Looking back on a century of life

Imagine everything Sara Denton has seen in her life as she approaches 100. But when talking to her, she’s not allowing age to slow her down as she continues to experience everything life has to offer.

“As the saying goes, ‘If you live you get old,’” she said. “So, living to be 100 years old is as good as it can get, and I know that each day forward is a gift. Hopefully, I can find a way to make those days meaningful.”

Denton, who has been a Boulder City resident for 65 years, officially becomes a centenarian on Nov. 12 and will be spending it with friends and family.

Early days

Denton was raised on a farm in Kentucky where the closest city, Paducah, was 20 miles away. Since it was during the Depression, everything they had to eat was raised on the farm. Cows for fresh milk, pigs and sheep to slaughter, orchards for fresh fruit, bee hives, and vegetable gardens helped them by. The only thing they had to buy was sugar.

“I think back now and know that a healthy diet gave my body a great start for a healthy life,” she said. “On Saturdays the family took the produce to Paducah to sell in the horse-drawn wagon and while my dad and my brothers went to the market, my mother would take me to the library where she checked out stacks of books. I remember she always had a book about eating right and health hints. One big treat was, on the way home my father would give us a banana. He always told us that if we had just a few pennies and got hungry, a banana was nutritious and clean to eat.”

On to Nevada

Long before the Internet and even television, Denton said the only source of news for her family was the Paducah Sun Democrat newspaper, which was a bit of luxury for the cash-strapped family. The building of Hoover Dam was headline news because it was going to create so many needed jobs. But unlike many who came to Southern Nevada thanks to the building of the dam, Denton found her way here in a different way.

“When I was finishing my first year of college, an Army lieutenant from the Signal Corps came on campus to recruit girls to go to Washington, D.C. for the summer,” she said. “It turned out to be at Arlington Hall Station where they were decoding the Japanese code, and was highly secret. That is where I met Lt. Ralph Denton from Caliente, Nev., who was stationed there. After we won the war, we were married and Ralph went to work in Sen. Pat McCarran’s office and went to law school at night.

“After graduating, we moved to Nevada and while living in Las Vegas, where he practiced law, the city was growing so fast they couldn’t build schools fast enough so all the schools were on half-day sessions. We discovered the small town of Boulder City, just a few miles away, was having full-day classes, and was one of the outstanding schools in the state. So, in 1959 we moved here and Ralph said he would commute to work so our four children could get a good education in Boulder City.”

Life in Boulder City

Even though the dam was completed two decades earlier, in the late 1950s, Boulder City was still a government-run town. Denton said almost all the people were employed by either the Bureau of Reclamation or the National Park Service. And most of these people lived in government-owned houses.

“The house we bought was privately owned and in foreclosure, but was built by the company who built the Boulder Dam Hotel, so it was a historical landmark, across the street from the government park,” she said. “I was looking for a gardener and asked a man who lived down the street if he had one and he said, ‘The government does our yards.’ And we soon observed that us non-government people were in the minority.”

Shortly after moving to BC their youngest child, Jeffrey, died.

“We were consoled by the entire town with that tragedy,” she said. “The hospital staff, doctors, neighbors and everyone showed us what a loving community we were in, and the small government-run hospital was there for us.”

In 1960 Ralph Denton was running the John F. Kennedy campaign in Nevada. Sara kept busy as she helped start Teens for Kennedy as well as being a den mother for their son Mark’s Cub Scout troop in Boulder City.

A resident for more than 60 years

After Boulder City became a private municipality, Denton said the big developers from Las Vegas were coming in droves to get land cheap to start building homes. A group of business owners were concerned that Boulder City was going to become another large city.

“They approached Ralph as an attorney to see what could prevent large growth,” she said. “He had just read about this small town in California that had passed a growth ordinance so he suggested he go there and check out their ordinance. He discovered they had a no-growth ordinance, so when he returned, they decided he should write a controlled-growth ordinance and put it up for a vote of the people.

“It passed overwhelmingly, so it saved us from becoming a large city,” she said.

Art in the Park begins

In the early 1960s, the former Boulder City Hospital was struggling financially and a group of Pink Ladies from the hospital called Denton to see if she could help with an art festival to raise some much-needed funds to save it. It was to be in May and they were hoping to raise $2,000.

“Everyone in town got involved,” she said. “We invited a famous guest artist, James Swinnerton, to show his paintings. He wouldn’t let his paintings be outside, so we hung his inside our house and they all sold, exceeding the amount needed to save the hospital. “So, after the fourth year of the art festival, I was asked to be chair again. The weather was so iffy in the month of May that I asked the weather bureau to give me the best weekend weather-wise in the year. They researched and told me there had never been a bad storm on the first weekend in October.”

So, for the past 57 years, Art in the Park has been a staple in Boulder City during the first weekend of October and draws tens of thousands each year.

Her own career

After their children left home for college and their careers, Sen. Howard Cannon asked her to be his administrative assistant in his Las Vegas office. Denton hadn’t worked since before she was married, but had volunteered in many political campaigns, so she saw it as another challenge.

“In his local office there were many issues constituents had with government, problems like veterans, social security, etc., so meeting and working with these people was another learning experience for me, and working in his office gave me the chance to meet many business leaders in Clark County,” she said.

Other interests

“One of the best things I enjoyed was getting involved with the Boulder City Museum,” she said. “It was just a tiny place, and not large enough to store all the tons of artifacts that were stored away in boxes. A group of volunteers approached the hotel to see if they could move to the basement there, which would give them more room. They agreed, and that was the beginning of the expansion.”

The hotel was privately owned and going bankrupt. A client of her husband’s and a friend gave an anonymous gift to make the museum the owner of the hotel. Another business owner she had met in Sen. Cannon’s office made a donation to help take out the floors above the museum that was moving upstairs to show the high scaler wall we see today.

“There’s been so much history saved for our historic town, and every day the tour buses stop to see it,” Denton said. “I’ve often thought, without the dam, a vision to give people work during the Depression, there wouldn’t be a Las Vegas or Lake Mead. So, in our small town, we’ve given the gift of preserving history and showing it in our museum.”

Her family

Together, she and her husband raised their children, who have followed in their parents’ footsteps in terms of serving others. Her eldest son is a district court judge and he and his wife have four children and three grandchildren. Her daughter is a writer, married to another writer, and they share three sons and one daughter. Her youngest son is a pediatrician, and he and his wife have three children and two grandchildren.

“The contributions already made by so many of them have given me continuous joy,” she said.

After 64 years of marriage, Ralph died of cancer more than a decade ago.

“It was a sad, life-changing stage of my life after 64 years of marriage,” she said. “I was too old to be active in community affairs, but I had time on my hands and needed to stay active. A group of us noticed that all the scholarships for high school graduates were for college and many students wanted to learn a trade. We started the Boulder Blue Scholarship fund to give those students a chance to learn a trade. Over the past years we have raised thousands of dollars to make that possible, and a great reminder how important the trades are in our lives in Boulder City.”

Any advice for longevity?

“This is a very hard question,” she said. “Any answer will sound like I have control over my destiny,” she said. “Basically, I think that staying informed and not being afraid to jump in and help with a problem is obvious. I’ve always had an active life. It reminds me of Ralph’s description of me. He used to say I was like a goldfish because I never sat down.

“Having a loving and caring family, and so many good friends, has been a great part of my long, happy life,” Denton said. “I just found out that my children have set up a scholarship in my name, the Sara Denton Women in History Endowment Scholarship at UNLV, because they knew for my birthday, I didn’t need anything other than a way to help others.”