Lonnie Hammargren dies, was Nevada’s former lieutenant governor

Nevada neurosurgeon, politician and colorful character Lonnie Hammargren has died, a family friend confirmed Tuesday. He was 85.

In the 1980s and ’90s, Hammargren served as a university regent and then as the state’s lieutenant governor. In more recent years, he was known for opening his home to visitors on Nevada Day to show off his eclectic collection of artifacts and memorabilia, much of it gigantic, which eventually swallowed up two neighboring houses.

“It’s me,” he said about his collection during his open house in 2017, the last one he would hold.

“It makes me unique in the whole world,” he told the Review-Journal. “Nobody has done what I’ve done.”

Hammargren was born on Christmas Day in 1937 in Harris, Minnesota. He was first licensed to practice medicine in Nevada in 1971. His patients included both the famous and the infamous. He operated on daredevil motorcyclist Gary Wells after his failed attempt in 1980 to jump the fountains at Caesars Palace. Wells recovered.

In 1982, Hammargren performed brain surgery on boxer Duk Koo Kim following his loss to Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini in a world championship match in Las Vegas. Kim died of his injuries.

Hammargren said he gave up surgery in 2005 when his malpractice insurance increased to $275,000 per year.

He served on the nonpartisan board of regents for the Nevada System of Higher Education from the late 1980s until the mid-1990s, and then as Nevada lieutenant governor for the remainder of the decade. In 2006, he lost his comeback bid for lieutenant governor in the Republican primary.

“I was not a good politician,” he told the Las Vegas Sun in 2011. “I was a superb doctor. Which is what I want to be remembered as.”

In recent years, his notoriety as a collector outstripped his fame as either a surgeon or a politician. He purchased two homes next to his own to house an ever-expanding collection. The objects went beyond diverse: a 200-year-old gondola, a life-sized papier-mâché brontosaurus skeleton, Liberace props, a Batmobile, memorabilia of Teddy Roosevelt, whom Hammargren, mustachioed and big-grinned, somewhat resembled.

His hobby, which Hammargren said began with collecting butterflies as a boy, appeared to get the better of him. Deep in debt from purchasing items, he sold the main house near East Flamingo and Sandhill roads in 2017, as well as a portion of the collection.

The buyer of the house, Amber Softing, told Las Vegas Weekly that she’d always fantasized about living there. After the purchase, Softing and her husband, Mike, became close with Hammargren and his wife, Sandy. For Nevada Day in 2021, the couples opened their adjoining backyards filled with stuff to the public.

Hammargren had joked about his own death. In 2007, he held an “Awake Wake,” for which he staged a mock funeral and New Orleans-style funeral parade, and then lay in an iron lung within a sarcophagus in his garage for an hour.

In 2017, while giving a reporter a tour of his home, they walked past a sign that read, “Whoever has the most things when he dies … Wins.”

“I’m winning,” he said with a smile.

Contact Mary Hynes at mhynes@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0336. Follow @MaryHynes1 on Twitter. Review-Journal staff writer Briana Erickson contributed to this report.