COWTOWN CHRONICLES

Thursday, January 15, 2004
Copyright © Las Vegas Mercury

Cowtown Chronicles

Gabbs

Pop.: 400

Industry: mining

Nearest city: Hawthorne (pop. about 3,700), 58 miles southwest

Distance to Las Vegas: 315 miles

Talk of the town:

Gold's got a hold on many a dustblown, dwindling Nevada community. One decade it's boom, the next it's bust. Makes you wonder about the evolutionary impulses of a Nevada small-town dweller. Conditioned to drop leaves in the dry times and spread a thick canopy in the good? Hunker down like a tortoise in winter? Anyway, Hazel Dummar seems to be in semi-calm waiting mode when I call her on the phone at the R&H Café in Gabbs. The R is for her husband, Ray, the H for Hazel.

"Well, there really isn't much to say," Hazel says. "We're just hoping something good's going to happen. The price of gold is back up. When it dropped, our population went down." That was about 10 years ago, when FMC Gold shut down.

But it's not just gold puppeteering the town. Hazel says in the 1980s, when steel mills closed "because of the environmentalists," the old magnesium mill in Gabbs closed, putting 300 employees out of work. (The magnesium went to the steel mills, and had been needed during World War II as well.) Before magnesium, it was tungsten.

With all this population loss, Gabbs lost a distinction. Since 1955, it was the only incorporated city (the rest are towns) in Nye County. But the state Legislature tore incorporation from the shrinking Gabbs in 2001.

"Gabbs was just a burr under the saddle" for Nye County, says Hazel, whose husband was the mayor when Gabbs was still a city. But she's hopeful the town will grow again, and expand upon its three churches and one café-service station-bar. "We're surrounded by BLM land, but we can buy it. We just hope we can do something good with it."

Well, and what about some help from the grave? Hazel's brother-in-law is none other than Melvin Dummar of Gabbs, who when Howard Hughes died claimed he once gave the millionaire a life-saving lift in the desert, and that in turn Hughes named him a beneficiary in his (undocumented) will. A movie was made about it. Nothing came of it.

Still, any hope? Any Hughes activity lately?

"Well, Howard Hughes has been dead a long time," says Hazel. "But Melvin, I see him every three weeks."--Heidi Walters