Paula Saragoza passed away Jan. 23, 2015. Born July 10, 1930, to Paul F. Troester and Marguerite Reed Troester, she was a long-time resident of Nevada. Born Paula Jeanne Troester in Salt Lake City, she spent much of her youth between Salt Lake and the mining camps just outside of Battle Mountain. In the Copper Basin Mine she would play among her father's gold and silver deposits and pick turquoise from the surrounding hard rock mine shafts. There she developed her love for Nevada, nature, and freedom, something she would treasure throughout her adult life. After studying at the University of Utah, she married Justin Saragoza July 29, 1950, bought a trailer home, and together they would spend months traveling throughout Nevada on road construction crews in every town in the state of Nevada. In 1953 they settled in Henderson to raise their only son, and through hard work, live the American dream. She pursued her artistic side, having her home featured in the Henderson Home News, numerous blue ribbons for flower arrangements, hand painted ceramics, and showing the Bulldog breed. She would also spend time painting, writing poems on various topics (e.g. "The Mechanical Menace" a prescient warning about computer dominance), and volumes of letters on the United States and Nevada Constitutions as well as other topics, which she held as the highest standard for procuring freedom. She was also known as "The Informer" on the Part Time Pete Moss show on KDWN. She was socially active having been a Soroptimist, Executive Secretary at Nevada Beverage Company, a business woman co-owner of "The Kiddie Korner" in Henderson, a Founding Individual Member of United We Stand America, honored 11 year member of The National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial, and a member of the U.S. Deputy Sheriff's Association. She was a giving person throughout her life having given to several charitable organizations and, May 2, 1988, loaning her personal family collection of Mormon pioneer clothing and pictures to the Wells Fargo Silver Reef Monument Restoration Project in southern Utah. She had a lifetime passion for collecting, she was a published poet and, in one of her last poems from 2014, she wrote, "I collect pre-World War II China brass" and "like Granny Reed before me, I save poems, scraps, old pictures, dishes and cards, not to act in yard sales in some stranger's yard." Besides her lifelong penchant for collecting all forms of Asian art, in the last years of her life she created her own kind of "impermanent" American Folk Yard Art full of whimsy and joy. She is survived by her son, Justin; nephew, Lawrence Draper; niece, Paula Zub; and all friends and family. She will be buried at Battle Mountain Cemetery in Nevada. -