Whether it was finding a Depression-era construction job, assisting his dying wife, Noma, or even throwing the switch at Hoover Dam that illuminated Boulder City's new marketing logo, Roy Lee Rickles Tilman has been, by his own admission, "at the right place at the right time."
For the past several months, the man born in Gooding, Idaho, has been the subject of an intense media frenzy. Writers from local, regional and national publications and reporters from TV documentary shows came banging on Tilman's door at The Homestead wanting to interview Boulder City's last known living construction worker on the Boulder Canyon Project.
"I don't know why this is happening to me," said Tilman, who will turn 93 on April 14. "I'm just a somebody who's not smart enough to come in out of the rain."
But don't let that "Tilmanism" throw you.
The White Pine High School dropout, who completed eighth grade in the once booming but now forgotten mining town of Hamilton, claims that was the last time he graduated "unless you consider the School of Hard Knocks, because I know I graduated from that."
That he did.
Coming from a broken home -- his father abandoned the family when Tilman was 7 -- he and his three brothers -- Jack, Carl and Jim -- grew up in several places before, at the age of 18, Tilman struck out for Southern Nevada, where a new and more prosperous life awaited him.
"For the first seven years of my life, I went to three or four schools, never spending more than half a semester in any one school," he said.
When he got here, a state law requiring underground workers to be 21 prevented him from working on the dam, but not for long.
After one pay period working on the railroad spur line to Boulder City, Tilman landed a job as a Six Companies truck driver, which lasted throughout the dam's construction period.
During his tenure there, he married his high school sweetheart, Noma, on June 28, 1934 in Las Vegas, where they lived on a site now straddled by the Stratosphere Tower.
After workmen completed the massive barrier, Tilman worked three months at the Union Pacific Railroad ice house in Las Vegas, putting 300-pound blocks of ice in refrigerator cars that hauled produce.
A supervisor told him that "one day the railroad will come to a screeching halt" and advised him to "get a job with the U.S. government."
The Bureau of Reclamation was looking to add two electrician helpers in September 1936 and hired Tilman, even though he admitted, "I didn't even resemble an electrician."
Although it's been a while, the man known as a "squeak" -- a novice electrician who wasn't supposed to talk to journeymen -- still remembers what the construction period was like.
"A lot of the men who worked at the dam didn't live in Boulder City but commuted from Las Vegas," he said. "The demand for housing far exceeded the supply. Housing went to those who needed it the most. This was in the days when 15,000 to 20,000 people were trying to get a job here and unemployment was at 30 percent.
"There was no Social Security, no unemployment insurance. There might have been a lawyer or a doctor working a shovel. There were a lot of college graduates down there and they were tickled to death to get a job. The country was really desperate. It took somebody like (President) Roosevelt to correct those things (because) he had a finger on the pulse of the country."
In the early 1950s, the Tilmans and their six children -- Dawn, Kathleen, Rick, Tim, Nomalee and Paul -- moved to Boulder City.
In 1969, after more than three decades on the job, Tilman left his job behind.
"I've been retired longer than I worked and I've had my hand in the taxpayer's pocket all the time," he said, noting that he's currently living off a federal pension.
Despite losing his wife to kidney failure last August and suffering from prostate cancer himself, Tilman remains alert, engaged and alive. He waxes nostalgic about his life, saying "I'm living on borrowed time, but I'm going to live forever, too."
Tilman said Noma, his bride of 71 years, was "a perfect sweetheart, wife, mother and friend" and that "it was a wonderful experience to be married to her. The last two years I cared for her. Over the years, I had little opportunity to give back to her instead of taking, so I enjoyed taking care of her. It made me happy to do that. I happened to be at the right place, at the right time."
Tilman claims he's a religious man, even though he said, "I don't believe in angels floating on clouds or some bearded guy walking around."
"Whatever created us, created us to be happy," he said. "I really believe man was created to be happy. I think life is not measured in time, but in a state of being. The thing I hope for is happiness as I move into whatever state of being it is. That's the substance of faith. I'm not in the same state of being as I was in high school. I'm a different person today than I was five years ago."
Decades ago, a foreman electrician named Ben Vaughan taught a frustrated Tilman, who was ready to quit his job, a lesson that he still remembers today.
"Wherever you go, whatever you do, you're going to meet the same (person) as you see here today, and then I realized that person was me. Two years later, I had his job."
Relaxed in his overstuffed easy chair with his friend, 83-year-old Homestead resident Shirley Pucci, at his side, Tilman related to the world what his legacy to Boulder City might be.
"Who knows? I hope that I measured up as a craftsman, as a father, as a husband and in the community as a resident who tried to do his part."
Archived Editions| Advertising | Contact The Staff
