sponsored by Ancestry.