PINE NUTS – Founding Incline Village

As this is Pine Nuts number 1,664, I thought it might be fun to look back 26 years to column number one, to see just how bad it was. Please don’t let Historian Emeritus Richard Miner see this, he who tells me I’m a good historian where facts are not essential… 

Circa 1956, Harold Tiller and Art Wood, our founding fathers, shared a thermos of coffee over a fallen log…

“You know, Art, by the year 2000, they’ll be servin’ coffee over a nice counter here instead of this old dead log.”

“We only wish it were right now, Harold, ‘cuz we’re fresh out of coffee.”

“This village of ours is going to need a good name, Art, a classy name, a name that will stand up over time…I was thinking maybe, ‘Tiller Village.’”

“‘Wood-Tiller Village’ sounds fitting to me Harold, and isn’t it interesting that if you draw a line from here to Reno, and draw another line from here to the summit of Mt. Rose, and another down to Reno from there, you’ve got yourself a perfect right triangle…we could rightly call our little village, “Pythagoras Village.’”

“Art, who the heck could spell Pytha…no, you better leave that idea right there. It is a pretty good pitch from here to the top of Mt. Rose, actually quite a grade. We need to find us another word for ‘grade.’  

“Why, think if we were to build us a golf course here, Harold!  Can you just imagine what would happen with all these lateral water hazards?”

“Yes, all those lost golf balls would wash right down into the lake, and you & I’d be the only ones who knew where they gathered!  We could keep ourselves up to our eyeballs in Johnnie Walker Red on recovered golf balls alone!”

“And just think how far those golf balls would fly in this thin air!  Why people will come from the four corners of the earth to play our course. We could fairly well establish a newspaper, sit back and watch that paper prosper just on the publication of tee times. Heck, we could name streets after golf balls…think of living on Titleist Drive!  Wouldn’t that tempt the devil himself!”  

“Indeed! we could sell lots with a view of the lake, then the lots with partial views, then the lots with filtered views, and then we’ll go to sellin’ lots with an essence of view!”

“Hey, Art, we could carve our own ski slope!”

“Nope…too flat.”

“No problem…we’ll just take to callin’ it, ‘Diamond Peak!’  That’ll fetch ‘em.”

“You know, now that I think of it, Harold, we could lay claim to the beach too, and allow property owners to spread their towels out on our beach!”

“No, Art, that will never fly…those Crystal Bay Bedouins would be down here tryin’ to throw down their Cal-Neva towels on our beach, and we’d be havin’ to call out the militia every other day.”

“There’s potential here, Harold, great potential.  But this little village of ours is going to need a really good name. Tilted Village, maybe? We just don’t know… 

Audio: https://open.spotify.com/show/7Fhv4PrH1UuwlhbnTT23zO