Capital City Arts Initiative

Friday, April 27, 2012
Reception: 6:30pm
Reading: 7pm
at the Carson City Library Auditorium
900 N Roop Street, Carson City

The Capital City Arts Initiative’s [CCAI] Books & Writers series invites you to attend a reading Friday, April 27 with David Toll, an award-winning local writer reading from Breaks, Brains & Balls, which he co-authored with Joe Conforte. The free events will take place at the Carson City Library’s Auditorium, 900 N Roop Street, Carson City, Nevada. A reception for the writer begins at 6:30pm followed by the reading at 7pm. The Carson City Library and CCAI co-sponsor the Books & Writers events.

David Toll co-wrote Breaks, Brains & Balls with Joe Conforte, one of the most outrageous characters ever to emerge from the American west. Joe Conforte, who made Nevada’s Mustang Ranch the biggest, brightest, and most famous whorehouse in the USA, maybe the world. Mr. Toll will give the reading. Mr. Conforte will not attend.

In the book, Joe Conforte tells the story of his life in the same bold way that he has lived it, and he shares the secret of his success. Joe’s story might have been written by a 20^th century Horatio Alger . . .  the penniless immigrant boy who comes to America, runs away from home and in 1942 makes his way west to Los Angeles to seek his fortune. By the time he’s 18, he’s driving his yellow convertible to Tijuana on weekends for the gambling and the bullfights. By the time he’s 30 he’s opening a place out in the sagebrush east of Reno, where three counties come together near the Truckee River. He named it the Triangle River Ranch, and the rest is, as Joe likes to say, “. . . mostly myth.”

David W. Toll is a prize-winning Nevada journalist, the only living newspaperman to begin his career at The Virginia City Chronicle. He also worked for The Territorial Enterprise and in 1974 helped revive The Gold Hill NEWS from a 92-year slumber, completing a journalistic hat trick not achieved on the Comstock Lode since the 19th Century. His writing has also appeared in The San Francisco Chronicle, The Sacramento Bee and other newspapers, and for the past 30 years, in Nevada Magazine. He is author of The Complete Nevada Traveler, the first guidebook to the state since the WPA’s 1939 guide; now, after a dozen editions, it is still a bestselling book about Nevada.

[photo of David Toll]