Transcript of interview with Bernice Jaeger by Joanne L. Goodwin on July 25, 1997, July 30, 1997, & February 3, 1998

An Interview with Bernice Jaeger by Joanne L. Goodwin Conducted on July 25 and 30, 1997 and February 3, 1998 Las Vegas Women Oral History Project University of Nevada Las Vegas 2003 © Las Vegas Women Oral History Project University of Nevada Las Vegas, 2003 Produced by: Las Vegas Women Oral History Project Women’s Research Institute of Nevada University of Nevada Las Vegas Las Vegas, Nevada 89154-5083 Director and Editor: Joanne L. Goodwin Project Assistant and Text Processor: Laurie W. Boetcher This recorded interview and transcript have been made possible through the generosity of the Foundation at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. The Department of History of the university provided a home for the project and a wide variety of in-kind services. The department, as well as the college and university administration, enabled students and faculty to work together with community members to generate this selection of first-person narratives. The participants in this project thank the university for the support given that allowed an idea the opportunity to flourish. The transcript received minimal editing. These measures include the elimination of fragments, false starts, and repetitions in order to enhance the reader’s understanding of the material. All measures have been taken to preserve the style and language of the narrator. In several cases, photographic sources (housed separately) accompany the collection as slides or black-and-white photographs. The following interview is part of a series of interviews conducted under the auspices of the Las Vegas Women Oral History Project. Additional transcripts may be found under that series title. Joanne Goodwin, Project Director Associate Professor, Department of History University of Nevada Las Vegas List of Illustrations Frontispiece: Bernice Jaeger, Assistant General Manager, Continental Hotel and Casino, Las Vegas, Nevada, 1985-1997. The following photographs appear after the index: 1. Bernice Jaeger and daughter Ginger (14) at a Girl Scout event, 1970. 2. Graduation from Community College of Southern Nevada, 1973. 3. At her desk in the Riviera Hotel and Casino, 1980. 4. Ivan and Bernice Jaeger at the Sands (date unknown). 5. Receiving Clark County Working Mother of the Year Award, 1981. 6. Serving cookies at the annual Christmas party for shelter children, ca. mid-1990s. 7. Participating in Reading Week at Squires Elementary School, February 1998. 8. Standing with casino manager Don Spence at the Continental, ca. 1985. 9. With Ira Levy and customers at the Continental, November 1996. 10. Posing with the cast of “Sex Over 40” at the Continental, ca. 1990. 11. Graduation from University of Nevada Las Vegas, 1985. 12. Posing with granddaughters Rebecca and Eva after graduation from UNLV, 2003. 13. With Mary Goodin, Inez Rambeau, and Bea Ratliffe, 2003. 14. Family portrait (date unknown). All photographs are courtesy of Bernice Jaeger. Preface At the 2003 commencement ceremony held by the University of Nevada Las Vegas, Bernice Jaeger graduated with a master’s degree in counseling. Her walk across the stage at the Thomas and Mack Center culminated years of on-and-off study, during which she married and raised three children, was involved in community activities, had a successful career in hotel administration, and earned two associate’s degrees (liberal arts and hotel administration) and a bachelor’s degree in women’s studies in addition to her master’s. All of this came about because of a move to Las Vegas in the summer of 1961. Bernice Jaeger was born in Cincinnati, Ohio on July 27, 1934, the daughter of Frank Charles Smith and Bertha Marie Smith. Frank worked as a supervisor in a paper box plant; Bertha was a homemaker. Bernice graduated from Our Lady of Mercy High School and then attended Our Lady of Cincinnati College on a scholarship. She left early to marry Ivan Jaeger on June 20, 1955. They subsequently had three daughters, Ginger, Jacqueline, and Judith. Ivan Jaeger and his family were involved in the so-called underground gaming industry in the Midwest. In the gambling halls and country clubs of Ohio and Kentucky, Ivan honed his skills as a dealer. When the Midwest gaming industry shut down in 1961, he and Bernice relocated their growing family to Las Vegas. Here Ivan continued to work at the city’s major casino properties, first as a dealer and later in various executive gaming positions. Bernice joined the cadre of gaming wives who supported their husbands and raised their children by staying at home. Rather than succumbing to “Las Vegas wife syndrome”, however, Bernice decided to go back to college. She was one of the first students to attend Clark County Community College (later Community College of Southern Nevada) when it was founded in 1971. Bernice earned a liberal arts degree in 1973 and, in 1974, a degree in hotel administration. While she was completing the second degree, she did an internship at the Riviera Hotel and Casino with Inez Rambeau, the director of convention sales. Inez then hired Bernice as her secretary, and her career in the hotel industry began. Bernice discovered, through working with people such as Inez Rambeau, Bea Ratliffe, and Mary Goodin at the Riviera, that women could attain executive positions in a male-oriented industry. In 1973, when Bernice started at the Riviera, women represented only about one-tenth of Las Vegas hotel administrators across the board. Executives like Inez Rambeau, Bernice’s first mentor, encouraged young women in their goals to attain executive positions. After working a few years as Inez’s secretary, Bernice became the assistant to the hotel director at the Riviera, Dick Chappell. Later she was the personal secretary to the owner and general manager of the Aladdin Hotel and Casino, Ed Torres. After Bernice left that position in 1984, she completed her bachelor’s degree in then-new field of women’s studies at UNLV. She took some time off for personal travel, then started Flex-Time, a temporary employment agency catering specifically to working women. It was there in 1985 that Bernice met Ira Levy, the new owner of the Continental Hotel and Casino. Impressed by her background and knowledge of the hotel industry, Levy hired Bernice immediately as his assistant general manager, a position she held for twelve years. Bernice’s career in hotel administration had put her on “triple time,” as she called it. While working, she raised three daughters. As part of this, Bernice was a Girl Scout leader for twelve years and was also involved in PTA. In addition, she continued to attend school, eventually earning a bachelor’s degree. In 1981, Bernice was rewarded for her efforts when she received the Clark County Working Mother of the Year award. She was honored again in 1995 with her inclusion in Distinguished Women of Southern Nevada. Bernice also appears in Who’s Who in American Women. Throughout her career in both the hotel and the temporary employment industries, Bernice found that she did a lot of informal counseling as part of her job. This led her to pursue a master’s degree in counseling at UNLV, which she earned in 2003. Bernice now works for Legal Rehabilitation Services, leading court-mandated group counseling for people in domestic violence situations. Throughout her forty-two years in Las Vegas, Bernice Jaeger has watched the both the city and the hotel and gaming industry grow and evolve. The underground gaming industry in the Midwest, which led many people to make the move to Las Vegas, is a little-discussed topic in the annals of the city. From the days when managers like Dick Chappell, Ed Torres, and Ira Levy ran small hotel/casinos single-handed and with a personal touch, we have entered the era of the corporate-owned-and-operated megaresort. From the times when entertainers like Milton Berle, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis, Junior entertained in the showrooms and on the casino and hotel floors, we now live in an era of the Gaming Control Board, high-level security, and entertainer anonymity off-stage. The persistence and growth of women’s roles in the Las Vegas hotel industry is a continuing phenomenon. Through her recollections, Bernice Jaeger gives us new insight into the past and present of the city we call Las Vegas. Bernice Jaeger, Assistant General Manager, Continental Hotel and Casino, Las Vegas Nevada, 1985-1997 An Interview with Bernice Jaeger An Oral History Conducted by Joanne L. Goodwin 1 This is Joanne Goodwin. It is July 25, 1997 and I’m here with Bernice Jaeger, interviewing her about her experience in Las Vegas with the hotel/casino industry. Hi, Joanne. It’s nice to be with you today. I thought that we should start right at that place where you begin to do your work with the hotel industry. Tell me how you started. I was taking some classes at the Community College when they first started out many years ago in the early 1970s. I was just finishing up a liberal arts degree and I had one more class to take and I could elect to take anything I wanted. I decided to take Orientation into the Hotel Industry. I’ve always been interested in the hotel industry, especially here in Las Vegas. I did get into that class and they sent you out in the field, so to speak. They had a difficult time with me because in the early 1970s there weren’t very many women out in the industry and they wanted to pair me up with a female executive. They were able to select one at the Riviera Hotel, Inez Rambeau. She was the director of convention sales. So I went out to visit her. I would go out once a week and I really just sat there and observed. As time went on we developed a real friendship. Her father had owned a casino and my husband’s family had been in the casino industry all of their lives, so there was great rapport between us. We seemed to really understand the business. It happened that she had a secretary that was leaving, going back to Seattle, and she said to me, “Would you like to have a job here?” I said, “Well, goodness sakes, I don’t know. I wasn’t planning on it. I don’t even know how to type.” She said, “That’s okay. You’re enthusiastic. You’ll learn.” So I started out with Inez, and this was probably back in 1973. I worked with her for several years and worked well with her. I 2 do believe that we both realized that it wasn’t the sales department that was filling the hotel, it was really the casino. That’s where it all was. We sort of knew our place. After I worked there for a few years with her, I moved on to become Assistant to the Hotel Director. This was really a plum of a job. It was probably the most social job I’ve ever had. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I sat right in the middle of the hotel lobby and handled everything that came my way, literally. I loved every minute of it and I do believe that back in the 1970s, the Riviera was a very nice hotel. We had an awful lot of V.I.P. guests and they were very interesting, charming people from throughout the whole country – throughout the whole world, actually. I worked for a man who was such an interesting guy. He was brought to town here by Bugsy Siegel and he, himself, had an interesting life. He knew people from all over the world and so I had a great opportunity to visit with all of them. Now, I say “visit” because that’s really what my job was. It wasn’t a job by any means. It was socializing and taking care of all these people that came in. I also had the pleasure of taking care of the hotel reservations for all the stars and all their entourages. That was quite a kick, too. It wasn’t only just taking care of their hotel reservations; it was taking care of all their little idiosyncrasies. I think it was Joan Rivers that had to have x-number of hangers. I think it was Shirley MacLaine who had to have a certain kind of carrot juice. And Rodney Dangerfield, oh my God, he had this refrigerator that he would take with him on the road and whatever hotel he was playing at, he would keep his refrigerator there. It was my job, after I made his reservation, to find out where he played last and to find out where this refrigerator was so that we could go get it. It was over at the Sahara and they went over and picked it up. A God-ugly thing, it had a rope 3 tied around it and it was about to fall apart. But it was just one of those things that he had to take with him on the road. It was interesting meeting all of these people. I thoroughly enjoyed that. Every day was a real social event, meeting people who came to the hotel. I do believe [that] in those days that all of us who worked in the industry went out of our way to try to take care of them. It wasn’t a job. It was something that we really cared to do, and throughout the years so many of these guests were repeat guests. [They] came back year after year. Families came back. Their children came back. Before you knew it, there were grandchildren. The list goes on. Every year at Christmas, I still send and receive cards to some of these people that I met twenty-five years ago. In some cases, many of them are not real pleased with what they’re seeing here today, compared to what they had before and the kind of service that we were able to give at that time. I think we’re just getting a little bit too big today. It’s hard to do it. It’s hard to be as personal and as intimate as we were able to be at one time when we were smaller. How many rooms did the Riviera have in the mid-1970s? When I was there at that time, it was around eight hundred. Then they put another tower on and I think it went up to something like eleven hundred. But that’s small by today’s standards. I enjoy small hotels. The last hotel I worked at was only four hundred [rooms]. That’s almost like an inn. But I liked that. I think you can give a nice degree of service when it’s a little bit smaller. 4 Was there a particular ratio of workers to customers at the Riviera? Sometimes they talk about differences today between the Mirage and Circus Circus by how many employees per customer. No, I don’t remember back then how many employees we even had. I do know that the employees had been here for a long time. There was not a big turnover and we really felt like family. We were very close to each other. Even to this day, I still see so many of them and that’s been a good twenty-five years ago. There was a real closeness between us, and I think that’s very important to try to develop in your management style. People would rather have that, I believe, than union benefits and all those things. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but I’m just saying that there was a real spirit between us in those days. When you arrived in 1973, where were the women in management or administration at that time? I would say personnel. You often found women running personnel offices and in some cases payroll. Many times you’d have a female executive as a housekeeper. What about cashiers? By “cashiers,” do you mean…? That would be the casino rather than the hotel, right? There were front desk cashiers. The people that worked at the front desk also served as cashiers. 5 Have those changed at all in the last twenty-five years? Where the women are? Oh, I think so. Yes. I definitely think so. I think now you see a lot more women in your casino areas that you never would see before. As far as management positions? Oh, yes, definitely. In the last position that I had, we promoted a gal who had come through the ranks. She started out as a slot runner. [We] promoted her all the way through the ranks to become our slot manager. So you’re seeing an awful lot of this, women in your casino area. Never before. Maybe they would work in the cage, if you’d like to think of that as the casino area. Or a few of them would work as dealers, but you wouldn’t see too many that were on the floor – I’m speaking of the 1970s – or that would become a pit boss or anything like that. You’d see pit clerks, but you’re seeing more and more of those now. When do you think that started to shift? It would have probably been in the 1980s. What would you say was the cause of that? How do you think about that shift? I think colleges like UNLV [University of Nevada Las Vegas], who offered classes and afforded an education to these girls where they could actually go out and try and seek these jobs. I think more women came up through the ranks, and I know [that] I personally have helped a lot of women attain leadership roles in different hotels. I think 6 we did do that for each other, because I’ve always known how hard they work. They do their homework. They work twice as hard as men do. I don’t doubt that at all. They’re good team players and they’re usually very good to their help. Good personnel skills. Yes. You came in before this tide but you’ve been in the industry all the way through that era. Do you think that any particular casino leadership happened? Let me pose this as an either/or [question]. Do you think it was legislation, court action, or legal actions that led to that? You said education and the role of opportunity through education. As a person who sat in managerial offices, did you see any influence or any lack of influence by the legislation for equity? How did it work here? It was tough. It was a man’s world for so long, especially on the casino end of it – not so much the hotel end of it but definitely the casino end of it. I think it was after some of the older fellows moved on and maybe some younger people came in that you started to see the shift. For so many years, the gentlemen that ran the casinos were not real interested in having women in any kind of casino-oriented management. They really didn’t put much credit to anything that we would say or think. They didn’t feel that was our place. It was hard. So the hotel was a whole different organizational structure? As a rule. Tell me how it worked there in terms of opportunity and advancement. 7 So many of the women were really getting better educated in the hotel fields and there wasn’t really any reason that they couldn’t advance. There wasn’t anyone really holding them back and more women were getting into a better position so that they were helping these younger women coming on – accepting them as their assistants and protégées and taking them under their wing and really helping them. So I think in the hotel end you did see that. It took a while for the casino end but it’s there. It’s coming. You see more and more of it today. Talk to me a little bit more about how you understand this division between casino and hotel. Was it always that way or does that happen with corporations when they come in? You indicated that the hotel end had a whole different kind of fluidity for women workers. I think it did. The casino, in this city or any city, is really where it’s at. That’s where you’re going to make the money. The hotel, with its sales department and its marketing department and all those things, is very, very, very important. The way things are structured today, especially with all the corporations, each department has to stand on its own. In the old days, that wasn’t necessarily so. The casino just took care of everything. You never had to really worry about food and beverage or any of those kinds of departments, or your entertainment department. All of those were just subservient to the casino. In today’s corporations, they’re not always quite looking at it that way. So I think that people who worked in the casino in those days certainly felt like they were carrying the whole ball. And in many cases they were. So I think their attitudes were probably a little different than the people who were in the hotel end of it. 8 Would it be an accurate assumption to say that a manager in a hotel section and an equivalent kind of manager in the casino section would also be paid quite differently or have very different perks in the 1970s? In some of your better hotels, yes. I would say there was a tremendous difference. Someone who perhaps would be in the accounting office, maybe in a fairly good position, would certainly not be making what maybe a pit boss would be making in the casino. It wouldn’t matter what kind of education they both had, either. Just a base salary or with tips not included? Tips included. That could skyrocket in those days in the better casinos. Let’s go back to 1973 and Inez Rambeau. There was yourself and Inez in sales. [Were there] any other women in management or administration? Bea Ratliffe was in charge of room reservations. Helen – I can’t remember her last name, and she just died recently – was in charge of personnel. Personnel only consisted of one person in those days. We had a gal who was the paymaster. That probably was just about all, as far as management. In the hotel end of it, for those of us who don’t know quite how it’s structured, would that represent like a tenth of the administrators, or half? No, maybe a tenth. You said Inez Rambeau was very welcoming to you. Tell me how she trained you in the job, or got you interested enough to take it on as a career. 9 She was very open. She really seemed to thrive on my being there and asking her questions. I was only a student. I was only sitting there observing. She would introduce me to the other department heads and any questions that I might have or things [that] I might be studying, she would let me spend time with them. I thought that was just a wonderful education. I really felt like I lucked out. Then, of course, she had enough faith in me that I could even take this job when I couldn’t type or anything. I’d never worked in an office. She was a good teacher. She had a tough job and I really felt like, you know, you wanted to back her up. You had to dot every “i” and cross every “t” because she expected that. It always seemed like whenever her work would be presented, it would be scrutinized perhaps more than a male’s might. We all felt that. We wanted to be sure that everything that we did or produced out of that office was as correct as we could possibly have it. There was another wonderful lady in that office who was her assistant and she was most helpful. Her name was Mary Goodin, and she really knew her beans. So I felt very fortunate to be there with them. They really did teach me a lot. You had mentioned that you and Inez understood what was important in the industry. Can you tell me a little bit more about that? Well, as I said, we both realized [that] it was the casino that was the important end of that hotel. Her father had been in the business. My husband had been in the business. That was just ingrained in us. That wasn’t anything that we had to learn. I think a lot of times you’ll find especially sales managers, when they get into these hotels, seem to think that they’re the ones that produce everything there. They’re filling the rooms, so they have to 10 be the very most important person there because none of these people would have shown up had they not rented these rooms. So we didn’t have any of that kind of garbage to sort through. We already knew it was the casino, and it was just understood. So we just went from there. I didn’t need any training in that end. I really understood that. That helped. Was this your first job? Yes, it was my first job. I actually hadn’t even intended to go to work. I was just taking a few classes. The Community College [had] just started [and] I was in its first class. I was just sort of trying this out to see what it was like, and when she asked me did I want to go to work, I thought, “Oh, my God. I don’t know.” I’d been a housewife and mother for years, and it wasn’t anything that I was looking to do but I thought, “Well, it sounds like a wonderful opportunity.” And I loved that hotel. The Riviera in those days was such a marvelous hotel. My husband had worked there at one time and so I knew of its grandeur. In those days, its clientele were very, very wealthy people. Some of the people used to come out and spend the whole winter here. That’s the way [Las] Vegas was in those days. They’d stay at the Riviera and the Tropicana and the better hotels. He would come home with such wonderful stories about all of these people that he met, and I thought, “Why should I give up this opportunity?” At that time my children were now in junior high and in high school, so I thought that I could plunge in. What did I have to lose? Did it make any kind of difference at home? Was it a full-time job? Yes, it was. 11 Were you on a double shift, so to speak? Oh, I was on a triple shift. I was working and going to school and running my home, with my three children and my husband. So yeah, I was doing triple time there. But it was a very exciting time in my life. It really seemed to make me understand my children more. At that time, when I went back to school in 1971, people weren’t doing that. Everyone that I knew thought I was nuts. What was I going back to school for? I mean, a woman my age. What was I going to do after I went to school? I really got a lot of laughs and people were making fun of me. But I so enjoyed going back to school. That was quite a kick. I think going back to school; I could certainly understand what some of my children were going through, with some of the teachers that I myself ran across. Do you mean the kind of attitude? Oh, yeah. So my kids were a big help to me. They helped me with my homework and I helped them with their homework. There was a real closeness. I think going to work at that time and going to school – they really got on the ball and started to fend for themselves a little bit more. Which was good. Mom wasn’t around to be picking up, so they all learned to cook and sew and run a house. Excellent. Yeah, I thought so. What about your husband? Was that a problem? 12 No, that was never a problem. He was always very, very supportive of me. He was really a big help. There were many times when maybe he realized I needed to keep the house a little bit quiet. I had some studying to do. Maybe he’d go off with the kids to a movie or something. Yeah, he was always supportive. Let’s back up a little bit and give your kids some names and when they were born, and your husband, when you were married. Oh, goodness. We were married in 1955 in Cincinnati, Ohio and we have three girls. We had Ginger, who’s the oldest, Jackie, and Judi. I have two granddaughters, Rebecca and Eva. All women. You had a girl thing. Yeah, it was a real girl thing around our house. Are any of your children in the hotel or gaming industry? No. Although they have worked in the industry, it was always a means to an end. They have never been fascinated with it. They grew up around it. At home we had slot machines in the house for them to play with, so it’s never been that they’ve been interested. They don’t even gamble. They never did. None of us have because we’ve all been in the business, I guess. They do different kinds of jobs and careers. Oh, yeah. The two oldest girls are teachers, and the youngest is leaving in a week and going to pursue a career back East as a school psychologist, school counselor. 13 I’m sure this has happened to you many, many times. It has to me and I’ve only been here six years. When you travel and people ask you where you’re from, you always get this response, “Oh, people live there?” Oh, yes. So I’m going to ask a related question. How is it to raise a family here? I had wonderful experiences raising a family here. Raising a family has been the most challenging thing I’ve ever done. I’ve always said [that] if you could raise a family, then you could do any kind of job because all the rest are easier. This was a very small town when we came here. There were only fifty thousand people then. I always was interested in my children and there weren’t an awful lot of activities here for them when they were small. I wanted to be able to spend time with them, and so I became involved in Girl Scouts. I started out in Girl Scouts when the first one was a Brownie, and went all the way through twelve years of Girl Scouts. I was even on the board, as a matter of fact. I was a Girl Scout leader for twelve years. It gave me an opportunity to know who their friends were and all these kids always ended up at our house for parties and meetings. So I had an extended family, with all the girls that were in my troop. I had the same girls, some of them, for twelve years, so when I say “extended family,” I really mean that. After they grew up, I went to their weddings and baby showers and all those kinds of things. It was a small town and I think so many women looked for anything that they could, to afford their children a normal kind of upbringing. The fact that it was a 14 glamorous city didn’t have an awful lot of bearing on the very simple things that we did with our families. What else was available? There was Girl Scouts. You had all girls. Maybe boys would be different. Were there sports activities and dances? Oh, sure. Church activities. I was a room mother, so there were all those kinds of things. I was always running down there for parties with the cupcakes and all that. There were always dances and swimming parties and slumber parties. I had a lot of slumber parties in my day. Camping. Normal family activities. Yeah, very normal. A lot of our relatives moved here and I had nephews and nieces, and so the children had as normal a life here as anywhere, I’m sure. It was really strange to me because when we said we were leaving for Las Vegas, so many of our friends in Ohio had a fit: “[You’re] taking those children to Sin City?” They really berated us for that, and I worried about that, but actually we ended up having less problems with our girls than so many of them did in other cities. As far as drugs, we never had a problem with any of that. What do you ascribe that to, the size of the city? I think it was the closeness that they had with the family, knowing who their friends were and providing some kind of entertainment. I was never afraid to open my house up to the kids to have a party or a cookout or a sleepover. The kids that they ran around with, I 15 think their families were like that, too. We all came here together at the same time. So many of us came out of Ohio and Kentucky. When you say, “We all…” I’m speaking about the people who came from the Kentucky area in 1961. There were so many of us [that] came at one time. So you have a community. There was a colony of us, yes. That was kind of nice, too. We did an awful lot of things for each other. There was a lot of networking between us. [End of side one, tape one.] You were talking about the colony of migrants from Cincinnati. Well, they closed gaming in Kentucky. Gaming had been in northern Kentucky for years and years. It was underground, but everyone knew it was there. Cincinnati was a very conservative city, and all the fun and entertainment was across the river in northern Kentucky. When that closed down in 1961, actually we were one of the first families to come out. I just had a feeling [that] it wasn’t going to open again, and where else would you go but Las Vegas, if that’s the kind of business you were in. So we packed up and came out here, and then after a few weeks more and more people came. That whole summer they started to come out, and into the fall. There was a real colony of us. The fellows helped each other find jobs and the women helped each other. We had this box that we kind of circulated through the crowd. When we came, we 16 didn’t bring anything. We brought the kids, [the] electric skillet, my sewing machine, four dishes, and some silverware. That was it. We all had to start over, and so we had this box we’d circulate. It had some linens and some pots and pans and a couple of dishes and some old cups and things like that. I know that sounds crazy, but so many of us came without an awful lot until our things got here. So we all helped each other. But [Las] Vegas was like that in those days. People were very, very helpful. It was even funny. I noticed when I started to join some of the women’s clubs, way back in the early days, the women in the clubs – I don’t know if some of them were social climbers or whatever – they were very influential sometimes in getting their husbands better jobs just by some of the women that they would meet and socialize with. That was kind of funny to me. Is this like Junior League or [the] Mesquite [Club]? There were those things, and there were garden clubs and just various kinds of clubs in the early days. And you’d meet people whose husb