Since Sparks City Hall is pretty much reasonably isolated during Covid, we reasonably recently called Sparks City Hall with some reasonable questions we had as we saw nothing to help us on the Sparks' webpage with our reasonable questions. Although the various people we were transferred to were polite, hence the two star review, they not only seemed lacking in knowledge about our reasonable questions they also seemed lacking in wanting to get the knowledge to answer our reasonable questions. We never did get our reasonable questions answered. According to the Yelp ratings' definitions, Three Stars is "A-Okay." That to me is an acceptable rating of an organization that does day in and day out what they are to do. Four and Five-Stars to me is when an organization goes over and beyond what they are to do. One and Two-Star Ratings are for when an organization fails to do what they are to do.
The City of Sparks was an afterthought of the railroads; created in the flood-prone swamps to the east of Reno in 1904, to replace Wadsworth as the big switching yard on this section of the Southern Pacific Railroad. In early July 1904, some 1,300 people, practically the entire town of Wadsworth, picked up and moved to this new Sparks location. Business and personal belongings--including everything from pets and livestock to trees and shrubs--were packed onto railway cars for the move. Entire homes and business buildings were cut into sections and also loaded on Southern Pacific flat cars for transportation, all free of charge by the railroad. The railroad's new roundhouse and accompanying businesses served as the central employer and revenue generator for Sparks.
In 1907, cars were few and far between when a silly 'reform-minded' Sparks City Council outlawed the then popular after work pastime of hard-working and fun-loving locals who would drive up to a Sparks saloon in the horse-drawn family buggy, park at the curb for drinks that were delivered by scantily-clad pretty young women working for pennies a shift and tips, then later having the then Dedicated Safe Driver, the horse, all by itself find its way home safely with its either highly inebriated or passed out Sparks local(s). Something a car couldn't then do by itself and still can't do by itself. Today my husband casually and teasingly muttered to me after he read this review, "seems a reasonable and pleasant alternative during this god-awful Covid-19 pandemic :-((".
This Dedicated Safe Driver story reminds me of SSgt. Reckless, U.S. Marine Corps, who's life-sized bronze statues greet everyone to Virginia's National Museum of the Marine Corps and Heritage Center since 2013, at Camp Pendleton since 2016 and at the Kentucky Horse Park since 2018.
Some 50 years after Sparks beginning, John Ascuaga, a Veteran with an Honorable Discharge from the United States Army, brought Sparks its first skyscraper. John Ascuaga used his G.I. Bill at the University of Idaho for his Bachelor's Degree in Accounting and then Washington State University for an additional Bachelor's Degree in Hotel and Restaurant Management. He and Dick Graves together built up from a modest coffee shop in Sparks, Nevada and within its first two years it had a bigger employee base than the railroad. That was a welcome economic diversification for the City of Sparks government. Then its general manager, Ascuaga bought the Nugget from Graves in 1960, on a handshake, five years after it had been established as Graves retired. read more