Saturday, March 1, 1997 | 11:59 a.m.
RUSSELL and Jewell Pyron will celebrate their 55th wedding anniversary tomorrow.
How have they stayed together so long?
"I'll be damned if I know," Russell, 84, says.
"That's a good question," Jewell, 82, adds, sitting beside him on their living room couch.
"We have our ups and downs," she says quietly. After a pause, she adds: "I can beat him catching fish."
Some couples would consider that a reason for ending a marriage, not prolonging it.
But the Pyrons found they had a common love of fishing and they have plenty of fish tales -- real ones, not the proverbial "one that got away."
Jewell says there's a picture hanging on a wall at Willow Beach showing her with a 5-pound trout she caught.
Another of her prized catches was a 28-pound spring Chinook salmon. The petit woman says she could barely hold it up for that photograph.
Now Russell is not exactly a sloucher when it comes to fishing. In Mexico he caught a 5- or 6-foot barracuda.
But he admits that on some of their fishing trips, Jewell would be the only one in the group to catch a fish each day.
He remembers the time she caught a big salmon. The reel was set loose so the fish wouldn't snap the line. But it was too loose and Jewell couldn't reel in the fish.
"She was cranking and cranking. Nothing happened. She couldn't reel it in. We tightened the reel. I figured it (the salmon) drowned by this time, so I just pulled it out of the water," Russell says.
Now with all this reelin' and crankin', you'd think the Pyrons would be big fish eaters. Actually, they gave away a lot of their catches, but sometimes had the salmon canned.
Their favorite fishin' hole?
"Anyplace there's fish," Russell says.
These days, the Pyrons don't fish. Russell has some physical ailments. Jewell has macular degeneration, an eye disease, and is legally blind.
She says her eye problems came on suddenly. She lost sight in the first eye about 14 years ago, and in the other eye about seven years ago.
"No," Russell corrects her.
"Yes," Jewell replies with a huge grin. "Don't argue with me. It's my eyes."
One Sunday morning she was sitting in her chair and was looking at her shoes on the hassock in front of her. She asked her husband: "Do the heels look straight?"
Like any normal person, he considered that an odd questions and wondered about her for a minute.
The next day they went to the eye doctor. Jewell had laser treatment on her eyes, but was told nothing could be done about saving her sight.
She has some peripheral vision and is able to take long walks in her Charleston Heights neighborhood.
Because of her vision problems, she had to give up her 30-year career in the beauty salon.
But like the pesky fish she catches, one customer didn't want to let go.
Jewell told her: "You must go to someone else. I can't see what I'm doing." She says the customer replied, "You can do it by feel."
Jewell laughs thinking about it.
The Pyrons moved to Las Vegas from Oregon in 1955.
"I hated it here then," Russell says. "Now I wouldn't take anything else."
Russell was a craps and 21 dealer in "gambling joints." He worked for five years at the Riviera, a year at the Tropicana and 18 or 19 years at the Dunes.
"I hated to see them implode all the old joints ... not for sentimental reasons, but because it (the Dunes) was a good hotel," he says.
He and Jewell don't get out much now. Since he hadn't been on the Strip for years, a friend recently drove him down Las Vegas Boulevard. "I had no idea where some of the big joints were. Hell, I was like a typical rubberneck."
But the new resorts "aren't gambling joints anymore. They're slot machines," he says, adding that in the early days slots were called "bloodsuckers."
"We used to say that if Jesse James were alive, he'd throw both pistols away and would buy nickle slot machines and he wouldn't have to steal."
As he talks, Nicky, a toy, white poodle, is curled up beside him on the couch.
"At one time I didn't like poodles," Russell says, petting the dog.
That is until he picked up Jewell at the airport after a trip to her sister's.
"When I picked her up, she asked me if I knew where the freight terminal was. She took me there and there was a case, with a poodle," he says.
Jewell's sister raised poodles, so it was natural that she'd send one home with her.
"I then got hooked for poodles," Russell says. "They're smart."
Adds Jewell: "Smarter than humans. Smarter than me."
When he wanted to add to his poodle pool, he asked a vet if Dewey Animal Shelter had poodles. All the time, he was told. On one visit Russell saw what looked like a small sheepdog. He was about a year old. He took him home, named him Nicky and had him groomed. Voila -- a poodle emerged from under the small ball of fur.
Today Nicky is the only poodle they have.
The Pyrons have been active in various community organizations through the years. But today, they pretty much stay close to the home they've owned for 37 years.
The modest, comfortable home needs some work that the Pyrons haven't been able to keep up with.
On the first Saturday in May, their home will get a facelift as part of Christmas in April, a nonprofit program that renovates and rehabilitates homes. Many of the home owners in the program are elderly and live on fixed incomes.
Their buckling roof is scheduled to be replaced; the dirt front and back yard landscaped, and the inside of their house painted.
One of the Christmas in April volunteers, upon learning about the Pyrons' anniversary Sunday, arranged for a special dinner for them at Morton's Steakhouse, donated by Janalane Southard, the catering sales manager.
Court Petrie and Lauren Kincaid, students at the Meadows School, will stop by to sing "Unforgettable." Court, who has been invited to sing at various community events, is very talented. His voice is "unforgettable."
And there should be another surprise -- one you could say has been in the making for 25 years.
Russell made his own jewelry for many years. He bought the stones and made his own casts and waxes. He sold the jewelry, but there was a particular stone he saved for more than 25 years.
"He was going to make me a ring," Jewell says, "but he never got around to it."
Well, he will this weekend. (Russell: This is your cue. Don't read this part to Jewell.) Tower of Jewels is donating the ring setting for the stone.
It should be a nice anniversary for a couple who worked all their lives, were active in the community and had the fortitude to stick it out together all those years.
Maybe it's their sense of humor that has bonded them, as shown in their affectionate banter with each other.
Happy anniversary, Russell and Jewell.
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