McFadden was spice of life in Carson City

The Bob McFadden Plaza will join the Marv Teixeira Pavilion in commemorating a couple of spicy characters who helped boost the image of Carson City.

Teixeira, politician and mayor for three terms, died this year. Bob McFadden, who died a decade ago, tried politics but his real main passion led him into a three decades long commitment to the community. He ran twice for mayor, once in 1992 when he lost to Teixeira, but that was one of the few things he tackled which didn’t work out.

As Linda Marrone, who now runs Carson City’s Farmers Market in the parking lot at Curry and 3rd streets downtown, once said of McFadden: “Bob’s recipe for life was to have a good time.”

He purchased and restored the Krebs-Peterson House, which became his residence, relished collecting art and antiques, restored various commercial and other properties, among them the St. Charles Hotel at West 3rd and South Carson streets, and worked tirelessly on behalf of bringing life to the downtown.

A manufactured housing dealer, McFadden also was a realtor who officed at Carson and 3rd, a businessman, investor and vocal civic booster. A California native born in 1949, he came here and stayed because he viewed it as a unique western town imbued with history. Coincidentally, the pavilion Teixeira championed and the hotel building McFadden restored were at different times known as the Pony Express Pavilion and the Pony Express Hotel.

McFadden’s family, led by son Rob, a banker, is contributing $125,000 toward the public/private plaza project that will bear his name when completed on a closed West 3rd Street as part of an urban design upgrade along Carson and Curry streets. Rob McFadden provided a packet of information on his father, which included quotes from the late Mayor Marv about the businessman and what restoration of the St. Charles meant to the community.

“He was part of the spice of life of Carson City,” Teixeira, a spicy guy himself, once said of McFadden. Teixeira also said before McFadden restored the St. Charles, it “was an eyesore, and every time the legislators came to town it was, ‘Hey, Marv, when are you going to clean that up?’”

McFadden sold the St. Charles to the current owner, Jenny Lopiccolo, about a month before he died on Nov. 16, 2004.