Marydean Martin died recently. Some of you may have known her name because it showed up in some prominent places. She was a major donor to numerous organizations and causes. But there was so much more to her story, and how she affected you … and me.
A building bears her name—the library at Nevada State University. That’s appropriate. She helped get the school started, but that’s not all. She grew up in Las Vegas and went to Las Vegas High School. There she took courses in library science, and she intended to be a librarian. The problem was that there was no local university then. Classes didn’t begin at the University of Nevada Southern Regional Division until 1951. The university in Reno didn’t have a library science program. So she took correspondence courses from the University of Utah. When I was a student at Las Vegas High, she was working in the library. In 1957, Maude Frazier Hall opened as the first building on what became the UNLV campus. The library had three employees, and when the assistant librarian left, Marydean Martin got the job.
She eventually completed her education at American University, and involved herself in education in southern Nevada. It wasn’t just because she was married for 66 years to Charlie Silvestri, who eventually became a top administrator with the Clark County School District. She taught classes and worked with authors on self-publishing. She helped start the Safekey program for latchkey kids. She was a founding member of the Friends of the UNLV Library, now the library’s community advisory board. She became a board member for Boys Town of Nevada, the Boy Scouts, KNPR, and Vegas PBS. She and Charlie underwrote programs, including Antiques Roadshow and Great Performances.
Marydean did assorted freelance work for many years. In 1974, she worked with her friend Mahlon Brown on his campaign for justice of the peace. They needed an advertising agency and hired May Advertising. Its top political operative was Jim Joyce. I had known Jim since elementary school, when we would go to Las Vegas Wranglers Class C baseball games for free. At the university, he ran my successful campaign for student body president. He was an usher at Bonnie’s and my wedding, and godfather to one of my children.
Marydean and Jim worked well together. He asked her to join him in starting their own agency, which would handle political campaigns and advertising for businesses. Jim suggested Martin and Joyce. As Marydean put it in a book that Jim’s daughter Marilee edited about her father, “the librarian in me couldn’t tolerate that because it wasn’t in alphabetical order.” From 1975 to 1988, Joyce and Martin Advertising became legendary. He was the top lobbyist at the legislature, and brilliant at running campaigns. Marydean ran the operations—as Jim had put it, she would teach him business and he would teach her political consulting. They represented everybody from Senator Howard Cannon to Sunrise Hospital.
Jim and Marydean parted as friends in 1988. He continued with Joyce Advertising, which his son Robin took over when he died. Marydean teamed with Mark Brown, whose father Bob had been Jim’s boss at May Advertising. It’s a small world. Marydean eventually semiretired, if you could call it that. She remained active in the community, and with her husband Charlie did a lot to make this community, and all of us in it, better and smarter.
