Jimbo Eruptions II. [Updated]

It appears our governor is a nonpartisan one after all: He was recently seen at a Reno pancake house with a woman alleged to be Leslie Durant (maiden name Sellers), now around 44 years of age, who gained a lot of publicity back in the mid-1980s for marrying, divorcing, remarrying, and divorcing then-Reno mayor Pete Sferrazza.

If her current name is Durant, then she has been married at least five or six times. I know she has at least one child (not with Sferrazza). She had been married at least once and possibly twice already when she married Sferrazza, nearly twenty years her senior, back around 1985/1986, I believe it was, when she was 22 and he was 41. One of her husbands was a Cord family heir, and I believe another husband was a doctor she was married to for a few weeks between her two marriages to Sferrazza. The Sferrazza marriage was stormy, to say the least, and Leslie reportedly didn't get along at all with his daughter Jessica (now on the Reno city council). Anyway, they split up for good, and Pete Sferrazza married another much-younger woman to whom he is still married and with whom he has two children. Leslie, who made an appearance on Geraldo Rivera's television show back in the 1980s, has stayed out of the limelight ever since. At least until Jim Gibbons decided to intrude.

I have a bunch of articles about the Leslie/Pete Sferrazza soap opera, and I did have a copy of the Playboy issue which Leslie posed in the altogether. I probably still have the magazine, but it is stored away, as is the scrapbook where I have the Sferrazza articles.

--A USA People Search doesn't yield much in the way of information about the various names of Leslie Durant. I hate to have to rummage thorugh my scrapbooks; it is a pain in the ass.

---I did rummage through the scrapbooks I have in the apartment; the one I am looking for is not there. It's probably in my landlord's storage unit or in his apartment.

-----I still can't find the articles, but I know I still have them. I don't think I put them out to the storage unit across town.

Another thing to note: Leslie did an interview with the Reno News & Review alternative weekly some years back. At that time she was a single parent, and she was talking about what she had been doing in the years since the divorce from the former mayor. As I recall, she had positive things to say about him. By that time, he had remarried. Unfortunately, a search in the RN&R archives turns up empty on her. I have tried to go through every issue in the online archives going back to 2002, and I have come up empty. It may be a case of an article which is not online.

An alternative in finding the original Reno Gazette-Journal articles about Leslie and Pete Sferrazza would be to go to UNR and look through the microfiche. I am not sure I want to do that.

At around the time she married Pete, he was running for Congress against incumbent Barbara Vucanovich, and even though he had a shoestring budget to run against her, he won something like 42 percent of the vote. This was impressive given the fact he used much of his own money and District 2 was even more Republican than it is now.

Note if you will I am writing this out of memory, so there might be a few faulty details. Not everybody can remember everything from 20-plus years ago. At the time I had returned to college, attending the University of Nevada, Reno, and was taking a few journalism courses before I gave that up and majored in general studies. During the Sferrazza soap opera, there were students I took journalism classes with who either knew Leslie or knew about her, and at the time they all had low opinions of her. "Stupid" and "golddigger" were the words used to describe her at the time.