Founding dean of UNLV’S first hospitality college dies at 91
Jerome Jay Vallen, the founding dean of UNLV’S first hospitality school, was always laughing and cracking jokes, even in his final days.
Vallen passed away Thursday morning at age 91, but family friend Pat Moreo said that when he interviewed him for a project two weeks ago, Vallen was joking about how much time he had left.
“He said, ‘I’m glad you’re talking to me now because they tell me I don’t have much longer to be around,’ ”
Moreo said of the man most called “Jerry.” “That was just the type of humor he had — he was always laughing at everyone, including himself.”
Vallen, the founding dean of what became UNLV’S William F. Harrah College of Hospitality and the co-founder of UNLVINO, died of cancer.
His Las Vegas legacy began in the summer of 1967, when the Philadelphia-born son of a restaurateur was called to start a hospitality college at the then-struggling, two-building Nevada Southern University, now known as the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Vallen moved his wife and four kids from upstate New York to the Southwestern desert, arriving on a surprisingly rainy day marked by flash flooding, his son Marc Vallen remembers.
The hospitality school started small, with 18 students enrolled and Strip hotel employees brought on as faculty. But with the financial help of the Nevada Resort Association and an enthusiastic founding dean, it has grown into a booming, widely respected program.
‘Lives were changed by Jerry’
Stowe Shoemaker, the school’s current dean, said it is Vallen’s vision that has made the school one of the best in the country. He said the most important distinction is the hospitality school’s independence from the business school.
“Hospitality is really not a job, it’s a lifestyle,” Shoemaker said Thursday. “And if you go to a traditional business school, you’ll learn accounting
said in an update that the number of hospitalizations in the state continues to rise, though at a slower rate than in late June. The association said the number of currently hospitalized COVID-19 patients has risen by 100 since July 18 and has “stressed” some individual facilities with high all-cause occupancy rates.
It noted, however, that Southern Nevada hospitals are continuing to operate well below capacity, with 83 percent of all available beds and
72 percent of intensive care unit beds filled.
The Southern Nevada Health District, meanwhile, reported 848 new COVID-19 cases and 18 additional deaths in Clark County over the preceding day.
The figures posted on the district’s coronavirus website pushed the total number of cases in the county to 40,193 and increased the death toll to 663. The district estimates that 32,079 of those who have contracted the disease caused by the new coronavirus have recovered.
New cases were below the daily average of just over 898 over the preceding week, while the fatalities
were well above the daily average of just over eight for the period.
The health district also reported 36 additional hospitalizations over the preceding day.
In another development Thursday, Washoe County reported a single-day record 179 new COVID-19 cases along with three new deaths. The new cases pushed the total in the state’s second-most-populous county to 5,144, while the fatalities lifted the death toll to 113.
Contact Mike Brunker at mbrunker@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-4656. Follow @mike_brunker on Twitter.