775 Gentry Way: The Stone House Inside Reno's Travelier Trailer Park

Above: south Reno in 1950, from the federal topographic survey. U.S. 395 runs down the left in heavy red. Virginia Lake sits at the top; Anderson School is marked beside the highway; Peckham Lane and Boynton Lane cross the open ground below. At the upper right the sheet reads RENO AIRPORT, and the unnamed road running east toward it — the only one that goes there — is Airport Road. The small black squares strung along its north side are buildings. Two of them had been standing for eleven years when this was drawn, and one of them is still there.

There is a stone house inside a trailer park on Gentry Way.

You would not find it unless you were looking. It stands a little back from the lane, under cottonwoods that have had eighty years to get where they are, with a vine over most of the front and mobile homes close on either side. Steep intersecting gables. A deep recessed porch on round river cobbles. A chimney on the ridge. It was built in 1942, it has two bedrooms and one fireplace, and it is the second-oldest thing on twenty acres.

The oldest is forty feet away: a two-storey building put up in 1939 with eleven bedrooms and four bathrooms, and twenty-three hundred square feet of concrete poured around it the same year.

Eleven bedrooms. In 1939. A mile and a half past the edge of Reno, on a road that went to an airport and nowhere else.

This is an account of that ground: who owned it, what she did with it, why the trees are the size they are, and what an eleven-bedroom building was doing out there in the first place.

The Road Went to an Airport

Gentry Way was called Airport Road, and the name was literal. It ran east off South Virginia Street and ended at Hubbard Field, which is where Reno kept its aeroplanes. There was nothing else out there to go to.

That matters for a practical reason before it matters for any other. Before the city's street numbering reached that far south, property on Airport Road had no street number at all. It had a rural box: Rt. 1, Box 70, Airport Road. A man advertising a bachelor's shack for ten dollars a month in 1942 gave that as his address. An apartment house advertising monthly rates in 1950 gave Box 90.

So the whole first decade of this property is invisible to anyone searching for the number. There is no 775 Airport Road in print before 1952, and the reason is not that nothing was there. Two buildings were there. The address simply had not been invented yet.

The rename happened fast and late. The road is still Airport Road in the last week of October 1961. By the second week of January 1962 the papers are printing Gentry Way addresses — 230, then 596, then 800. Old habits held on in the classifieds until about May. Six or eight weeks, and a street that had been named for where it went was named for something else instead.

By then the airport it was named for had moved, grown, and been renamed twice itself.

What Was Standing in 1939

Strip away the four hundred-odd mobile homes and the county's own record of the ground is short and strange.

The 1939 building is two storeys, twenty-five hundred and ninety square feet, stud walls and wood siding, with a dug-out basement under part of it and a wooden stair. Eleven bedrooms. Four full baths. A fireplace. It is not carded as a house. It is carded as a low-rise multiple residence, at commercial quality — which is the assessor's way of saying that whoever built it was not building a home.

Around it, dated the same year: a detached garage of four hundred square feet, and two thousand three hundred and sixty-eight square feet of concrete flatwork. That is not a driveway. That is a court — a surfaced yard big enough to stand a dozen cars on, poured in 1939, on a dirt road a mile and a half out of town.

Three years later, in 1942, the stone house went up beside it. Eleven hundred and sixty-one square feet, two bedrooms, one bath, stone laid on masonry, a fireplace, a dug-out cellar, and its own smaller garage. Fair-to-average quality. A decent small house, built separately, after the big building, and plainly meant for somebody different from whoever slept in the eleven bedrooms.

And then, dated 1945: three sets of apartment appliances installed in the 1939 block.

Read those dates in order and a shape appears. A commercial lodging building goes up in 1939 with a paved court and a garage. A separate small stone house for the owner goes up in 1942. In 1945 the big building is cut into flats.

Not a Divorce Ranch

The obvious guess is wrong, and it is worth saying so plainly, because it is the guess anybody who knows Reno would make.

An eleven-bedroom, four-bathroom building with a paved motor court, out past the city limits, built in 1939 at the height of the six-week residency trade, a quarter of a mile from a working dude ranch — that is the exact architecture of a divorce ranch. Reno had more than twenty-five of them. Most are named in no published list.

It was not one. Not this. In forty years of Reno newspapers there is not a single advertisement, notice or mention of a guest ranch, a dude ranch or divorcee accommodation at this address or anywhere on Airport Road. The guest-ranch columns of the period are full — the Del Monte out on South Virginia, the Palomino, the D and R beyond Steamboat, the Stardust, guest houses on University Terrace and West Fifth and Riverside Drive, a countryside ranch out on Holcomb Lane — and not one of them is on this road. When the trailer court here finally advertised, it advertised under Trailer Space, on pages whose guest-ranch column ran three inches away.

No stone house is ever described. No cottages, no corrals, no stables, no horses, at any Airport Road address, ever.

What is on the road, in print, is plainer and more useful: a bachelor's shack to let in 1942; Wells Cabins, Airport Road, furnished, kitchen and bath, in 1950; and — the same winter, in the apartments column — Airport Apartments, Box 90 Airport Road. Furnished apartments. Reasonable. Monthly rates. Children welcome.

Monthly rates and children welcome is not the divorce trade. That is working-family housing on the edge of a town that had run out of it.

Airport Apartments ran from about 1947 to 1953 and never once printed a street number, so it cannot be nailed to this parcel. But set the advertisement against the assessor's card — a 1939 two-storey block, eleven bedrooms, four baths, commercial quality, cut into three flats in 1945 — and they describe the same building. That is as close as the record gets, and it is a great deal closer than the ranch.

Mrs. W. Vernon Heape

The number finally appears in April 1952, and it appears in the least romantic way imaginable: a grass fire. Reno firemen turned out to 775 Airport Road at five to ten one morning and put it out before it did any damage. That is the earliest printed trace of this address.

Six months later the first person. In the first week of October 1952, Mrs. W. Vernon Heape, 775 Airport Road reported to the police that a Revere camera and the films in it, worth a hundred and thirty-four dollars and fifty cents, had gone from her car sometime in the previous three days. Her neighbour down the road at 665 reported something similar in the same column.

A Revere cine camera was not a cheap object in 1952, and neither was leaving it in the car.

Her husband's name does a certain amount of work here. Vernon W. Heape had filed for divorce from his wife Ruth in the Second Judicial District in January 1950 — extreme cruelty, custody of the minor children, forty dollars a month — and the decree came through that August. He married again within a year or two, and by the autumn of 1952 the second Mrs. Heape was living at 775 Airport Road. He married a third time; a Dorothy divorced him in 1963.

The second wife is the one who matters. Her name was Helen, and she is about to own this ground for thirty years.

Two Boards, Two Answers, Two Days Apart

In August 1954 Helen Daniel Heape asked permission to put trailers on her land, and the answer she got depended entirely on which half of her property anybody was looking at.

On Wednesday the eleventh, the Washoe County Board of Adjustment refused her. The application, as the county recorded it, was to establish a trailer court at 775 Airport Road, in an area zoned for agriculture. It was turned down along with two others because the applications did not meet the conditions of the ordinance.

On Friday the thirteenth, the City of Reno Board of Adjustment granted her. The variance let her keep four trailers on her property at 777 Airport Road, and the minute explains itself in one line: the part of the property in question is in a commercial zone. The City Council ratified it a fortnight later, four trailers specified as the limit.

Same woman, same twenty acres, same fortnight, opposite decisions — because the city limit ran through her land. The agricultural half was 775 and the county said no. The commercial half was 777 and the city said yes.

That single fact explains two things that have never made sense about this parcel. It explains why there are two addresses on one holding, which there still are today. And it explains why the assessor carded a 1939 lodging house at commercial quality: the ground it stood on was commercially zoned before anybody thought about trailers at all.

At the same meeting the board approved a man's real-estate office in his home on University Avenue, and a golf driving range out on South Virginia, and declined to act on a trailer court proposed for Locust Street. The neighbours were already organising: a petition to the Council that month came from twenty-seven residents of the ground bounded by the Cochran Ditch, Moana Lane and Plumas Street.

Travelier Court, Licensed 29 August 1954

Three weeks after the variance, the Reno city clerk issued two business licences. One went to a contractor on East Taylor Street. The other authorised the opening of Travelier Court at 775 Airport Road, with Helen Heape as owner.

That is the founding date, and it is three years earlier than the trade name's first appearance in the classified columns. Four trailers, on a woman's twenty acres, behind an eleven-bedroom lodging house and a stone cottage, at the end of the summer of 1954.

What it grew into is easy to measure, because trailer courts number their spaces and the numbers turn up in for-sale advertisements. In April 1961 somebody was selling a 1958 Eastern, ten feet by forty-two, three thousand four hundred dollars, must see the interior to appreciate — at Space 112, 775 Airport Rd.

Four spaces in 1954. Past a hundred and twelve by 1961. Two hundred and forty-three on the assessor's card by 1966.

By the late fifties it was advertising a feature worth noticing: Adults — private garages, every convenience. Travelier Court, 775 Airport Road. Private garages, at a trailer court, in 1958. There is still a long storage building standing at the north end of the park with old side-hinged double doors on it, the kind you pull open rather than lift — which is how garages were built before the overhead sectional door became standard after the war. Nobody has ever carded it. It may well be what that advertisement was selling.

The Mink Coat

On a Saturday night in December 1954, four months after the court opened, two men came to the house at 775 Airport Road and beat an elderly workman nearly senseless.

His name was Charles Trimble and he had been asked round that evening to repair the bathroom plumbing. The owner was out; she worked nights and came home at half past four in the morning, and found him in the house, dazed and badly hurt. The men had taken thirty dollars in cash and a mink coat worth five thousand dollars.

Five thousand dollars for a coat in 1954 is the price of a decent house. Whatever else was true of the woman who owned this ground, she was not scraping by on four trailer rents.

And the newspaper gave her name as Mrs. Helen Close, 775 Airport Road.

Not Heape. Close.

That had been puzzling for a long time — a Helen Heape who gets a variance in August and a Helen Close who owns the place in December, with no obvious link between them. The link is in a traffic court item from the September in between. Four people failed to answer speeding citations and the court issued bench warrants, and the first name on the list is Helen Close Heape.

One woman. She married Vernon Heape around 1951, used his name for the three years she had it, and took her own back as soon as the marriage was over. Every document from 1952 to 1985 belongs to the same person.

Miss Helen Close

She was not a landlady who happened to own land. She was in business.

In August 1958 she was named in a newspaper story as the housekeeper of LaVere Redfield — the Reno millionaire — and allegedly forced off his South Virginia Road farm at gunpoint. She objected in print, and the correction tells you more than the original story did. She was not a housekeeper. She was an independent insurance broker, writing through a Western American agency, and she had stayed on the farm to protect property she had herself insured. She was also, she said, a long-time friend of the Redfield family.

There are other small sightings and they all point the same way. In July 1955 she reported two hub caps stolen off her 1954 Cadillac sedan, parked on South Sierra Street. A mink coat the winter before. A post office box rather than a street address for her business mail.

The Redfield connection is worth holding onto, because of where it leads. Redfield bought his Reno mansion from the Hill family — the same Hills who ran the dude ranch on George Wingfield's old Nevada Stock Farm, a quarter of a mile south across Airport Road, and who were brokering frontage on this very road out of an office at the Virginia Street corner in 1948. The woman who owned the north side of the road was a long-standing friend of the man who bought the south side's mansion. Reno was small, and its land moved among people who knew each other.

Silver Chaps

In the last week of October 1961 a burglar forced a rear door at 775 Airport Road and took a television set, and a set of silver chaps, spurs, saddle and bridle.

The police blotter called the place a residence. That is the detail to hold. By 1961 this address was a trailer court with well over a hundred spaces on it, and a reporter writing up a break-in still described the building that was entered as a residence — a house, with a back door, inside the court.

And somebody living in it owned show tack. Silver-mounted chaps and a parade saddle are not working equipment; they are what you wear to be looked at from a saddle, and they cost real money. A quarter of a mile south, the Hill place had been running horses for the divorce trade for twenty years and was fading out of the record. Somebody on this side of the road kept the habit.

Four weeks after that item ran, the street changed its name.

“I Planted Trees”

This is the answer to the question anybody asks who drives past: why are the trees in there so much bigger than the trees anywhere near them?

In June 1976, Helen Close went to the United States District Court in Reno and asked Judge Bruce Thompson to stop the State of Nevada buying right-of-way for a freeway. She named the state highway engineer, the governor, the attorney general, the state controller, the federal Secretary of Transportation, the Federal Highway Administration and the Department of Transportation, and she argued the environmental review had not been done properly. Four of the five proposed corridors for the new road went straight through her park.

Her own statement of why is the best thing in this entire file:

“I own a large, quiet mobile home park … and some of my guests have been with me for 20 years. I planted trees and did lots of other things to make sure that my guests would be just as peaceful and away from noise and unsightly highways as if this were their very own land.”

And on what the freeway would do: my guests will have to look day in and day out at an ugly concrete barrier twenty feet high.

She called them guests, not tenants. Twenty years in residence, in a mobile home park, by 1976.

Read that against the trees today. Cottonwoods that size are sixty to eighty years old. They were planted deliberately, by an owner who thought of the ground as somewhere people lived rather than somewhere rent came from, and who was prepared to sue the federal government to keep them standing where they were. She lost the wider war — the freeway came through the district — but the canopy is still there, and it is the most visible thing on the property.

October 1985

Not everything that happened on this ground is pleasant, and leaving it out would be a kind of lying.

On a Thursday evening in October 1985 a mobile home in the park caught fire. A neighbour, an aircraft mechanic with the Air Guard, heard what he described as a loud woof, opened his door, saw someone lying in the flames and fought the fire with a garden hose until help came. The woman who lived there was Edna Peterson. She was eighty-three, lived alone, and had worked as a maid. The park's owner, asked about her, said she was very quiet and kept her place spotless.

Investigators found that the fire had been set, and that she had been killed before it was lit. A man of sixty-five who lived across the lane, a retired glazier, was arrested within the week. He pleaded guilty the following April to voluntary manslaughter and third-degree arson and was sentenced to two concurrent six-year terms. They had known each other twelve years. There had been an argument.

The deputy district attorney made the point that mattered to everybody still living there: setting fire to one mobile home in a park of two hundred and forty-three is like setting off a bomb.

Helen Close was still the owner. She had been for thirty-three years.

What Became of It

The park passed out of her hands in the late eighties, to a limited partnership formed in 1987. In 2004 it sold for nine million three hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars, to a company that held it for seventeen years. In February 2021 it sold again, for twenty-one million four hundred and fifty thousand, to a limited liability company registered in Delaware four months before the purchase and managed from Sacramento.

The county now values the land at better than sixteen and a half million dollars and everything built on it at just over a million. That ratio is the whole story of the district in two numbers: the dirt is the asset, and the buildings are a rounding error.

Helen Close also owned a second park. In August 1965 she opened the Posie Post Trailer-Inn on Kietzke Lane, immediately north of this one — two months' courtesy rent to start, a free community aerial, and the office, naturally, back at the Travelier.

The streets inside the park are named for birds: Bobwhite Way, Kildeer Lane, Verdin Place. And Leisure Lane, which is not a bird and was presumably somebody's joke.

Standing There Now

Seven buildings on the assessor's card. The 1939 lodging block and the 1942 stone house. Two more small places from 1939 and 1949, each two bedrooms, siding on frame, heated by a wall furnace. One from 1961. One from 1959 with no bedrooms at all, which is the office — the low board-sided building with the shake roof and 777 GENTRY painted on a granite boulder outside it. And a metal shed from 1973.

Everything else — the two hundred and forty-three spaces, the lanes, the bird names — is infill around those.

What is remarkable about the stone house is not that it is handsome, though it is. It is that it is still there, eighty-four years on, in the middle of a commercial property worth twenty-one million dollars, where every economic argument says it should have come down decades ago. It survived because it was never in the way. The park grew around it, the trees grew over it, and nobody with a bulldozer ever had a reason to notice.

That is how most old buildings survive. Not because anybody protected them. Because nobody needed the space.

No photograph of it exists in any public collection. Nothing in forty years of newspaper coverage of this address uses the words stone, two-storey or eleven bedrooms. The only pictures are modern, taken by people who did not know what they were looking at, and the only reason anybody knows those two buildings are old is a county card with dates on it.

It is on private ground, in a residents' park, and it is not somewhere to go wandering. But it is forty feet off a public lane in south Reno, and it has been standing since the year before Pearl Harbor.

Resources & Further Reading

The county assessor's property record for this parcel supplies the building dates, the eleven bedrooms and four baths of the 1939 block and its commercial carding, the 1942 stone-on-masonry house with its fireplace and dugout cellar, the 1939 flatwork and garages, the three sets of apartment appliances dated 1945, and the two hundred and forty-three mobile home spaces carded in 1966, together with the acreage, the zoning and the sale prices of 2004 and 2021. The rural-box addressing on Airport Road appears in the Reno Gazette-Journal of 28 May 1942, page 15, and the Gazette-Journal of 17 February 1950, page 21, which also carries Wells Cabins and the Airport Apartments advertisement with its monthly rates and children welcome; a further Airport Apartments notice runs in the Nevada State Journal of 19 May 1950, page 21. The Hill real-estate office at the Virginia Street corner and the golf driving range are in the Nevada State Journal of 19 June and 1 September 1948. The grass fire of April 1952 is in the Nevada State Journal of 16 April 1952, page 7; Mrs. W. Vernon Heape and the stolen camera in the same paper of 1 October 1952, page 2. Vernon Heape's divorce summons runs in the Reno Gazette-Journal of 28 January 1950, page 8, and the decree in the Nevada State Journal of 22 August 1950, page 12. The county Board of Adjustment's refusal is reported in the Nevada State Journal of 11 August 1954, page 8; the city board's grant at 777 in the same paper of 13 August 1954, page 12, and in the Gazette-Journal of 14 August, page 3; the City Council ratification and the Cochran Ditch petition in the Gazette-Journal of 25 August 1954, page 5. The business licence for Travelier Court is in the Nevada State Journal of 29 August 1954, page 6. The bench warrant naming Helen Close Heape is in the same paper of 10 September 1954, page 10, and the assault on Charles Trimble and the theft of the mink coat in the issue of 8 December 1954, page 3. The private-garages advertisement runs repeatedly through 1957 and 1958, including the Nevada State Journal of 26 February 1958, page 16. Space 112 is advertised in the Nevada State Journal of 7 April 1961, page 27. The Cadillac hub caps are in the same paper of 7 July 1955, page 8, and the correction of Helen Close's occupation and her friendship with the Redfield family in the Reno Gazette-Journal of 29 August 1958, page 18. The burglary and the silver chaps are in the Nevada State Journal of 29 October 1961, page 4. The Posie Post Trailer-Inn opening notice runs in the same paper on 8 August 1965. The federal suit over the freeway corridor, and Helen Close's statement about planting the trees, are reported in the Reno Gazette-Journal of 19 June 1976, page 13. The fire of October 1985, the investigation and the 1986 plea and sentence are covered in the Reno Gazette-Journal across October 1985 and in April and May 1986.

• USGS topoView — the Historical Topographic Map Collection, including the Mt. Rose, Nevada 15-minute quadrangle of 1950 used at the head of this article. Public domain. The 1:24,000 Mt. Rose NE sheet of 1969 shows the same ground with the park already on it, labelled simply Trailer Pks.
• Washoe County Assessor — the property record and building cards for this parcel, which are the only documentary evidence that the two oldest buildings are as old as they are.
• Reno Divorce History — the University of Nevada project documenting the guest ranches of the residency trade. More than twenty-five operated around Reno; the great majority are named in no published list, which is why the possibility had to be tested here rather than assumed either way.
• Brown Station: Peleg Brown and the Damonte Ranch — the ranching ground immediately south and east of this parcel, and what happened to it.
• He Watched Reno Grow Past His Ranch: The Pecettis of 9300 Gateway Drive — another south Reno holding that the city reached and absorbed, and a 1918 house that did not survive the arrival.

Hero image: detail from the U.S. Geological Survey's Mt. Rose, Nevada 15-minute quadrangle, scale 1:62,500, 1950 edition, scan 321118, Historical Topographic Map Collection. U.S. Geological Survey, United States Department of the Interior. A work of the United States Government; public domain.