An absolute extrovert and a jocular man, Dr. Lonnie Hammargren worked full-time on the preparation of his wake for more than two months in advance of its predetermined date, March 31. He retained the assistance of laborers who had helped build piecemeal the theme park of Castillo del Sol, 4318 Ridgecrest Drive, just south of Flamingo and Sandhill Roads, the doctor’s home since 1972 and the most recognized personal property in town, with its two acres and three housing units piled high with cultural vestiges from across the state, marvelous and incalculable stuff. They are all ignoble men, fathers and grandfathers like Hammargren is, obsequious to his orders and not too disgruntled by his constant changing of mind to refrain from bantering and BS-ing with the brilliant doctor. Hammargren rode them hard, they say, instructing them to paint and repaint props, move and remove signs, build and rebuild stages. And he commanded their respect, too, on account of the maniacal work he himself did alongside them, on a daily basis, starting each morning at 5 a.m., when Hammargren climbs to the top of his ranch to watch the sun rise.
Day after day he walked back and forth about the Castillo del Sol with the air of a distracted professor, one finger in the air dictating orders on projects whose deadline was, in his mind, just around the corner, and asking out loud in a meticulous but whimsical way questions about the many pieces that reflect a lifetime’s work of buying, building and showcasing: roller coasters, dome pieces and neon signs from imploded Strip resorts, trains from Yucca Mountain, altars from casino chapels, signs and sundry artifacts from every corner of our state’s history. Hammargren lugged himself from piece to piece, project to project, throughout the sunlight hours, a dark turbid shadow pursuing him, and he mumbling, as he always does, “Okay, yeah, okay. Here we go. Okay, yeah.” He was, as ever, a man on his own course, alterable by no one. Not even his wife, Sandy, who friends say has achieved sainthood for having managed to endure Hammargren and his notorious eccentricities for nearly 20 years of restless matrimony.
They met at Sunrise Hospital, he a renowned neurosurgeon and she a nurse who assisted him on many operations, and they married in Hammargren’s back yard, in which she now, too, when not working at Sunrise, helped her husband prepare for his wake. She says Hammargren, now retired, is driving her nuts, and the both of them poor.
“There hadn’t been much time for going out and having fun since I’ve been here,” says Alan Vaughn, Hammargren’s unfaltering friend since the first grade, back in Rush City, Minnesota, recruited to stay with Hammargren as he prepared for the wake. “It had been full-time and labor-intensive.”
In fact, the wake had been Vaughn’s idea in the first place. He had been a photographer at several Hammargren funerals in the past, and he noted that it was a shame families came together only for funerals, when the deceased didn’t have a chance to cherish it. And so he told Hammargren they should have a wake while still alive, as to enjoy it.
At first they planned on doing it together, a joint ceremony. But then Vaughn realized that for him, it was far too premature. For he doesn’t think himself to die. “I still got too much ass to kick,” he says, his bold statement corroborated by the sharpness of his speech and his physical shape, enviable at any age.
Hammargren, on the other hand, ran with the idea, of course adding to it one layer of his wild ideas upon another. Until soon he had in mind a grand carnival, what in the end would be the greatest wake ever for a man not yet dead in the history of Las Vegas.
The decision to hold the wake at the end of March resonated in Hammargren after surviving a sextuple open-heart bypass operation last year. It’s not that he had been unaware of death before the precarious surgery, for he had no doubt seen just how finite man is when he served as a helicopter medic in Vietnam, as well as when he lost patients on his own operating table. Rather, he had been too busy saving lives, too busy earning a venerable reputation around the world as an elite neurosurgeon, too busy hunting down Nevada’s cultural artifacts, too busy cheering courtside at the Thomas & Mack during the Runnin’ Rebels’ glory days, too busy befriending national presidents, state politicians and local celebrities, too busy heading the senate as lieutenant governor, too busy checking on Roy’s condition after he was mauled by a tiger, too busy revolting against the clock to save perishing boxers, too busy inspecting astronauts as a NASA flight surgeon, too busy working pro bono and without sleep in Honduras during the Nicaraguan Contra affairs, too busy being knighted in five countries, too busy earning five academic degrees cum laude, and all the while too busy singing, dancing and playing the piano, the guitar, the organ, and even the ol’ accordion whenever the chance arose—far too busy to worry over his own mortality.
“Doc packs as much life into each day as he can, and that’s a fact, Jack,” says Grant, 57, a friend and worker of Hammargren’s for more than two decades now. “You gotta respect that.”
But the heart operation slowed him down. His mind continued at the same pace, but his countenance now betrayed him with its dolorous weight; and his legs, rigid and lumbered, could not keep up. And those six bypasses he underwent in August permitted the message to travel straight to his heart, not only that he is mortal, but that also, he is dying.
“When I came out here two months ago, the first thing he told me was that he was dying,” says Vaughn. “The surgery really shook him.”
And Hammargren proved unable to release himself from its volt. The pains persisted, there was an ineluctable scar down his chest, and when Hammargren surrendered his ongoing angst to another physician last month, after having doctored his own recovery from the operation, he was informed that he had pneumonia. In other words, Hammargren could not help but be mindful of his mortality.
“I understand it,” says one of Hammargren’s workers and friends, Gilbert, a churchgoing man who lives without haste and who suffers from diabetes. “I never thought about death until my blood dropped on me, and now I think about it all the time. Every day.”
For Hammargren, who harbors no presumptions about an afterlife, who puts no stock in a final judgment, and who is convinced by his own experience that a man is rewarded for his strength of character during his life span, awareness of death struck no fear in him. That’s what he says. But the tacit truth is that it heightened his concern over his legacy, that footprint a man leaves behind to be recognized by people long after he has vanished from it.
“He is extremely concerned with that,” says Wolfgang Muchow, a local filmmaker who, with authorization and encouragement from Hammargren, is working on a documentary about the popular Las Vegas figure. “He says he wants to be remembered at least 100 years after he’s dead.”
It’s true. At 69 years old, having had the good fortune of amassing enough money to buy a show prop from the MGM or take a trip to the other side of the world to see an eclipse on a whim, of accumulating more toys and valuables and cultural relics than he has the time or space for, of establishing innumerable friendships with everyone from mendicants to mayors, and of accruing enough worldwide experiences and local memories to recount fascinating original stories to a dozen generations of Hammargrens to come, if only by some means he can stretch out his life for that long, it was a chief priority of Hammargren’s to see that all is not forgotten when he passes.
He has stated his desire to see his house turned into a state museum after he dies. Hammargren says he delved into politics because he felt he could leave his good mark on the state, and he believes he did, as a regent in the early ’90s and lieutenant governor from 1995 to 1999. A born explorer, Hammargren has taken expeditions throughout the world, documenting most of them on videocassettes. And he keeps on stamping his footprint into the Earth’s soil, as if in the back of his mind, or below it, he feels that perhaps he has not yet done quite enough to solidify his immortality.
And so he scheduled for himself a wake, where he could unite all the people of his life with all the things he’s accumulated, and where the incredible experiences that compose his time on earth could be recounted, and he worked with great resolve and urgency to see it done on March 31.
All the work paid off. As Hammargren sat like a king inside the Community Lutheran Church last Saturday afternoon, his colleagues rendered eulogies, his wife, Sandy, dedicated two songs to him, his niece gave him the gift of a tearful “I love you,” and a parade of jubilant mourners halted the 4 o’clock traffic as they proceeded back to the doctor’s marvelous house on Ridgecrest Drive, Star Wars troopers leading the charge, followed by prehistoric showgirls, buffalo soldiers and bagpipe players, and a mobile wall commemorating the fallen soldiers of the Mideast conflicts, and Hammargren’s many friends and fans, and his family, some reunited for the first time in a half-century, and, of course, Hammargren himself, entertaining the multitude with festive singing to the tunes of a New Orleans band. Doctors and politicians and other very rich men from all over the nation, as well as common folk, had come to pay their respects. Also there was Robin Leach, famous for documenting the lifestyles of the rich and famous, including Hammargren three previous times, and Munchow documented him interviewing the good doctor.
In his top hat, his regal jacket adorned with a boutonnière of two dead roses, his da Vinci watch and his dark slacks, Hammargren hosted at his Castillo del Sol a party whose legend has already compounded with every retelling since it dissolved into the night like fairy dust, a little after 10 o’clock.
The crowd ate and drank and sang and danced, and they evoked the many occasions Hammargren worked on—and saved the lives of—folks on whom other doctors had quit, either because the patients had no insurance or their chances of survival were minuscule. Several of those grateful survivors, in fact, showed up.
The masses overran the backyard and each of the house’s rooms, and stood astonished at the way Hammargren, typical of his master philosophy, had made deliberate use of every square inch of space with his stuff. The planetarium, the dinosaur skeleton hanging intact, Hemingway’s old typewriter, Liberace’s piano waiting to be played, carousels, statues, war rooms, steam ships, space stations: It was all quite magical. “To me, a whole lot of it is junk,” says Grant, a tanned and broad-backed man with a biker’s goatee. “But there’s a story behind all of it, and it gives the Doc great pleasure when he sees it, and he’s worked hard for it, and that’s all you can ask of a man, if you ask me.”
As always, Hammargren was everywhere during the party, shuffling from friend to friend, muttering, “Okay, yeah, here I come. Okay, yeah ...,” escorting guests through his house of preserved history and astronautical fantasies, arousing them with crude and historical tales, typical of him, of how each piece came to be, and submitting to countless photographs, happy to leave behind an indelible record of his part in the majestic party. Although his legs hindered him, he moved about as if he were trying to beat time, as if he were trying to enjoy as much family and friends and fun before the da Vinci watch on his wrist struck 11 o’clock and it was thus time for him to surrender to the tomb which awaited him beneath his house.
The magician Steve Wyrick was there, and he, after Hammargren said his goodbyes, sealed the doctor off in an Egyptian sarcophagus. To no one’s surprise, Hammargren reemerged from the tomb about 20 minutes after midnight, on April Fools’ Day, and the next time he was seen, it was in his house, sitting next to his wife and his lifelong friend Alan Vaughn, all relieved that the wake was finally pulled off. Hammargren was playing the guitar, and all three joined together in the singing of old folk songs. For the first time in more than two months, an air of peace and contentedness surrounded them.
“In the final analysis,” Hammargren said, “your family is all you have.”
Among the crazy and myriad stuff at the Castillo del Sol for which Dr. Lonnie Hammargren is best known to the Las Vegas public, there is a sign that reads: “Let The Good Times Roll.” Although his friend Vaughn says Hammargren has become more religious in the past two months than he’s ever known him to be, Hammargren conducted himself at his wake as he always has, cramming as many good times into the day as if it were the end of everything, eating, drinking, singing, cracking jokes, telling stories, showing off his stuff, all one tick ahead of the da Vinci watch on his wrist.