Nobody reported seeing any ghouls, ghosts or goblins on their visits to the 10 cemeteries John & Alice Strom put on their Halloween themed fun rally on Sunday, October 28th. That’s probably a good thing!
Seventeen Porsches and their occupants ventured out on a sunny Sunday afternoon to visit 10 area cemeteries on a fun rally where they had to answer questions about the cemeteries and identify the locations of a number of photos. “We did a lot of planning putting this together,” said John. “We had to make sure you couldn’t just Google the answers to the questions. You had to go there to find the answers.”
Participants were given the list of 10 cemeteries in Reno, Carson City, Genoa, Dayton, and Virginia City and had to choose the order and the route they wanted to take to visit them. Total mileage for the drive was about 120 and it took 4-5 hours to complete.
In addition to driving some nice roads, the goal was to have participants visit some places they probably didn’t even know were there and learn from things about Northern Nevada history. Several of the questions were about early pioneers in the area.
Three cemeteries of particular interest were Huffaker in Reno, Pioneer and Stewart Indian School in Carson City. Huffaker was the first known cemetery in Washoe County and was a challenge to find. Pioneer is the first known cemetery in Carson City and is where Major William Ormsby and his scout were buried after they were killed at the Battle of Pyramid Lake on May 12, 1860. Carson City is in what was formerly known as Ormsby County. And the famous Native American basket weaver Dot so la lee (Louisa Keyser) is buried in the historic Stewart Indian School Cemetery.
When the participants arrived at Miguel’s Mexican restaurant for dinner, they turned in their answer sheets to be scored. Gloria Santamaria and Bernie Beauchamp took first place with a score of 19 out of 20. Second went to the Wilson family – Ron, Nicole, Jackson and Raelin. Rich and Karen O’Larey finished third. Each received a Halloween themed bottle of wine.
Ron and Denise Lewis, who earlier validated the viability of the questions and photos during a pre-run, helped out John and Alice on the event. The four of us met participants at the Dayton Cemetery with Halloween candy.
“Everyone I talked with had a good time,” Denise reported after the dinner at Miguel’s. It certainly was a “different” event for the club!
