Marvin Sedway at 17

 

Marvin M. Sedway:
The Early Years of a Las Vegas Pioneer
Written by Paul Sedway

When Marvin Sedway was 15 years old he went west. Not in a covered wagon but in a Greyhound bus, which drove from bustling New York City to a very small - and quiet - town in Nevada, called Las Vegas, population 8,000. He changed buses in Chicago, Omaha, and Salt Lake City. His father had come to Las Vegas to work as a bookkeeper, and his parents had decided that the rest of the family should spend the summer there to see what it was like. His mother, brother and Marvin boarded a bus in June 1943 in Manhattan, and five and one-half days later arrived at the Greyhound Bus terminal on Main Street in Las Vegas.

So Marvin was a true pioneer, attending the only high school in town, Las Vegas High School on Ninth Street, with approximately 500 other students. With his family he lived in a cottage unit on the grounds of the El Rancho Vegas Hotel, now razed, and with his brother, took a bus to high school each morning, catching it at a tree in the desert located on the site of what became Club Bingo, then the Sahara Hotel. If they weren't at the bus stop, the bus driver would wait for them to run from their house.

Marvin was a pioneer in many other ways as well. He was always looking for new answers to old problems. When someone came up with an answer, Marvin always questioned it. In fact, he questioned almost everything, including the edicts handed down by his parents and teachers. Whenever I see the bumper strip that says "Question Authority," I think of him. In addition, he was, in many ways, a rebel. So it was an interesting coincidence that the university campus which Marvin, as a University Regent, helped locate in Las Vegas -- UNLV, took as it's mascot or trademark, "The Rebels".

Marvin spent only two years at Las Vegas High School, since he entered the school as a Junior. He went from there to the University of Nevada, then located in Reno only, and went on to study optometry at Pacific University in Oregon. When he started his optometry practice, he would drive up to 100 miles one day each week, to care for the eyes mostly of the children in various communities around Las Vegas, including Beatty, Virgin Valley, and Moapa, and other surrounding areas. He loved helping the young, the less fortunate, the disabled and the disadvantaged, a characteristic which he maintained throughout his life.