Jack Streeter 1921-2013

Jack Streeter grew up in a different world than we have known. In the 1920s and ’30s, the country was proud that its standing army was small and politicians who talked warlike paid a political price.

Streeter's generation still ended up in a massive world war in the 1940s and Streeter himself came back from service with the First Infantry in Europe with five Silver Stars, two Bronze Stars, the Legion of Merit, and five Purple Hearts. He is believed to have been the most highly decorated Nevada veteran of World War II. What it cost him, only those close to him knew. He said he didn't like dwelling on it, but avoiding it was difficult with reporters intermittently doing stories on him. Of his five Purple Hearts, he told University of Nevada interviewer Tom King with a laugh, “I was wounded five times, but none was serious.” His interview with King can be read at www.veterans.nv.gov/ under “Latest blog posts” or in King's book War Stories, which is available from the Sparks, Spanish Springs and South Valleys branches of the county library and is sold at Sundance Books.

In 1944, the Nevada State Journal published a letter Streeter wrote to an instructor at the University of Nevada detailing a recent operation in France that left him injured and hospitalized. That letter can be read on our Newsview blog.

The Reno he came home to was very different from ours, too. He became Washoe County district attorney when Reno was still a small town and politicians did not yet tremble in the presence of the gambling industry. In 1954 Streeter proposed that the state government of Nevada take over legal gambling and operate it as a state monopoly, akin to Monte Carlo. Nevada, he said, should “place the entire management and control of the gambling industry in the hands of the state government.” (He didn't call it gaming.) Streeter said it would protect legal gambling from federal abolition and would also make the taxpayers partners—“all taxpayers would reap a benefit through the wealth of the state treasury. … If the citizens of Nevada are going to put up with gambling, they might as well enjoy relief from more taxes.”

Streeter launched the public service career of William Raggio by hiring him as a deputy district attorney. Raggio, later a dominant state leader, called him “an important mentor in my career.”