Dozens of people gathered Tuesday at downtown’s Bicentennial Park to honor former Mayor Bob Cashell. They were there to dedicate a plaque and red, white and blue flower bulbs planted in honor of Cashell.
The downtown Reno Rotary was responsible for the celebration.
Kurt Mische with the Rotary club called Cashell, “one of our own, longtime Rotarian and a great man.”
Mische said Cashell was a dedicated philanthropist.
He said he would encourage people to donate to the club in order to ring a bell. The bell ringing signified a $100 donation.
“When Mayor Bob would attend, Mayor Bob would grab the sergeant at arms and get ahold of the microphone,” Mische said. “He would look around and identify all of his friends and all of his buddies.”
Cashell would proceed to nominate cash donations from his friends and then ring the bell.
Mische said that would go on and on.
“It went on for several minutes,” Mische said. “Those meetings would be the most entertaining we would have. Sometimes we wouldn’t even need our guest speaker because we would have so much fun with Bob working the room.”
Members of Cashell’s family were in attendance. Reno Mayor Hillary Schieve also spoke and remembered Cashell’s dedication to the community. She read aloud the plaque placed at the park in Cashell’s honor.
“Mayor Bob, the ‘People’s Mayor,’ was mayor of Reno from 2002-2014 and is remembered here for his humanity, leadership and great sense of humor,” the plaque reads. “In his memoir, Cashell shared life lessons in his folksy manner, ‘As you climb the ladder of success, treat people right. Because you might come down that ladder again.’”
Cashell died in early 2020.
Reno’s poet laureate, Dustin Howard, wrote a poem for the event and read it aloud. He called it, “Ode to Bob’s Garden.”
