New To Las Vegas

Life-size long-ago campaign poster of Lonnie Hammargren in the street gutter at his home a few days after his death

Boy was the life of Lonnie Hammargren a terrific story. Like a terrific movie.

In a medically underserved state he had been one of Nevada’s first neurosurgeons–sometimes  controversial, eventually giving up his practice citing huge insurance premiums, perhaps due to publicly noted malpractice settlements/complaints. He was elected Nevada lieutenant governor–but subsequently came in third in a Republican primary bid for governor due to little party support.

Lonnie was also a nationally known hoarder, living in three adjoining Las Vegas houses he bought to store his thousands of collected items. In later years the “Hammargren Home of Nevada History,” as a sign called it, was opened to the public a single weekend a year, to the annoyance of some neighbors in the upper-class neighborhood–until after he lost one house to the bank amid mounting debts.

Slowly, Lonnie faded from view personally. But some of his collecting–a Batmobile in the front yard, military figurines on the roof, a towering green Tyrannosaurus Rex replica in a back yard easily seen by passing motorists on a busy street–remained visible to help let the world know this was a venue of something–and someone–really weird.

So perhaps it was fitting that a few days after Lonnie–as everyone called him–died last month at age 85, a life-sized poster of him in doctor’s garb from a long-ago political campaign lay in the gutter of the street in front of his compound, from where it had blown. The poster is in the nearby photo, which I took. For seven years I have walked past Lonnie’s spread nearly every day during the morning constitutional with the dog. Lonnie and his long-suffering second wife Sandy lived just a few blocks from the New To Las Vegas world headquarters.

The weathered, partly damaged poster on the ground, which was removed by day’s end, immediately triggered a thought. That was of the shattered snow globe as the troubled, financially distressed Charles Foster Kane–also an excessive collector–utters the mysterious word “Rosebud” while dying before flashbacks at the start of the celebrated 1941 Orson Wells movie “Citizen Kane.” Nearly two hours later, movie-goers learn (spoiler alert for the eight people out there who haven’t seen the film) that Rosebud was the brand name of Kane’s childhood snow sled and that he still had it at the time of his death at his jammed-with-junk estate called Xanadu.

That poster wasn’t Lonnie’s Rosebud. But as it turns out, I might have seen his Rosebud a few years ago. Stay with me on this. Continue reading →