In this episode of 8 News Then, host John Langler sits down with former Henderson Mayor Andy Hafen, now president of the Henderson Historical Society, for a conversation about the city’s origins and how it grew into the community we know today.
Andy walks through Henderson’s beginnings as a World War II town built around the Basic Magnesium plant, and the lesser-known story of Pittman, the earlier mining-era community folded into Henderson at incorporation in 1953. He shares details most residents have never heard, including the fact that some of Henderson’s oldest streets were laid out off the grid and painted white and purple to camouflage the town from potential wartime air attacks.
After the war, Henderson came close to becoming a ghost town. Andy explains how local leaders secured the city’s future, and how industry kept the community alive through the following decades. He speaks candidly about growing up when Henderson was jokingly called “the armpit of the nation,” and how his family’s tire business felt every plant strike and slowdown firsthand.
The conversation turns to two pivotal moments in modern Henderson history: the arrival of Green Valley in the late 1970s, which put the city on the map as a master-planned community, and the 1988 PEPCON explosion, which Andy witnessed firsthand as a newly elected councilman. He reflects on how the community pulled together in the aftermath, and how the disaster reshaped conversations about Henderson’s industrial identity.
Andy also discusses the challenge of preserving what makes Henderson feel like Henderson, that folksy, neighbor-knows-neighbor character that has survived decades of rapid growth. He highlights the Historical Society’s Henderson Speaks program and its push to save landmarks like the original fire and police stations, making the case that history shouldn’t be bulldozed in the name of progress.
