The weathered, partly damaged poster on the ground, which was removed by day’s end, immediately triggered a thought. Lonnie and his long-suffering second wife Sandy lived just a few blocks from the New To Las Vegas world headquarters. For seven years I have walked past Lonnie’s spread nearly every day during the morning constitutional with the dog. The poster is in the nearby photo, which I took. So perhaps it was fitting that a few days after Lonnie–as everyone called him–died last month at age 85, 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. 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. Slowly, Lonnie faded from view personally. 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. Lonnie was also a nationally known hoarder, living in three adjoining Las Vegas houses he bought to store his thousands of collected items. He was elected Nevada lieutenant governor–but subsequently came in third in a Republican primary bid for governor due to little party support. 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 notedmalpractice settlements/complaints. Life-size long-ago campaign poster of Lonnie Hammargren in the street gutter at his home a few days after his deathīoy was the life of Lonnie Hammargren a terrific story.
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