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% ?ll ’ ..........................-..... - •= Volume XXXVII, Number 46 By CHARLES P. SQUIRES I GREAT ENTERPRISES Las Vegas, for many years, has been looking forward to the time when power developed at Boul­der Dam would draw great in­dustries to us. We have suffered many disap­pointments because of the “hope deferred” in oi necessary training for us, to teach us the value of community harmony and cooperation with those great en­terprises which desire to come to us. The investment of approximate­ly seventy million dollars, which the latest estimates'declare nec­essary, in what the government plans for a permanent industry, is far beyond the powers of any of us to visualize. However, we know by bitter experience that great enterprises need careful nurturing and that none are so great that they cannot quickly be killed by ill-advised criticism and opposition. It would be common sense for us to assume that the great men who have the means and the abil­ity to create such an enterprise as Basic Magnesium, have also the sense to know what is most needed for its success. It should not be necessary for those men to appeal again for our wholesbuled and unanimous cooperation with their plans. In the greatness of the enter­prise there is plenty of opportuni­ty for all of us to profit. Our present business should be to give our complete cooperation. It has taken most of us some time to grasp something of the vastness of the new enterprise. this matter. But today we observe in construction a vastly greater industry than -the most op­timistic of us ever dared to visualize. Perhaps the “hope defer­red” was a process of For example, we are shown the ground being cleared and graded for the main building of the mag­nesium plant. We have known some fairly sizeable buildings, for example, those of the rubber tire plants in Los Angeles. We used to think that the shop building which employed for a few years about four hundred men in Las Vegas was quite a shack, because it was 150 feet wide and 400 feet long. This main building of the mag­nesium plant will be 450 feet wide and 5800 feet long. That is 520 feet more than a mile. That building is to be no flim­sy shelter of.boards and galva­nized iron, but a solid, perma­nent building of steel and con­crete, as nearly indestructible as money can make it. It is interesting, also, to know that the permanent force of the Basic Magnesium plant will be about 4000 men, with an annual payroll of $8,000,000, most of which will find its way into the business channels of Las Vegas. The value of the product which the plant will produce is estimat­ed at approximately $35,000,000 per year. Another thing which but few Las Vegas people have realized, is that the magnesium plant will be the natural center about which many other smaller industries will cluster; also that service in­dustries necessary for supplying the wants of the workers and their families will mean another large addition to our population. The prophecy that the Las Ve­gas area will double in popula­tion within the coming years ap­pears quite conservative in view' of the established facts. The one ill av, back from which we now are suffering is the lack of hous­ing. If the public spirited men of Las Vegas will assist in provid­ing a part of this they will be doing a fine community service.