Yerington Monday Sidebar: Renowned Nevada Basques
John Ascuaga is and has been one of Nevada's most famous businessmen. He moved to Sparks, Nevada after graduating from college and opened the Nugget Cafe, where his business and community ties have grown exponentially.
John’s father, Jose, came to America in 1914 from Orozko Spain in the Pyrenees Mountains. John’s mother, Maria, arrived soon after, and they settled in Notus, Idaho. Their firstborn child was Carmen, then Frank, and in 1925 John and his twin sister, Rose. The children attended school in the area. When John graduated high school he entered the army. After his honorable discharge John went on to the University of Idaho for his bachelor'’ degree in accounting and then Washington State University for an additional bachelor’s degree in hotel and restaurant management.
The original Nugget in Sparks opened in 1955 and was known for serving the best hamburgers in town. It was in the Nugget’s Steak House that John met Rose Ardans, his future wife. John together with his wife Rose built John Ascuaga’s Nugget Hotel/Casino into the major resort destination in the Reno area. John maintains a truly family operation. All of John and Rose’s children are an integral part of what has grown into a 1,658-room hotel, with eight restaurants, 84,000 square feet of gaming area, and 110,000 square feet of convention space.
Frank Bergon, novelist and author of four novels featuring Basque Americans
Frank Bergon (born 1943) is an American writer whose novels, essays, anthologies, and literary criticism focus primarily on the American West Frank Bergon was born in Ely, Nevada, and grew up on a ranch in Madera County in California’s San Joaquin Valley. After attending elementary school at St. Joachim in Madera, California and high school at Bellarmine in San Jose, he received a B.A. in English at Boston College, attended Stanford University as a Wallace Stegner Fellow, and completed a Ph.D. in English and American Literature at Harvard University.
Bergon has published ten books—four novels, a critical study of Stephen Crane, and five edited collections and anthologies. A major concern of his work is with the lives of Basque Americans in the West. His writing about Native Americans ranges from the Shoshone of Nevada to the Maya of Chiapas, Mexico. His Nevada trilogy consists of three novels spanning a century from the Shoshone massacre of 1911 (Shoshone Mike), to the shooting of Fish and Game officers by the self-styled mountain man Claude Dallas (Wild Game), to the current battle over nuclear waste in the Nevada desert (The Temptations of St. Ed & Brother S)
Paul Dominique Laxalt (born August 2, 1922) is an American politician who was Governor of Nevada from 1967 to 1971 and a United States Senator from 1974 to 1987. In the media, the words "son of a Basque sheepherder" often accompanied his name. He was one of Ronald Reagan's closest friends in politics. In fact, after Reagan was elected President in 1980, the national press began to refer to Laxalt as "The First Friend." He is the older brother of Robert Laxalt, who was a noted and prolific writer. He is a member of the Republican Party.
Laxalt was born on August 2, 1922 in Reno, Nevada, the son of Basque parents, Therese (Alpetche) and Dominique Laxalt, a shepherd, both of whom had immigrated to the United States in the early 1900's from their homeland in the Pyrenees, which straddle France and Spain. Dominique became wealthy in the sheep industry, but he lost everything in the early 1920's. Thereafter, he went back to sheepherding for the rest of his career. Therese, who had been trained at Paris' Cordon Bleu cooking school, eventually opened a restaurant called The French Hotel in the Nevada capital of Carson City.
Therese and Dominique had six children: Paul, Robert (born in 1923), Suzanne (1925), John (1926), Marie (1928) and Peter (1931). The Laxalt children were raised largely by their mother as Dominique spent long periods of time away from the household as he tended to his sheep in the deserts and mountains of Nevada. The children all helped Therese at The French Hotel. It was here that Paul first acquired an interest in politics as he listened in on the conversations of the politicians who patronized the restaurant (including the legendary U.S. Senator Patrick McCarran).
Robert Laxalt (September 25, 1923 – March 23, 2001) was a Basque-American writer from Nevada. Sweet Promised Land (1957), Laxalt's first and possibly best-known book, was based on the history of his father, Dominique, and his return to the homeland after forty-seven years as an immigrant sheepherder in Nevada. This book was especially well received in the ranching areas of Nevada and adjacent states, and led to creation of several "Basque Festivals" in those areas. Laxalt also served as a consultant to the Library of Congress on Basque culture, and helped start the Basque Studies program at the University of Nevada.
Robert was the younger brother of Paul Laxalt,who served as Nevada governor (1967–1971) and U.S. Senator (1974–1987). Sweet Promised Land's local popularity likely played a role in his brother Paul's early political victories.
Robert Laxalt founded the University of Nevada Press, which published almost all of his books written after 1964. This raised the prominence of the University of Nevada Press, but also limited the distribution and probably the critical attention given to Robert's books. He also served as the writer-in-residence at the University of Nevada Reno, and in 1988 became the first occupant of the Distinguished Nevada Author Chair at that university.
Laxalt was chosen along with Walter Van Tilburg Clark to be the first writer inducted into the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame when it was established in 1988 by the Friends of the University of Nevada Libraries.
- The Violent Land: Tales the Old Timers Tell, 1950
- Sweet Promised Land 1957
- A Man in the Wheatfield 1964. Selected by the American Library Association as one of the six notable works of American fiction that year.
- Nevada, 1971
- In a Hundred Graves: A Basque Portrait, 1972
- Nevada: A Bicentennial History, 1977
- A Cup of Tea in Pamplona, 1985. Nominated for a 1985 Pulitzer Prize in fiction.
- A Basque Hotel 1989. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
John W. Etchemendy (born 1952 in Reno, Nevada) is Stanford University's twelfth and current Provost. He succeeded John L. Hennessy to the post on September 1, 2000. John Etchemendy received his bachelor's and master's degrees at the University of Nevada, Reno before earning his PhD in philosophy at Stanford in 1982.
He has been a faculty member in Stanford's Department of Philosophy since 1983, prior to which he was a faculty member in the Philosophy Department at Princeton University. He is also a faculty member of Stanford's Symbolic Systems Program and a senior researcher at the Center for the Study of Language and Information at Stanford.
Etchemendy's research interests include logic, semantics and the philosophy of language. He has challenged orthodox views on the central notions of truth, logical consequence and logical truth. His most well-known book, The Concept of Logical Consequence (1990, 1999), criticizes Alfred Tarski's widely accepted analysis of logical consequence. The Liar: An essay on truth and circularity (1987, 1992), co-authored with the late Jon Barwise, develops a formal account of the liar paradox modelled using a version of set theory incorporating the so-called Anti-Foundation Axiom.
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