Bob Mullen: Dirt road fetish
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While I was living in Carson City, I was the President and CEO of "XEX Corporation" and "Dial-Log Corporation".
We leased a building at 500 Hot Springs Road (click for map). it was quite a find. It had plenty of office space on the ground floor, a really nice apartment upstairs above the office, and a large warehouse with roll-up doors in the back. Hot Springs Road connected Highway 395 to the Hot Springs and the Carson City airport.
On one occasion, Bob Mullen had come up from Hayward to spend a week or so working on an invention we were designing. The "Cadre One" was the first commercially viable product using what we called Automatic Number Identification (ANI). We later sold the product to Tandy/Radio Shack as the Dial Log, but the technology was adapted by "The Phone Company" and renamed "Caller ID".
On one Saturday morning, Bob and I decided to go exploring. Armed with plenty of US Geological Survey maps, we headed east on US Highway 50. About a hundred miles east of Carson City is the town of Frenchman, Nevada. There is a building that looks like it may have been an old farmhouse, but it had been converted to become the City of Frenchman.
There were gas pumps in front and a small diner inside to the left. Bob had a hamburger with fries while I had "the other item on the menu" for lunch. There was a sign behind the lunch counter that read:
- Official Greyhound Bus Depot.
- Schedule
- Monday, Wednesday, and Friday: Eastbound at 2:30 pm
- Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday: Westbound at 1:45 pm
- Schedule
And we started looking around for Rod Serling (from "Twilight Zone") or Allen Funt (from "Candid Camera") hiding somewhere in the background.
After lunch, we found Nevada State Road 121 about ten miles further east and turned left. The road began as a wide, paved, two-lane road. After a while, to turn into a hard-packed dirt road. It "de-graded" into a one-lane dirt track. Sometime later, we rounded a bend in "the road" to discover a drilling team. There were several cargo containers around, and a few had been converted into living spaces. The workers had drilled down about 300 feet to find geothermal steam. Their "discovery" was escaping under pressure up a ten-inch diameter pipe several hundreds of feet into the air.
Bob and I had a cooler in the station wagon, and we sat around talking with the crew about the geothermal properties of Nevada, sharing cokes and cookies from home.
We decided to push on and asked the crew if the "road" we were on connected to Interstate 80, a few miles further north. One of the guys said, "I really don't know; we all came in by helicopter. A jeep did pass by going north about a week or so ago, and I don't remember seeing them coming back out."
With pleasant goodbyes, we pressed further on, and the road became what looked like wagon ruts. Bob was concerned that we would find the skeletal remains of the party ahead of us, or worse, others would find our remains. I was concerned because it was getting to be nightfall. I said, "Highway 80 is just over that hill." He asked how I knew. "Because it is getting dark, and I don't wish to spend the night out here in the desert." Sure enough, we topped the hill and discovered Interstate Highway 80 with its six lanes.
When we returned home, Kelly asked where we had gone.
Bob said, "You know how when you are in a city, you get cable TV, VHF TV, UHF TV, and FM radio. As you leave the city, you lose UHF TV, and further out, you lose VHF TV and FM radio. As you travel further, all you get is country and western music on the am radio. Further out, all you get are Christian broadcasts. Where we went, our cassette player wasn't working."
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