KVIG Informative

Clark County required $7.2 million in private donations to remove Sen. Pat McCarran’s name from Southern Nevada’s airport in 2021, 73 years after the county itself put that name there. The same public record credits McCarran with winning federal money that helped build the valley’s airports and with writing the 1952 law that tightened who could immigrate into the United States. Only one of those legacies survived at the terminal.

Commercial aviation reached Las Vegas in 1920, when a strip named for its owners, Anderson Field, opened near today’s Sahara Avenue and Paradise Road on Thanksgiving Day, according to the Clark County Cannon Aviation Museum. Two early operators failed to build a lasting business there before brothers Earl and Leon Rockwell bought the field in 1925. Western Air Express president Harris Hanshue struck a deal with the Rockwells, and the airline began airmail service on April 17, 1926, according to UNLV. The first passengers flew out on a Douglas M-2 biplane on May 23 that year, and Maude Campbell became the first woman to fly into Las Vegas on June 10, paying $160 for a round trip routed through town between Salt Lake City and Los Angeles, according to the Cannon Aviation Museum’s history.

A separate airfield eight miles northwest of downtown followed its own path. Fuel distributor Pop Simon opened it as the Las Vegas Airport in 1929, and Western Air Express bought it in 1932, according to Air Combat Command’s official history of Nellis Air Force Base. The city of Las Vegas bought that field for $10 on Jan. 2, 1941, and the Army Air Forces leased it three days later to train aerial gunners, dedicating it that October as Las Vegas Army Air Field. The base was renamed Nellis Air Force Base on May 1, 1950 — a separate lineage from the civilian airport that still carries passengers through Southern Nevada today.

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Commercial aviation in the valley meanwhile took root on a third field. George Crockett opened a private airstrip south of town in 1941 and ran it as Alamo Airport, according to the Cannon Aviation Museum’s history.

The man whose name would eventually go on that field was already Nevada’s senior voice in Washington. Pat McCarran was born in Reno on Aug. 8, 1876, left the University of Nevada in 1901 to help run his family’s ranch, was admitted to the bar in 1905 after studying law while herding sheep, and sat on the Nevada Supreme Court, serving as chief justice from 1917 to 1919, according to the Architect of the Capitol. Nevada voters elected him to the U.S. Senate in 1932, where he served until his death. The Capitol’s own record credits him with sponsoring the Civil Aeronautics Act of 1938 and the Federal Airport Act of 1945, laws that steered federal money toward airports like the one taking shape in his home state.

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Clark County bought Crockett’s Alamo Field and reopened it on Dec. 19, 1948, as McCarran Field, naming it for the senator, according to a Las Vegas News Bureau photograph of the opening-day air show. Crockett’s company, Alamo Airways, stayed on as the field’s fixed-base operator until 1968, according to the Cannon Aviation Museum — the same year UNLV says the airport was renamed McCarran International Airport.

The Architect of the Capitol’s own biography lists McCarran’s other legislative legacy alongside his aviation work: the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, which the Capitol’s record describes as tightening the nation’s immigration laws, and a 1950 measure the same record calls the McCarran-Woods Act, which required registration of Communist organizations and barred their members from government jobs.

Clark County’s Board of County Commissioners voted Feb. 16, 2021, to strip McCarran’s name from the airport, on the condition that private donations cover the entire cost. Donors cleared the funding threshold for the first phase that October, and the Clark County Department of Aviation marked the airport’s new name, Harry Reid International, in an announcement dated Dec. 14, 2021. The senator’s name is gone from the terminal. His immigration law is still on the books.