Sara Denton still awakens early, as she has since her childhood on a farm near Paducah, Kentucky, growing up in the Great Depression.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s steadfast and hopeful image graced the walls of her family home, as it did in countless others while the country struggled mightily to regain its footing. The stock market collapsed, the banks closed, and the speculators scattered, but
President Roosevelt had their backs. And, so, they kept the faith.
Sara turns 100 this week. Family and a wide circle of friends are with her to
celebrate her century. As a woman and lifelong Democrat, she had hoped to
propose a toast to the outcome of the 2024 presidential campaign and rest easy
knowing that she had lived long enough to see the first woman elected to the
highest office in the land.
That didn’t happen. But as she would tell you, life’s journey is full of surprises with
joys and heartaches around every turn. Obviously, she says, the struggle
continues.
Instead of wallowing in a loss, one she suspects might take the Republic with it,
she plays it for a smile with a wit that remains as sharp as ever.
How does she feel about the outcome?
“It kind of makes me wish I had Alzheimer’s,” she says.
For our purposes today, be thankful that my wonderful mother-in-law Sara
Denton remembers.
She remembers her daddy losing the farm to the bankers, then scratching out a
living for his family by sharecropping on another man’s land. “We grew everything
on the farm except sugar,” she says. “We ate everything on the pig but the
squeal.”
With the bankers’ doors closed, she took refuge through the doors of the public
library, reading an armload of books a week and the Paducah Sun-Democrat when
the family could afford it.
The books and public school led to an opportunity to leave the farm and start
college classes at Southern Illinois University. After a year, she answered the call
to serve her country against the fascists during World War II. Recruited by the
Signal Corps, she was among the thousands of “Code Girls” tasked with breaking
the Japanese and German military codes. When her group was asked if anyone
could type, she raised her hand and would up in the stenography pool for Lt. Gen. George Hays.
While living in Washington, D.C., she shared a second-floor apartment next to the
Statler Hotel near the White House.
“They would bring President Roosevelt up the alley and put him on the service elevator so no one would see him in a wheelchair,” she says. “We would wave out our window and call, ‘Hi, Mr. President!’ He would wave to us and tip his hat. He was our hero.”
As Sara told UNLV oral historian Claytee White, “From the day Roosevelt was
elected we had a picture of him in our house. And I still have it in my house.”
In addition to contributing to the war effort, she met a confident first lieutenant
from Caliente named Ralph Denton. They were married 64 years. After he
graduated from law school, thanks to the patronage of U.S. Sen. Pat McCarran,
their journey together led back to Nevada and, in 1959, to Boulder City, where they
would have a lasting positive impact on the community.
Through the years, she met Bess Truman and waved hello to her husband. She
met handsome John F. Kennedy when he was running for president and Ralph was
in charge of his Nevada campaign. She remembers the devastation she felt three
years later when he was assassinated.
She met Lyndon B. Johnson, Jimmy Carter, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden, too. All had their strengths and weaknesses, but all were trying to move the
nation forward toward an America in which equality was achievable.
The most impressive person she met wasn’t a president, but a preacher. She and
Ralph were fortunate to see the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. twice during his
April 1964 stop in Las Vegas: once before a mostly white crowd, and the second
time before a Black audience. The Dentons were just as devastated when King
was assassinated several years later.
Sara and Ralph had four children, one of whom would die tragically in early
childhood. Heartache? Sara could tell you all about heartache.
But today she’ll remind you about the importance of participating in the political
process, win or lose. Like so many women of her generation, Sara gained access
to politics as an unpaid and often unsung campaign volunteer. She would
eventually go on to manage the Las Vegas office of U.S. Sen. Howard Cannon as his
administrative assistant.
Sara will tell you about civic engagement, helping a neighbor and being active in
life outside your own self-interest. It doesn’t have to be a presidential campaign
to make a difference.
She could tell you about the time she and some friends started Boulder City’s Art
in the Park festival, which actually began in her home nearly six decades ago. Art
in the Park has grown into one of the largest judged shows in the West. But she
reminds me that it wasn’t started just for art’s sake, but also as a fundraiser for
the Boulder City Hospital.
Sara can tell you how she and Ralph worked to craft Boulder City’s remarkable
slow-growth ordinance, which has helped keep the bucolic town from being
entirely consumed by the monumental boomtown located just over the hill. To
this day I suspect there are developers who grumble when the Denton name is
mentioned.
She still reads several books a week, now with the assistance of a magnifying lens.
On Thursday morning, she watched President Joe Biden his address members of his Cabinet and staff. On closed-captioning she read the words Biden spoke about the
importance of ensuring a smooth transition and the peaceful transfer of power
from his administration to the next.
“Campaigns are contests of competing visions,” he said. “The country chooses one or the other. We accept the choice the country made.”
Then Biden added, “I’ve said many times you can’t love your country only when
you win. You can’t love your neighbor only when you agree.”
You know, that sounds just like something Sara Denton would say.
John L. Smith is an author and longtime columnist. He was born in Henderson and his family’s Nevada roots go back to 1881. His stories have appeared in New Lines, Time, Readers Digest, Rolling Stone, The Daily Beast, Reuters and Desert Companion, among others.
