Wilbur D. May Center
Nevada
A department store heir brought home a shrunken head from South America, and it sits in a Reno museum.
Wilbur May was the third son of the man who founded the May Department Stores. He could have done anything. He chose ranching, flying, painting, and travel. More than forty trips around the world, and he kept bringing things back. Tang dynasty pottery. African masks. Inuit scrimshaw. Egyptian scarab figures. Greek icons. And a shrunken head from South America. All of it now sits in a museum in Rancho San Rafael Regional Park, about a mile off the road. The museum goes further than displaying the objects. It rebuilds the rooms they came home to. Visitors walk through recreations of the living room, the bedroom, the tack room, and the big game trophy room from May's Double Diamond Ranch in south Reno, a spread of twenty-six hundred acres. May moved to Reno in nineteen thirty-six and lived there until he died in nineteen eighty-two.
This is the first of 2 parts. The rest runs about 2 minutes and is read to you as you drive past. Hear the whole piece.
Egyptian scarab figures, Greek icons, wildlife dioramas and a shrunken head from South America
Written from Wikipedia, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Nearby, on the same roads
- Derby Dam 20.3 mi This low concrete wall east of Reno drained an entire lake off the map.
- Donner Memorial State Park 27.2 mi The pedestal under the pioneer statue at Donner is twenty-two feet tall because that was the depth of the snow.
- Lake Tahoe Dam 31.2 mi A Russian-born engineer once tried to drain Lake Tahoe's outflow all the way to San Francisco.
- Sugar Bowl Ski Resort 32 mi Goofy's famous holler started as an Austrian ski champion's yodel on these slopes.
- Fernley, Nevada 32.7 mi A hundred-year-old irrigation canal broke one January morning and put six feet of water in Fernley's houses.
- Ed Z'berg Sugar Pine Point State Park 37.3 mi The cross-country skiing and biathlon events of the 1960 Winter Olympics were held in what is now this park.