Paper Trail

I didn’t spend all of my Reno years working on casinos. That kind of work was sporadic at best and the Reno construction market had lots of other projects to offer. One of these was the on-going remodel of Saint Mary’s Hospital. Over the years, I would be sent to Saint Mary’s for any little job that came along; a day, a week, or rarely, months at a time. You had to be able to give the contractor, Q & D Construction, a detailed cost estimate before the work began and since I was a former estimator, I could do that. This way our office didn’t have to be bothered with sending someone out to estimate a $500 job; I could do it and then actually do the construction itself. The customer loved it and we never had any of our billings questioned.

And during this time, the hospital administration was quietly buying up houses in the neighborhood around the hospital; preparing for eventual expansions. Quite often we would have to work on one of the old houses as they converted it to temporary office space. And I remember one in particular, a very old house that was being converted into a ‘blood bank’.

I was working in the stairs that went into the basement and as I chopped off the old plaster ceiling, I noticed that the backside of the old wooden lath was covered with newspaper. Very old newspaper. I had heard that this was common in the ‘old days’, a primitive form of insulation.

I carefully peeled the newspaper off of the lath, a tricky job. And I ended up with a couple of fairly large pieces of newsprint from the local paper, printed in 1916. In fact, I still have them today.

I thought I had done quite well, retrieving a little bit of history, but two carpenters had been told to reinforce the joists in the attic and they had found boxes of treasure hidden between the joists. Yes, money had been found. Which went to the hospital administrators and was never talked about again. And no one thanked the carpenters.