After 52 years in state service, Cindy Clampitt hung it up Friday saying it’s time to move on.
No, that’s not an error — 52 years.
Clampitt signed on with the state in 1965 and, after a couple of different jobs, landed at the Department of Motor Vehicles where she worked until retiring after 30 years.
Then, at the suggestion of friends, she went to work for the Legislative Counsel Bureau where she has been a session employee, primarily for the Senate Finance Committee, for 22 years.
But her roots go deeper than that, painting a picture of a rural 20th century Nevada now largely gone. Her mother came to Nevada to get a divorce in the 1950s. They settled first in Mill City where mom owned a bar, restaurant and gas station. But they kept moving around to towns including Lovelock, Yerington, Tempiute, Alamo and Eureka because her stepfather was a miner. She said their homes were often without indoor plumbing and Tempiute is now a ghost town.
“That was all in two years,” she said.
She graduated from eighth grade in Imlay, one of two in her class. Then she went to high school in Alamo.
“When I went to Alamo, the county paid to board me out in Alamo,” she said.
Clampitt stayed with teacher families during the week, then caught the mail truck home to Tempiute 42 miles away on Friday afternoon.
She was one of just seven students in her graduating class at Pahranagat Valley High.
“A lot has changed,” she said.
Meanwhile, her family had moved to Carson City. When she visited from nursing school in Salt Lake, she met her future husband, Roger Clampitt.
Working at DMV, she moved up the ladder until she was executive assistant to the head of the registration division. During those years, she developed the skills in personnel and training new employees that made her valuable to the LCB.
She developed the first training manual for incoming secretarial staff and supervised the training of each new class of workers. But to the other staff members, she’s renown for her patience, especially with new employees.
She has good memories of certain legislators as well.
“There have been a lot of very special people who become lifelong friends,” she said.
She named Bill Raggio and Bernie Anderson as two of her favorites.
Asked why she kept coming back session after session, she said simply, “I think it’s being a part of history.”
“I have told new staff you become part of history because your minutes and your signature on those minutes becomes part of the historical record,” she said.
But now, she said, it’s time to move on.
“I think 52 years is good enough,” she said.
So what’s next?
“I’m going to do some traveling,” she said.
On her bucket list is to take the riverboat up the Mississippi River all the way to Minneapolis. And she’d like to visit as many presidential libraries as possible and spend some time writing her family’s history.
But she won’t forget the people she’s known for decades right here.
“I can’t think what I would change about my life,” she said.
