Nevada Day revisited: 1955 & 1975

Editor’s Note: This continues a series featuring the Appeal’s coverage of past Nevada Days.

Reprinted from the Nov. 1, 1955, Nevada Appeal:

As Carson City prepares its Nevada Day program with a concert by the Twelfth Naval District band at the capitol grounds, the West and Russia handed to each other rival “peace packages” that showed them still hopelessly far apart on how to end the Cold War.

The peace offers were contained in Western and Soviet draft security treaties put forward at the second plenary session of the Big Four foreign ministers conference.

The West’s package called for a “treaty of assurance” against aggression for an indefinite period of time. But it was made conditional on Soviet agreement to all-German elections and German unity in 1956.

The Soviets proposed, in turn, a 50-year European collective security treaty that would include the United States, with Red China as an observer. But it offered no prospect of early German unity. It called for scrapping of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and Western European Union alliances, as well as complete neutralization of Europe.

In Carson City, Marines from Pickel Meadows and Hawthorne Naval Ammunition Depot walked away with top prizes in four divisions of the parade.

Prize winners in the parade were announced by a panel of five judges, all top-ranking Navy and Marine officers.

Prizes were awarded to: Mounted Group, uniformed parade type — Marine Cold Weather Battalion; Mounted Group, posse type — Washoe County Sheriff’s Posse, first; Nevada White Hats, second; High School Bands — Reno high school, first; Mineral County High School, second; Grammar School Bands — Carson elementary, first; Fallon grammar school, second; Best Sustained Character — Sade Grant of Carson, first; Badwater Bill of Virginia City, second.

The five judges also gave special mention to the Stewart Indian school float, the Indian float from Schurz and the Nevada Ranch school float.