Nancy Kidwell is a modern-day pioneer of the American desert, a rough-riding frontierswoman who built an entire town amid the lonely Yucca trees and sturdy sagebrush, where nothing existed before. A half-century ago, Kidwell and first husband Slim turned a triangle-shaped gravel airstrip abandoned by the US military into a thriving community that featured a casino, store, camper van park, motel, bar and restaurant that drew high-desert wanderers from thousands of miles around.
Many travelers landed in private planes to frequent this gambling state's first-ever fly-in gaming emporium, that once advertised "seven hours of fun" where one-armed bandit aficionados could touch down in the late afternoon and taxi out that same night. Now it's all up for sale -- a couple's dreamscape of 350 hardy residents, carved from hardscrabble land an hour south of Las Vegas, where Nevada's narrow southern tip comes within 10 miles of both California and Arizona. Asking price: $8 million.
For the 78-year-old Kidwell, the sale is bittersweet. This patch of desert is all she's known since she and Slim first flew over the arid expanse in 1965, gawking at the isolation and sheer beauty of the spot they'd chosen to make a break from the California rat race. But now her beloved Slim is long gone -- a victim of Alzheimer's disease in 1983 -- and Kidwell has grown weary of working seven-day weeks supervising 22 employees, playing the role of the town's mayor, police chief and sole businesswoman. She wants to travel, maybe buy another airplane for a tour of the nation's parks -- Yosemite, Yellowstone and Gettysburg included. She has no idea what her town will become once it's sold, but has received calls from people who want to turn it into everything from a renewable energy project, motorsports park, guest ranch, survival school or shooting range.
Kidwell was born in rural Utah and later moved to Southern California, where the young adventuress made enough money in her airfield secretarial job to take flying lessons. That's when she met Slim Kidwell -- she was 28 and he was 62, and the couple launched on a spring-autumn relationship that would provide the adventure of two lifetimes. When Slim got sick with Alzheimer's, a son from a previous marriage, Ace, came to help care for his father. After Slim's death, Nancy and Ace eventually fell in love, and the couple married. But Ace died in 2011 -- also of Alzheimer's. Both father and son, members of a secretive club for male aviators known as the Quiet Birdmen, are buried out by the gravel runway -- their markers bearing the group's slogan "Gone West" with an image of a plane taking off toward the sunset.
When her time finally comes, she wants to be buried out on the airfield next to her men. She's already got the tombstone with the same markings as Slim and Ace. Everything is in place except for that final date.
