Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
Price revered for stamp put on Assembly
CARSON CITY — It can truthfully be said that Bob Price’s legacy in the Nevada Assembly includes tax-cutting, extraterrestrials, brothels, a near-fatal heart attack, an office squatter named Merlin, guitar singalongs in chambers, extra pay for harried staffers, government transparency and ethics, equal rights and constitutional protections.
The word “character” might not be big enough to describe him.
Price, a longtime Democratic assemblyman from North Las Vegas who had faced health challenges after contracting an infection during a 2015 hospital stay, died of a heart attack Jan. 4 at his home in Sparks, his wife, Nancy, confirmed Tuesday. He was 82 and had moved to Sparks after leaving the Legislature in 2002.
Price, who was born in DeLand, Florida, on May 23, 1936, arrived in
PRICE
Nevada in 1955. An electrician by trade and union business manager who had worked at the Nevada National Security Site, he served 28 years in the Assembly from 1974 to 2002. He was one of just 11 people to serve that long, a legislative career that spanned 14 regular and three special sessions.
“I think that I would like to be remembered as a friendly person who was interested in what was going on in our community and tried my best to do what I could to be of any assistance,” he said in a 2008 interview conducted as part of a Legislature oral history project. “I always felt it was important to try — and this is not unusual among politicians — to get along with folks and to learn what the various subject matters were and to try and get your two cents in. I really have enjoyed that.”
‘Bigger than life’
Price chaired a half-dozen Assembly committees during his time in office and was the longtime chair of the Committee on Taxation and a member of the Ways and Means Committee. Equanimity, not to mention a sense of humor and whimsy, were his hallmarks.
“Bob was just bigger than life. He was happy, smiling. He’d be out campaigning and walking door to door, and if somebody needed help with something, he’d stop and help them fix it,” said Tom Collins, a Democratic assemblyman in the 1990s who, while serving as a Clark County commissioner, worked to have a Las Vegas park and community center named for Price in 2007.
“He was very smart, very serious. He knew the process. He knew how to get things done there,” Collins said. “He was probably one of the best people that Nevada was fortunate to ever get to know.”
Price sponsored, supported or helped win passage of significant legislation, including the elimination of the state’s grocery tax, which was abolished by referendum in 1984 after back-to-back Legislatures endorsed the move in 1981 and 1983.
But he is also remembered for working to pass legislation to rename state Route 375 the Extraterrestrial Highway, in recognition of frequent UFO sightings in the area and the road’s proximity to the test site and secretive Area 51 Air Force facility.
It took some effort for the idea to catch on with lawmakers, some of whom considered it frivolous. But Price and other backers saw its marketing potential.
“It was an interesting fight,” his wife recalled Tuesday. “First it was called the Alien Highway. But they didn’t want it mixed up as immigrants coming across the highway.”
When the naming did go through, in April 1996, actors from the film “Independence Day,” set for release that July, came to the dedication ceremony in the tiny town of Rachel. Price attended as well, wearing a Darth Vader mask.
Price for a time also gave over part of his legislative office to a “lobbyist” who went by the name of Merlin and thought himself an extraterrestrial.
“I let him share my office because he had quite a bit of stuff. He was a very nice and well-liked young man, just a little bit of a character,” Price said.
‘Price Days’
Among more serious-minded legislative pursuits, Price worked to win paid days off for legislative staffers to compensate them for long extra hours worked at the end of every session. They came to be known as “Price Days.”
Those frantic, end-of-session scrambles also saw him press to change from biannual to annual legislative sessions. At the prodding of his wife, then a citizen lobbyist, he also worked to make proposed legislation available for public review.
And Price supported contemporary causes of the day, such as the Equal Rights Amendment, recalling in 2008 that he had been “very opposed to issues that limit women’s rights because of the organizations that (he’d) worked with and also having been married to a politician.”
He was arried three times. His second wife, Brenda, had served on the North Las Vegas City Council.
Nancy Price, who served as a University of Nevada regent and also a chief master sergeant in the Nevada Air National Guard, met Price in 1982 when she was doing opposition research for a friend who was running against him for the Assembly. They married March 3, 1984, in a ceremony attended by then-Gov. Richard Bryan and the chairmen of both major parties.
“I was a Republican at the time, and we had the wedding at his house, and when people came, it was, ‘Are you a Republican or Democrat?’” Nancy Price said. “We had a tug-of-war, and we put a tape down the backyard, which was the party line, and it was who was going to pull who over the party line.”
Their honeymoon was spent at a special session of the Legislature called by the governor, who, Price said, had earlier agreed to the assemblyman’s request to schedule the session around his wedding.
Price also supported creation of the state film office, strengthening of the reporting requirements for lobbyists and protections for reporters, and the abolition of other sales taxes, such as the tax on college textbooks.
But in 1997, when a freshmen lawmaker proposed legislation to outlaw prostitution, Price studied the issue and came to see how much tax income brothels provide to counties. That led him to lead a “fact-finding tour” for lawmakers at the Mustang Ranch in Storey County, outside Carson City.
Strumming and legislating
Near the end of legislative sessions, when lawmakers often would have to wait for bills to be printed before they could vote on them, Price would break out his guitar on the floor of the chamber. He had hosted his own country music show in Las Vegas in the 1950s, when Las Vegas had only one television station.
Health became an issue in the late 1990s. In 1998, he suffered a heart attack in the Reno airport and literally dropped dead but was revived by a woman who had lost her father the same way.
“Leave it to Bob. A pretty girl came over and gave him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation,” Nancy Price joked.
He subsequently underwent a triple bypass surgery.
Price lost the 2002 Democratic primary for his seat, prompting him and his wife to move to Sparks, where she had lived before they married. He broke a hip in 2015 and in the hospital contracted a MRSA infection. Though he survived, the infection ultimately left him bedridden, and he lived with diabetes and a pacemaker. In spite of those challenges, his wife said he was happy with his life and seemed to be doing well right up to his death at home Friday.
Besides his wife, Price’s survivors include a sister, Edna Schwenk, of Erie, Pennsylvania.; two daughters, Teresa Price and Cherie Price-Steiner, both of Las Vegas; a son, William Price, of New Orleans; and a stepson, David Bogan, of Sparks. Another daughter, Amber Price, and stepson, Thomas Horner, died earlier.
Two memorial remembrances have been scheduled, one in Las Vegas on Saturday, from 2 to 5 p.m. at the recreation center that bears his name, at 2100 Bonnie Lane. A memorial luncheon at the Legislature in Carson City is also scheduled for Feb. 14.