Harry Mason Reid was born in 1939 in Searchlight, Nevada, a gold-rush ghost town separated from Las Vegas by 50 miles of empty desert. The family lived in a shack made of stuccoed-in railroad ties with no running water; Reid learned to swim at one of the brothels that were the town’s main amenity. His father, a miner, was a brooding, silent drunk who would later end his own life with a shotgun to the head. Reid, nicknamed “Pinky,” hitchhiked 45 miles each way to the nearest high school, in the Las Vegas suburb of Henderson.
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Reid died Tuesday at 82 at his home in Las Vegas. The cause was not immediately disclosed. He had previously battled pancreatic cancer, but said last summer that it was in remission.
It was the fight in Reid that provided an escape from his hardscrabble circumstances. In high school, he met the man who would become his mentor, Mike O’Callaghan, a one-legged Korean War veteran who taught Reid to box and would go on to serve two terms as governor. It was also in high school that Reid met and wooed Landra Gould, a Jewish girl whose parents were so suspicious of his motives that he once punched her father in the face to take her out on a date. The couple eloped to Utah, where Reid had, with O’Callaghan’s help, gotten a scholarship to a junior college.
There had been no religion in Reid’s upbringing — the closest thing to faith, he wrote in his 2008 memoir, was an F.D.R. quotation pinned to the wall: “We can. We will. We must.” But in Utah, impressed by the generosity of members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, Harry and Landra Reid converted to Mormonism together. Reid moved to Washington to attend law school at George Washington University, working nights as a Capitol Police officer to pay the bills.
As a young lawyer in Las Vegas, Reid…
Source : time
