Rodney J. Reynolds was born on July 31, 1912, in Currie, Nevada. The settlement consisted of a one-room school house, a freight house, and a combination general store, post office, meeting place, and saloon. There were also three homes, one of which was uninhabited, and six families lived in the surrounding area.

Reynolds spent nine years in Currie, but his parents knew there were no grand opportunities in Currie and that it was no place to raise a family. The family moved to Elko, a large and bustling community of eighteen hundred, in the fall of 1921. Elko was the county seat, the division point for the Western Pacific, and the ranching center for northern Nevada. His father opened a meat market, bought a house, and Reynolds began his first real education at the Elko Grammar School. He finished his secondary education under the tutelage of the well-known educator Miss Knemeyer, and was graduated from Elko County High School with a diploma in science.

The rumblings of the Depression had not yet been felt in Elko when Reynolds left home to attend the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The Depression caused his father to lose his business, and Reynolds was forced to return home after only one year of college. The Depression had great consequences for his future life.

In the 1930s Reynolds held a multitude of short run-jobs: tank truck diver, surveyor, and procurement clerk for the Civilian Conservation Corps restoring Fort Churchill. As a young man he witnessed the revolution of American ideals in Roosevelt's New Deal policies. In the ensuing years this was to make as great an impression upon him as the Depression.

He married Margaret Ellen Walker of Sparks in 1937, and moved to Reno. He bought the Silver State Lodge, a motel built in the twenties for the divorce trade. The motel was located on old Highway 40—now West Fourth Street. He owned and operated the Silver State Lodge for twenty-six years.

During World War II Reynolds worked as a flight dispatcher for Pan-American Airways in the South Pacific on the islands of Funafuti, Wallis, and Canton. He returned to Reno in 1945 after the war and established himself as a businessman and civic leader. He joined the Rotary Club, was membership chairman and later became director of the Reno Chamber of Commerce. Reynolds was elected twice to the state assembly as a Republican in 1952 and 1954. He was a keen observer of Nevada cold war politics, which he describes in his oral history.