The answer to that question is yes. The story gets a little complicated.
There had been high school students in Las Vegas soon after the 1905 railroad auction. My alma mater, Las Vegas High School, opened in 1930. At the time, Las Vegans thought school superintendent Maude Frazier might have gone crazy. A 500-seat high school? Really? Would there be enough students to fill it? And it was at the outskirts of town, at Seventh and Bridger.
By the early 1950s, Boulder City High School and Henderson’s Basic had joined Las Vegas High. But Las Vegas was growing fast. It needed another high school. Then came Rancho. Its groundbreaking occurred in March 1954. Its building opened in 1955 at the southeast corner of Owens and Bruce in Las Vegas … and in North Las Vegas. We told you it was complicated.
Before the building opened, Rancho held classes elsewhere … at the Fifth Street Grammar School. They also held events at Las Vegas High School … which also was where the University of Nevada Southern Regional Division held classes. It was a busy time at Vegas High.
Meanwhile, construction continued on the complex where Rancho would be located. It opened with the 1955-56 school year. Local school officials had been careful not to take students already established at Las Vegas High, so they started with ninth grade, and kept adding until Rancho’s first graduating class.
It was a time of turmoil and transition in education. As Rancho opened, the state legislature was implementing its plan to have county-wide school districts in place of local ones. So the Clark County School District was just starting as the new high school did. And the fledgling higher education campus was fighting for funds to erect its first building, Maude Frazier Hall, which opened in 1957 … the same year as Rancho’s first graduating class.
That also was the year Las Vegas and Rancho High Schools began their annual football game for ownership of Sir Herkimer’s Bone. Rancho proposed playing the game for a large cow bone. A Rancho player’s father owned a butcher shop, where they got the original, and later bronzed it. One article credits Lou Rosgen, a Rancho football player who said he got the idea from the phrase “bone of contention.” Anyway, they still play for that trophy.
There’s more lore about Rancho. Yes, it was at Owens and Bruce, on the Las Vegas side of the border with North Las Vegas … but that city wanted its own high school. So, they tinkered with the boundary to allow Rancho’s address to be in North Las Vegas. But when they tore down the original school, the front office moved to another street, so its address changed to Las Vegas.
We told you the story was complicated. Richard Bryan, the person who reads the scripts for the audio version of this story, is a proud graduate of Las Vegas High School, Class of 1955, and I'm a proud graduate of Rancho High School, Class of 1982. We’ve never had a fight, not even over Sir Herkimer’s Bone.
