The life of the former Senate majority leader Harry Reid was celebrated by two presidents and other Democratic leaders in Las Vegas on Saturday.

President Joe Biden, the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, were scheduled to speak at a memorial for the longtime Senate leader, who died on 28 December at home in Henderson, Nevada, at 82 and of complications from pancreatic cancer.

Barack Obama, who credits Reid for his rise to the White House, was scheduled to deliver the eulogy.

“The president believes Harry Reid is one of the greatest leaders in Senate history,” Karine Jean-Pierre, a deputy White House press secretary, said on Friday. “So he is traveling to pay his respects to a man who had a profound impact on this nation.”

Biden served for two decades with Reid in the Senate and worked with him for eight years as vice-president.

Elder M Russell Ballard, a senior apostle in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, was also to speak at the 2,000-seat concert hall about Reid’s 60 years in the Mormon faith. Vice-President Kamala Harris also attended.

“These are not only some of the most consequential leaders of our time – they are also some of Harry’s best friends,” Reid’s wife of 62 years, Landra Reid, said in a statement announcing plans for the Smith Center for the Performing Arts event.

“Harry loved every minute of his decades working with these leaders and the incredible things they accomplished together.”

Reid’s daughter and four sons were scheduled to speak too.

In a letter to Reid before his death, Obama recalled their close relationship, their different backgrounds and Reid’s climb from an impoverished former gold mining town of Searchlight in the Mojave Desert to leadership in Congress.

“Not bad for a skinny, poor kid from Searchlight,” Obama wrote. “I wouldn’t have been president had it not been for your encouragement and support, and I wouldn’t have got most of what I got done without your skill and determination.”

Reid spent 34 years in Washington and led the Senate through a crippling recession and the Republican takeover of the House after the 2010 elections. He muscled Obama’s signature healthcare act through the Senate.

Reid hitchhiked 40 miles to high school and was an amateur boxer before he was elected to the Nevada state Assembly at 28. He had graduated from Utah State University and worked nights as a US Capitol police officer while attending George Washington University Law School in Washington.

In 1970, at 30, he was elected state lieutenant governor with a Democratic governor, Mike O’Callaghan. Reid was elected to the House in 1982 and the Senate in 1986.

Reid built a political machine in Nevada that for years helped Democrats win key elections. When he retired in 2016 after an exercise accident at home left him blind in one eye, he picked a former Nevada attorney general, Catherine Cortez Masto, to replace him.

Cortez Masto was the first woman from Nevada and the first Latina ever elected to the US Senate.

“Most of all, you’ve been a good friend,” Obama told Reid in his letter. “As different as we are, I think we both saw something of ourselves in each other – a couple of outsiders who had defied the odds and knew how to take a punch and cared about the little guy.”

The singer-songwriter and environmentalist Carole King and Brandon Flowers, lead singer of the Las Vegas-based rock band the Killers, were scheduled to perform during the memorial.

“The thought of having Carole King performing in Harry’s honor is a tribute truly beyond words,” Landra Reid said.

Flowers, a longtime friend, shares the Reids’ faith and has been a headliner at events including a Lake Tahoe Summit that Reid founded in 1997 to draw attention to the ecology of the lake, and the National Clean Energy Summit that Reid helped launch in 2008 in Las Vegas. Among other songs, Flowers was scheduled to sing the Nevada state anthem, Home Means Nevada.

Those flying to Las Vegas arrived at the newly renamed Harry Reid international airport. It was formerly named for Pat McCarran, a former Democratic US senator from Nevada who once owned the airfield and whose legacy is clouded by racism and antisemitism.