W. Wallace White, a native of Utah, was born in 1905. His family moved to McGill, Nevada, about 1910, due to the copper boom in that area. Mr. White received his education in local schools of White Pine County and at the University of Nevada. His major career was in the field of public health as a sanitary engineer for the Division of Public Health Engineering, Nevada State Department of Health.

Wallace White's memoir is real history. There is a completely real relationship to a series of incidents which were part of life in Eastern Nevada a half century ago. Jim Elliott's Buick was kept in a garage; the garage was of corrugated metal; the corrugated metal came from Kennecott; much metal was scrap thrown in a Kennecott dump; the dump was a wonderful place to play; children built forts out of trash metal; with a piece of pipe and black powder, even a cannon could be made; the play was dangerous, and one boy, at least, had his fingers blown off. This is not a logical sequence of historical ideas, but it gives dimensional reality to history. Later on, Elliott's Buick is described as a means of getting to Ely, but in the interim it has been a vehicle for insights into the economy and sociology of the area and era.

For the student of public administration and political science, it is valuable to see that politics can be involved in the planning of a golf course and the gardening practices of a truck farmer. It is more important to see, feel, and understand that each of these decisions involved conflicts between individuals who are living persons, not political abstractions. The sociologist can learn about the impact of the railroads on Nevada society, and also learn how clean drinking water and the need for toilet facilities can be critically important to the railroad's labor problems. Medical students can consider the health problems of Nevada, not in terms of statistics, but in terms of the foods people ate, the places they swam, and the means through which their medical needs were met. Engineering students gain insights into the fateful ways of career development, which can lead from hydraulics, to meat inspection, to certifying houses of prostitution, to approving the detonation of an atomic bomb.

White's memoir is a study which has beauty and warmth. These are terms often missing from the vocabulary of the historian and the social scientist. He talks about a place and an era in which there was friendship and warmth generated between people--in part, perhaps, because many people did not have much else but each other.