Robert "Doby Doc" Caudill is best remembered as the curator of the museum located at the Hotel Last Frontier. This gentleman is so colorful I really didn't know where to begin with all the information I had. I decided the best thing to do to describe this gentleman was to just copy-type his interviews that were published by the Las Vegas Sun in October of 1972 by Judy Carlos. The following are these interviews in their entirety:

Dark, with a funeral air about his clothes and demeanor, Robert Caudill stepped off the train and on to the dirt streets of Las Vegas In 1906.

Although he had worked the cow towns and rode herd in his native Texas, at 16 Robert Caudill thought himself as a gambler. Be has lived as a gambler until this day. Folks call him "Doby Doc." He has that gambler look about him alright. Black hair, slicked down. Black eyes under heavy brews which bore in even when he is only asking, ''How about a cup of tea?"

He is 82 years old and thinking about moving on. The city of Las Vegas, and the County of Clark, are moving next door. He feels crowded.

Robert Caudill may be one of the last of the true "westerners" in our midst, a man whose tales are partly based on fact, partly on fancy, partly on wishful thinking, and always mysteriously compelling like an old letter found in someone else's basement.

"Nowadays you got to have a permit to plant a tree on your own property," Doby Doc snorts.

"Why I read the other day you can't even drive up Pahrump and stop by the road for a cup of coffee like we used to every Sunday," he continues. "If you do they give you six months. That's six months for a cup of coffee by the side of the road and three months if you shoot your husband. Aw, hell, people have gone plain nuts."

For most of his adult life Doby Doc has been collecting the remnants of the past and present.

His collection may rival anything in the Smithsonian Institution's Western Americana, but it is not housed in such fancy surroundings. Instead it gathers dust in a series of weathered wooden buildings in Northern and Southern Nevada.

The value of this mound of Conestoga wagons, surreys, funeral coaches, fire engines, coal-burning trains and steam engines, oil rigs, complete school houses, furniture, coach lanterns, clothing, paintings, wooden Indians and books and civic documents is incalculable.

It is catalogued in only one place, the mind of this man. Most of it could be copied and has by decorators with a passion for pot-bellied stoves, but not replaced.

The artifacts are in remarkable condition because of the dry, hot climate of the desert country which retards the progress of rust in a thousand ghost towns.

But Doby Doc is the true original in the museum, the one memory which cannot be copied or replaced, a man of the American West -- slaty, a bile full of Archie Bunkerisms both wise and prejudiced, courtly and rough-hewn, sentimental and ruthless -- and mortal.

For several years a relatively small amount of his antiques and some of his buildings were clustered near the old Frontier Hotel in a re-creation of a western town. It was one of the most popular tourist attractions in the county.

But when new investors over the hotel, Doby decided they were not honorable men and overnight he yanked everything be owned off that property and retired it to a series of warehouses not far from the Las Vegas Strip.

A few years ago he toyed with the idea of contributing to a Nevada museum, but according to his friends, he became angry at a Nevada governor and declared he would never make a deal here again.

Since that time be has been selling some of his collection's larger pieces like the wagons and trains to collectors in other states. But he denies the story of his purported feud with the former governor.

The politician reportedly told some bemused constituents, "Aw, once you've seen an old wagon you've seen them all."

Doby feels the same way about politicians, with a few exceptions such as the late Senator Pat McCarran, "a hell of a fella."

"We haven't had a President since Hoover and they threw eggs at him," he growls.

McCarran, along with SUN Publisher Bank Greenspun, another long-time friend, rate Doby's four-star accolade he bestows on few men, "a real despar-A-do," or "the only guy I'd take with me if I was gonna rob a bank."

"It's too bad those fellas never could see eye-to-eye. They would have made a hell of a team," he said.

Doby ran saloons and gambling houses in some of the most colorful towns in Nevada history including Rawhide, Tonopah, Elko and Goldfield, where, for a time, he worked alongside the world-famous Tex Rickard as cashier of the Northern Club.

"Rickard was just another Benny Binion," Doby says in tribute to his long-time Las Vegas pal. "I learned one thing from him. He always told me play your own game. That's tough enough in this world. Did I have any money on the Gans-Nelson fight? Hell, you know I did."

"You know, I'll never forget one time when I was a kid back in Plainview, Texas, must have been 10 or 12 years old, course I always had that gamblin' in me. I went to a damn carnival or circus or whatnot and this guy had that shell game and I must of had eight or 12 silver dollars in this Bull Durhan tobacco sack tied to me. I lost until I got the "Cinch of Christ" on this old guy. The "Cinch of Christ," I said. Where I couldn't lose. So I put her down there all on this pea. Well, you knew, what kind of a cinch I had. The pea wasn't there."

Down home in Plainview, Texas, or up In Rawhide, Nevada, every story had a moral or a stern admonition at the end. Doby obliges:
"I didn't have this old guy. Oh, he was tall He had a finger - seemed like It must have been this long, maybe a foot. Of course he shouldna let a kid play. But, Hell, anything went in those days. He pointed that finger, and he says, 'Sonny, this might be a Guh-Rate lesson to yuh. Remember, says, NEVER, EVER play the other man's game."

Waving his finger under your nose, he drives home the instruction: "That saved me a million dollars if it saved me a quarter."

"When I was gamblin," he continues, "my competitors were looking in the window and I was doing all the business. You know jealousy, envy and those things are the worst poison you can take into your body. To hell with your competitors. Take care of your own business and you'll take care of them. You'll bust 'em. While they are worrying about you -- you're makin' money."

His property is screened from public view by a row of elm trees and protected by extensive fencing and he keeps a staff of watchmen to guard whatever he cannot cover with a sweep of the Colt 45 at his hip.

At 82 years of age, Doby Doe's hair is still black and his eyes are as steady and alert as they ever were at a poker table in Rawhide 66 years ago.

No one knows how much money he has made or lost or still has and he isn't telling. But he sports a wad as big as a softball and the only thing holding it together is a rubberband.

If you tease him about never owning a wallet he will pull out one which is stuffed with bills and held together with a safety pin next to two uncut diamonds each as big as a pinto bean.

His customary dress around his "ranch" is a pair of Oshkosh B'Gosh overalls loosely fitting and cool. There is no air conditioning on the ranch. Oddly for a man who might seem to be possessed with possessions because of his ownership of so much of the state's historical artifacts, he lives simply.

In fact he cares little for personal possessions, or the gimcraekery of a technological world.

He lives in one of about a dozen wooden buildings on his property which resemble weathered barns.

The kitchen is small, neat, and functional with a plain wooden table and two chairs. The master bedroom contains a magnificent hand-carved bed and chests which were once owned by Eilley and Sandy Bowers, The Bowers Mansion, 1Q mile.

The Bowers Mansion, 10 miles north of Carson City, Nevada is now a state monument to the gold rush days. Eilley was running a boarding house at Gold Hill when she met Sandy. Their marriage also joined two fabulous Gold Hill claims.

Sandy died four years after they built their house and took a Grand Tour of Europe to purchase its furnishings. Their 12 year-old daughter Persia also died.

A broke and lonely Eilley turned to renting rooms in her mansion and telling fortunes before she died in California in 1903.

A group of Reno women restored the house between 1946 and 1967.

This man who now owns their elaborately carved bed never met them because he came to the state in 1906.

Doby never sleeps in the ornate bed even though he says, "It's a pretty good one." He prefers "my single bed" in another room of his own house in Clark County.

The walls were jammed with cabinets and chests which are filled with books of history on the West. Photographs special monographs on western folklore, the art and words of cowboy Fredric Remington, whom he greatly admired, and articles and books on philosophy which he reads through the night.

On those few occasions when Doby has to leave the ranch to come into town to visit his closest friend, Benny Binion, or to do business with one of his employees or a close friend drives him. Casual visits by strangers are discouraged in order to protect the valuable antiques.

It was through the generous introduction of his good friend Binion that this writer was permitted to come and visit on more than one occasion "So that Doby could size you up."

The first meeting was arranged by Binion in a private dining room of Binion's Horseshoe Club where a large oil portrait of Doby by artist Julian Bitter once hung on the wall overlooking the poker parlor.

Today the painting hangs in the private office of Binion along with some historic photographs of one of the last of the great cattle drives in Texas.

A callow young fellow with stern countenance in front of the crew is one of the young fellows who rode drag or "the tail end where the g----n dust swallows you up." His name was Robert Caudill, _ also known also known as Doby Doc.

Also present at the first meeting was the SUN's Ruthie Deskin, a long time friend of Doby's and Binion.

One was struck immediately by the contrast between the raucous neon scene outside on Fremont Street and the red leather and carved wood serenity of the border-style dining room with its Mexican decor and the presence of this courtly, soft-spoken man in striped trousers and gray-striped black swallow-tail coat, light gray 10-gallon hat, string tie and large diamond stickpin.

Binion and Mrs. Deskin talked of how the town had changed and about an the fun everybody seemed to have building it and how nobody seems to have any fun any more since the place went slick with Wall Street types and strangers.

And Doby began to loosen up a little and to tease Binion about how folks used to say he had bought an old time politician or two with an automobile or another favor and Binion declared as how that particular fellow was a prince among men whose car had simply broken down between here and Tonopah, and he needed a loan.

"Now you didn't expect a gentleman like that to walk to Las Vegas, did yuh?"

And Doby said, "of course not,'' and chuckled over the time "Ole Senator Nores decided to join the show at the Frontier. "

It seems that Sen. E. L. Morer of Pioche fancied himself a leading student of good whiskey and music and one night decided to play along with Phil Spitalny's all girl orchestra. With little art or precision, he climbed on stage and began to fiddle around.

"Ole Phil gave him the downbeat right on the head,'' roared Doby.

One by one the waitresses and other Horseshoe personnel who have been there for many years discreetly knocked on the door and asked to come into greet Doby. There were many hugs and kisses exchanged. Then Binion's children began drifting in.

One by one the children said, "We heard Doby was coming to town and I just wanted to say hello.''

He basked in the glow of their greetings and clearly enjoyed his adopted role of combination great uncle or grandfather to Binion's children and grandchildren.

All the while he ignored the great platters of food the kitchen help had sent in and picked only now and then at the single salad he had insisted was enough for him along with a cup of tea.

This was the rough and ready cowboy, and gambler, from the Wild West? This was the gun toter with a mean eye and a gambler's heart?

The movies you saw about the Gold Rush, the flinty-eyed gamblers and highway men were "all crap," he said. "Come out to the place and I'll show you around and we'll talk."

"Tex Rickard's place? Sure, we had a few fights. Aw hell, you had more order and honor in them saloons and sporting houses than they do anywhere today," Doby Doc said.

He was holding court recently on the tree-shaded walk outside the weathered building he calls home. A cup and an enameled tin saucepan filled with tea rested on a box at his elbow. His visitors sat in a semi-circle on chairs and boxes.

Doby had told us in June that he believed in numerology and that the "numbers are all bad" in June so he always "lays low" that month. But now it was a steaming late Sunday afternoon in July and he was feeling as lively as a mule.

Doby never cared much for new - fangled improvements. There is no air-conditioning in his house or anywhere on the "ranch." When he had many of his Nevada antiques on display in the Last Frontier Village on the Strip several years ago he lived in a boxcar he outfitted behind the old Frontier Hotel. But on this day he spoke of glamour. Not that Doby Doc ever went Hollywood.

No sir.

There a lot of people in that world center of mythology who did their best to make him a town character. Trouble was that Robert Caudill also known as Doby Doc, was and still is a man of enormous personal dignity.

He went to Hollywood. But he never adopted its gaudy ways.

Hollywood producers who churned out western stories in the 30s and 40s were "lame-brained bastards'' who didn't know how to tell the true story of the winning of the West, he said.

But he had two close friends to whom he gave his highest accolades for men and women -- "A real desper-A-do, a friend" and "my sweetheart." They were Norma Talmadge and Bing Crosby.

Bing, who was for a time a neighbor and gentleman rancher in Elko County, gave Doby Doc his most prized possession -- a plain silver moneyclip with St. Christopher on one side and an inscription on the other side -- "Bing. Merry Christmas. 1942."

The crooner had a favorite story about Doby which he once included in an autobiography. Doby, with a little persuasion, especially from his pal Benny Binion, doesn't mind telling it himself.

Doby ran several nightclubs in the Elko area in the 30s and 40s and his collection of western memorabilia was already well known to collectors -- especially the celebrities who came to work and play in Northern Nevada.

A number of those people, notably Ted Lewis, William S. Hart, and W. C. Fields even contributed hats they had worn in the movies to his collection. "Tell 'em about old Sophie Tucker," Binion had urged.

"Old Sophie was up there in Elko playin'. After I left the Tonopah and Goldfield country I was up around Reno, Winnemucca and Elko which I kind of adopted as a headquarters," Doby explained. "It was around 1910 or 11 or somewhere thereabouts when I first went. Oh, I had several clubs there. The Silver Dollar. The Rosebud."

"Anyway Sophie came down to the club I had there I guess. She got mad the night before. I had a big drunken party goin' on there. Think the ticket was $1,500 on that one. Forty. Sixty people.

"Old Walt Whitaker, remember him, from Yerrington? He and I staggered in there drunk. We'd been out. And we staggered into this table. It was my table to start with. "And she says, 'Well what are you drunks doin' in here?' "So I says, 'This is my table, you old (blankety-blank). "I says, 'You don't like it, get up and leave.' And she just sat there. You know she had the guts of a guvmint mule.

"So the next day old Sophie came down to my house. "And she says, 'Mistah Doby,' and that made me mad callin' me Mister, you know. She says, 'Aren't you gonna give me some kind a souvenir to remember you by?' "Well I says, 'Sure, Sophie. Take that anvil over there. "That damn thing was nearly as big as she was."

Normally, Doby is the most courtly of gentlemen, always remarking on what appears to be your favorite color or a dress he fancies. He remembers the women of Rawhide, Tonopan and Goldffeld with respect and affection for each of them whether they took in laundry or reclined on couches upstairs over the saloons.

"You know some of the greatest and prettiest women were in those sporting houses. And some of the greatest and prettiest were ugly as hell" he said. "But their poise and manner and their goodness is what brings a woman out. Beauty is, you how, the old saying, only skin deep. But some of the most attractive were not pretty at all."

To live on the frontier and remain feminine was a tough job," one of his listeners interrupted. "Well, it was a different setup to what it is now," he answered. "They had, I don't know, more modesty and so forth."

One of the most beautiful women he knows now is clearly his helper whom he insists on introducing to visitors as son" because she is so pretty.

During the afternoon she collected a flour sack full of silver tokens Doby had saved from abandoned bars and sporting houses in the deserted mining towns.

Each of the coins was marked with the name of the establishment and its worth in trade. For instance, it might read "Jane and Betty's, one-tenth of a cent." The sack was marked, "Lamoille."

His helper is an avid western history buff and wanted the tokens in her collection. He gave them to her as a gift despite her earnest desire to pay for them.

Then taking notice of the four wheel drive vehicle one of his guests had just purchased he issued a warning. "You want to always carry plenty of water, gas and food. I never did get lost but I got stuck," he said. "I walked off the desert one time. Broke an axle on my car. Two nights and two days and the snow was almost knee deep on top, frozen, you would step on it and you'd bust down through it, you know. Damn near didn't make that one."

He started collecting the abandoned possessions of the hard-luck miners and busted gamblers and their women shortly before World War I. When anyone asks why he did he can't supply an answer.

Whole towns, including a schoolhouse from Caliente which he recently purchased complete with desks, blackboards, and books, were hauled onto over rugged desert roads by truck, car, mule, wagon and even his back over a period of many years.

He has a warehouse full of early-day records of Nevada mining towns including some of the first voter-registration lists in the state. The schoolhouse from Caliente is the one in which attorney Ralph Denton's mother taught in 1916 the boys and who later became leading citizens of Clark County. Denton's father, Floyd D. (Babe) Denton attended school there in 1901.

Parts of the glorious wood-burning trains Doby collected can be seen at an exhibit just outside of Boulder Dam on the Nevada side.

"Did you ever run those trains? How did you get them down here?" a visitor asked. "Well, mostly on trucks," he said. "Sure, I run one a few times up and down a track. When I was a kid, I always wanted a train of my own," Doby grinned.

Most of his antiques were moved to Southern Nevada in the late 40s with the assistance of long-time Las Vegas businessman William Moore who contracted with Doby to fill the Last Frontier Village and to appear there daily to explain the collection to visitors and to hypnotize the children with his tales of the old West.

One of those children who grew up hanging on Doby's every word was SUN sportswriter Don Chase who told Scene Magazine, "He was my idol. That's all. My idol. You know the kids could go in the saloon there and I remembered my father would take me and he would have a beer and I would have a sarsaparilla."

Doby was "tremendous with kids," Chase said. "He would sit down there at the end of the bar and tell us great stories and never get tired. You know one time when Binion wanted to put up that display of a million dollars in the Horseshoe Club and Doby carried the money right down the street from the bank to the club all by himself with that big horse pistol on him. Wow. Doby Doc. He was a hero for all the kids."

The old gambler said, however, he doesn't hold much with that word "hero" or any of the rest of that "Hollywood crap." He said he never saw a man anxious to draw a gun on another man in the middle of a saloon -- "a dark alley was more likely" in 1906.

"The reason you had more order in them saloons than you have today is because if one of them follows didn't take care of some fellow who wanted to fight, then one of the bouncers would just throw 'em out the back door," he snorted. "We never did have much trouble. Tex Rickard left the Goldfield-Tonopah area because he was using the money from the Gans-Nelson fight to open up and promote Madison Square Gar- den in New York."

"I was with Tex and he gave me an interest in the Northern Club," Doby continued. "I was in charge of the cashier's cage -- besides certain gamblin' games. Oh, hell, I never worked a year for wages in my whole life. Always work for yourself," he advised his recent visitors. "Oh yeah. I'd rather have a peanut stand than the best job in the country. Sure you don't want some tea or a drink of water or something?"

In one of his warehouses the safe in Tex Rickard squirreled away the money which built Madison Square Garden now rests in dusty anonymity.

"Rickard was like Benny Binion, you know." Doby Doc said. "A great guy, and smart as they come. Why I remember when these new people came to town and took over on the Strip they didn't know nothing. One time they needed several million dollars to get them through the weekend and they forgot about the banks being closed. They had to go down and borrow the money from Binion to get through the weekend."

''A real gambler always keeps enough cash on hand to do anything or go anywhere," he harrumped. "Yeah, Tex had over three and a half million dollars in that safe there when he put me in. Most of it was gold. Real gold," Doby said.

He was unwrapping his own sizable wad of bills to give an associate some cash so he could conduct some business in town.

"Wrapping this here money here makes me think what Tex said to me," Doby muttered: "He said, 'Doby, always keep your goddamn money racked up and your pistol cocked.' By Golley, that's about the way he went, too. You know, it was so if you got in a crap game or somethin' you had your money in order, racked up like this. It's a habit you form and you never forget it that way."

"Don't you keep your pistol cocked?"

"Most of the time," he said with a steely glance to let all know lust how dumb that question was. "If it's dark."

"That gun Doby wears. You better ask him about it," his friend Dick advised.

"It belonged to his uncle, Texas John Slaughter, one of the most famous men of the West."

But Doby Doc didn't want to talk about his 45 just yet.

"Can you hit the side of a barn with it?" I'm not aimin' at no barns," he said. "Sometime maybe I will tell you about my Uncle and those bastards Generals chasing the border raider Pancho Villa through Mexico. But I have to be careful. Think about it. You wouldn't betray a confidence would you?"

He still has not told the story. But the history books say that General Black Jack Pershing and his men chased a ghost up and down the countryside with comic lack of success when they were not engaging in gunfights with the local populace who took the position they had been wrongfully invaded by a foreign power.

At any rate they never caught up with the elusive Pancho Villa and all Doby will say is that he and Uncle John were there.

Texas John Slaughter was the Sheriff of Tombstone, Arizona, after the OK Corral and Wyatt Earp gave it international notoriety. Some years back Disney studio produced an entire television series based on his life.

History tabled him as an absolutely ruthless and fearless man who believed the best way to bring about law and order for Tombstone after the OK Corral turned it into a battleground was to shoot first and ask questions later.

He was renowned for leaving the men he slew out on the desert instead of bringing them back strung over the rump of a horse. Wandering outlaws and gunmen started bypassing the town after one look at those not welcome signs.

"Aw, hell," Doby said when asked about him. "He was just a rancher. He never wanted to be Sheriff. All he wanted to do was go back to ranchin' and he did when he got the place cleaned up. That's all."

What makes a tough guy and how can you spot him?

"Oh his fellow man makes a man a tough guy, I guess," Doby said. "In most cases. How can you tell? Huh? I don't know. Like a cop. You can smell 'em. There are not many tough people in this world. It's the way you feel. If they were really to tell the truth people would be afraid of it. If produced a real western picture the general public wouldn't appreciate it. They want a lot of flowery stuff and passion and action and stuff that didn't really exist."

"I think most of the action took place with a shotgun from behind," Doby's friend Dick added. "You know, where it was safe. People didn't want to take chances then anymore than they do now, you know."

Doby sat silently, lost in thought.

"Well, who was the dirtiest dog you met up north? Who was the rattiest rat of them all," he was asked.

"Well, I dunno," he grinned. "Maybe Al Cahlan, ha, ha, the late newspaperman. Unless it was his boss. No. I don't mean that. I don't know one bad man or one bad woman in the world now. And not one that I hold malice against. I haven't got a bad thought against anybody."

"It was in Elko where I had the Silver Dollar and the Rosebud that I met old Petey China. I just read an article about him the other day," Doby said changing the subject.

"Big sheep man. Couldn't write his own name. Worth millions and he come in there one night in that club I had it leased out then. And this smart, fresh bartender-Petey had been shipping sheep then," Doby began with an elaborate portrayal of a man sniffing the air. "This bartender (sniff, sniff, sniff) went and said, 'Petey, you SMELL bad." More sniffing.

"And Petey, he said, "mistuh, maybe in one hour you smell bad.' So Pete, he come over to the Commercial House over there and he said, 'Body, you want to sell house?' I said I sell any Goddamn thing I got. I says, 'Which one'? He says, 'One where tree is.' Well I had big trees on this property where the club was you know."

"'How much you take?' Old Petey asks me," Doby continued. "Well I didn't know there had been a big argument or I could have got any amount i guess.

"I just says offhanded 'Maybe $35,000, I guess, Pete.'

"He says, 'You got checkbook?'

"And he could hardly sign his name on the blank check from First National. I'd just give $15,000 for that club a few years before and this was in The Thirties and petty big money.

"He never asked how long the lease was--show you how lucky he was," Doby laughed. "That was the last part of August, I think. About the 28th or 29th.

"On Sept. 1 the lease expired. He went back over there to the Basco (Basque) who was running the place," Petey says to the owner, 'What time your rent due, Raymond?

"'Why,' Raymond sez, 'Bye Golly, Pete tomorrow or the next day. Sept. 1.' Petey says 'Sept. 2 you get out of here, you Basco Sunavabitch..'

"And he made 'em move out and they fought for a week a two and he doubled the at on then finally let 'em have it."

As his guests collapsed in laughter Doby added, "Why that Petey China was more picturesque than Howard Hughes ever thought of bein'," and no one denied it.

"Now Doby I am going to ask you a question. Will you promise to tell us the truth?"

"Nah. I won't promise nothin'," he replied.

"Well, I heard, that is the rumors are that you were pretty good at catchin' up with trains. I mean. Well they say you robbed a few trains to make your fortune."

"I've done everything that's HONEST," he declared, "from bank robbery on up."

"You don't think much of bankers then?"

"I just use banks for convenience."

Bankers take your money for their convenience and not yours, don't they?"

"Not mine they don't," he said, adding "There's only one banker worth a damn and that's a woman. Tell her when you see her I love her."

"What was the name of that gang that robbed the bank and they made a movie out of it?"

"Butch Cassidy. it was about 1911 in Winnemucca."

"Were they any good?"

"Well, they were pretty good. They got the money."

"How did these men stack up?"

"Aw, those people had more honor than some of these long haired preachers do now. If they owed yah anything they'd pay yuh. Their word was their bond."

World War I began Doby Doc was back living in Elko and running a few clubs and doing a little cattle business but he was one of the first four Nevada men to enlist to serve his country.

That decision was one of the few times his gambler's instinct succumbed to youthful naivete to hear him tell It. After the war and a lifetime of reading he concluded that the international bankers and the big corporations In the U.S. and other countries hornswaggled everybody into helping them make money.

"There's going to be an awful time ahead," he said one day last June when he was not feeling well and the summer heat was oppressive.

"I don't go along with these hippies but I can understand bow some of these boys feel comin' home with an arm a leg shot off and they got the drug habit and all and no lobs to look forward to," he said. "You'd looking for a place where you can get out of the line of fire."

"Hell I wasn't about to get shot up for some corporation," be continued. "I got shot once though. I came out of World War I with $50,000 in my pocket and that was a lot of money in those days."

He allowed as how be would rather convince the interview on another day since "I always lay low in June."

"I'Il visit with'you later in the summer when the numbers are right again," he said.

"Do you believe in numerology?" ology ?''

"Yes, I do and the world too. I know because I have experienced things I"ll tell you about sometime. I know because I've seen gamblers--hell I've done it muhself--tell you which card is gonna come up next. I've read a lot of books on it."

Later he said it was another hot day in June when he was shot in World War I.

"I had this tailor shop right on the base. I was stationed near San Diego Bay in the Quartermaster Corps. When they sent us boys down there they forgot to tell the Army and when we got there we were all alone. Stepped off the train and there was no one there. No sign. No buildings. Nothin'. So for several weeks I paid a farmer to board us until the Army got there."

"Anyway 'twas two or three years after the war before I ever got my money back from the damn government. How true. How true.

"Anyway in the back of this shop I was sellin' whiskey and we had gamblin'. Hell, I've always had gamblin'," he continued. "One day this Colonel and me had been drinking and we was laying low down in this ditch and I got shot right in the foot because it was behind the rifle range."

He was happy to get back home to Nevada there people took better aim and then only when it was for something important like searing a claim jumper.

One time Doby Doc and the men who work for him dug an enormous hole at the rear of his property in Clark County. They intended to build a modern concrete warehouse with a huge, reinforced basement which could be used as a bomb shelter, because Doby was greatly concerned about the things he read about the atom bomb.

But one day shortly after the rough digging had been concluded a building inspector Doby likes to burlesque as a prissy little man peeked from around the digging equipment and spoiled it all;

"He says you got to have your own contractor's license to dig a hole on your own property. He says it coats $25. I'm not gonna start paying for permission to dig my own holes. 'Like Hell I will,' I said."

He built his warehouse elsewhere in the state.

The first crater, about 180 feet by 120 feet remains. Parked alongside it is a large inter-state bus much like those Greyhound used to operate 25 years ago.

"What's that for?" the visitor asks. "You might say it's speculation," Doby replies.

Elsewhere on the property a Chinese Joss House, a place of worship built by the Chinese who were imported to build the railroad in Nevada lays in dust covered places on a dirt floor in a ramshackle warehouse with sun-warped walls of scrap lumber. Some of the pieces, including paintings, may date back to the Ming Dynasty.

Robert Caudill, also known as Doby Doc, former cowboy, Gold Rush gambler, and businessman is resolutely dedicated to preserving some part of the past even if the rest of us are hell-bent on blowing up the present.

That doesn't mean be won't stand ready to make a dollar our of modern circumstance.

During World War II he thought the Army might need fresh meat for the men who were engaged in some kind of secret project up near windswept and lonely Wendover, Nevada.

So he went in the hog business and the garbage disposal business. Refuse he collected at the government camp fed the hogs he sold them.

"There was a guy named Jimmy Doolittle who used to come over my way because he liked to go huntin'. We became friendly but he never said a word about what they was doin'. But I knew it was somethin' because one day me and my boys were out with the hogs and all of a sudden there was the biggest boom I ever heard and a great rush of wind and me and the hogs all fell down. One of my boys, he says, 'Good God, Doby, what was that?"

Years later the facts were told. Doolittle and his men were "practicing" their Tokyo raid over the dusty wastes of Nevada.

By that time it had already occurred to Doc that the wide open spaces he had known and loved as a boy and man were no longer isolated from the rest of the world. There were new frontiers for a man who couldn't stand to be crowded.

His friend Benny Binion was going to open up a real replica of the best of the old time saloons and gambling houses in Las Vegas which was waking out of a long sleep following the boom days when the government was dam building on the Colorado River.

Then hotelman Bill Moore invited Doby to come on down and join him. Doby Doc loaded up truckloads of his precious antiques from the ghost towns and headed South for Moore's Frontier (hotel) Village.

"It was about 1947 or '48. Can't remember which," Doby said recently as he talked with a group of friends in the shade of a tree outside his door.

"Oh, Benny and I worked together and were friends and in business together and different things. We opened the Horseshoe Club in 1951 and I had an interest, a small interest. Why didn't I stay up north? Too goddamn cold for me. Cold bothers a pauper or a rich man-either one."

"Pat McCarran and former Nevada senator Key Pittman I guess would be the last of the real western guys. Old Key was liable to come into a saloon, even the time he almost died, and shoot out all the lights," Doby continued. "How do you keep your youth and your health,'' a friend asked. "You seem to watch your diet. But you don't seem to like doctors much."

"Why I wouldn't have one of the _______________," Doby said. "Pat McCarran always said there was only one racket better than doctors and that was the sky pilots. You know. Preachers. He was a witty guy you know. He said the best doctor an earth was Old Mother Nature and the greatest lawyer was Father Time." "Old Key, you know, was a heavy drinker. But a brilliant son of a gun he added and then drifted off Into lonely thought.

"Where does a fella go now if he wants seclusion?" someone asked.

"Damned if I know unless its Hell," he snapped. "Like the bear. I saw a cute picture. Maybe some of you seen it. Here is two rangers discussing somethin' and this big 'bar' a standing there. One ranger says to another, 'He wants to get out of the park. Thar's too many people in here.' I thought how true, how true. A good picture."

"Do you play cards anymore?" "Nah, my eyes. I ruined my eyes playin' poker. I read all night. I read until 7 o'clock this morning. I have something I want to give you. It's the eulogy they read over poor Riley Grannan, one of the greatest gamblers that ever lived."

Several minutes later be returned from the building in vvhich he sleeps to hand over a maroon leatherette book published by the A. Carlisle & Co. of Nevada at Reno in 1952.

"I first had that printed in Rawhide," Doby said. "I let them have mine to copy first and they've done right well. There was this little bitty guy at Riley Grannan's funeral in Rawhide, April 3, 1908, and he was so drunk I was wonderin' if he got it all. A court reporter. I paid him $60.00 to take it down." "What made Grannan the greatest?" "Well, Riley, he was a great race horse man. From Kentucky. I guess he was the greatest race horse gambler. He wasn't a greater gambler than Tex Rickard because he got busted' a lot of times," Doby said.

"When he got busted that time over there--and died--why Nat Goodwin, the actor, and George Graham Rice, the big confidence man--I got a book o his life--they staked Riley Grannan. And he got busted the first night dealin' Faro. They put his limit too high for his bankroll. Got busted so got disgusted and went down the line was - the whorehouses. He got drunk and got pneumonia and froze. That was the way he died. Yessir. He died that way."

The miners and the dance hall girls and gamblers of Rawhide took up a collection and they hired the great Los Angeles orator, W. H. Knickerbocker, a man who was an unfrocked minister and a disciple of Ingersol the philosopher, to come read over him.

The former minister had tried his luck in the theater and lost and then discovered a little gold. He was prosperous again but he left his work on a windlass to speak over the body of a friend in a vaudeville theater at the rear of a saloon.

Knickerbocker told the throng that he spoke not as a minister but as a simple prospector. "I make no claims whatever to moral merit or to religion except the religion of humanity, the brotherhood of man."

Sixty four years later Doby Doc, watching the sun going down behind tall buildings which now surround him with unwanted, unloved urbanization, read a favorite page of the eulogy for Riley Grannan. '

''He was born in the Sunny Southland in Kentucky. He died in Rawhide. Here is the beginning and the end. I wonder if we can see in this a picture of what Ingersol said at the grave of his brother - Whether it be near the shore or in midocean among the breakers, at the last a wreck must mark the end of one and all."

The philosopher-minister-orator asked if the meaning of life was a luxuriant beginning and a cold, wasted end.

Not so with Riley Grannan.

Doby read: "He was invincible in spirit," a man who "seemed to accept both defeat and victory with equanimity."

"If you will allow me Doby read, "I will use phrase most of you are acquainted with. He was a 'dead game sport.' I say it not irreverently, but fill the phrase as full of practical human philosophy as it will hold, and I believe that when you say one is a 'dead game sport' you have reached the climax of human philosophy."

Slowly, carefully Doby Doc underlined the words.

"How true. It doesn't make any difference whether you are Howard Hughes or a wino or what your station is. I have returned to this often," he said to his guests. "You will too."

As Doby read what he called "Grannan's U-lo-loggy," it occurred to some of his visitors that he had not really told them much about himself.

He was apparently childless in life and had one, possibly two treat romances if not marriages. With a raconteur's gift for story telling he had told them some of what really happened and some fantasies.

Doby Doc, this singular man, the most unique an irreplaceable remnant of the past in a vast and cluttered museum, remained a mystery-full of unmet promise like an old oak pump organ which could, if it would speak, tell many tales of sorrow, joy, and derringdo.

He had left us all with room for our imagination. After all, he had said some time back, to tell the plain, unvarnished story of the West would scare everybody and ruin the fun.

"It says here on the cover of this book that Rawhide, Nevada, was the place where men sought gold and found 'Rainbows' End.' Did they?" this friend asked.

"Well I guess they did," Doby Doc barely whispered. "Some of them thought they did anyway."