When U.S. Rep. Dina Titus of Nevada gets down to work, she parks herself behind a piece of history.

At her district office in Las Vegas, Titus sits at the desk that once belonged to U.S. Sen. Howard Cannon, also a Democrat, in Washington, D.C. He served Nevada in the Senate from 1959 until he was upset in his bid for a fifth term in 1982 by Republican Chic Hecht.

Departing senators were allowed to take their desks with them, and Cannon did. When he died at age 90 in 2002, it was inherited by his daughter Nancy Downey of Genoa .

Downey loaned the desk to Titus when the lawmaker served in Congress in 2009-10, and again when the Las Vegas Democrat was elected this past November.

“She wanted me to have it, and I am just so honored,” Titus said. “It fits in the office perfectly.”

The now-antique mahogany desk with leather trim and footrest was standard issue in the Senate”;s Russell Building, where Cannon had his office. Some say the piece dates to when the building opened in 1909.

Cannon, a troop carrier pilot in World War II, served through the presidencies of John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, and is perhaps best known as an architect of airline deregulation when he headed the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee in the late 1970s.

Titus, a former government professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and longtime Democratic leader in the state Senate, served a faculty internship on Cannon”;s staff in Washington in the spring semester of 1982, and remained friends with him and his family afterward.

The senator, a Mormon who was born in St. George, Utah, had taken an interest in atomic weapons testing, and particularly early reports of atmospheric fallout poisoning “downwinders” in Utah and beyond. In what turned out to be some of his final months in office, he assigned Titus to research the topic.

“The more research I did on it, the more interested I became, and then it became something I did academic research on after I left his office,” Titus said. “Bombs in the Backyard,” her book on atomic testing and nuclear policy issues, ultimately was published in 1986.