Transcript of interview with Shirley Mudra by Barbara Tabach, November 30, 2011

An Interview with Shirley Mudra An Oral History Conducted by Barbara Tabach The Boyer Early Las Vegas Oral History Project Oral History Research Center at UNLV University Libraries University of Nevada Las Vegas ©The Boyer Early Las Vegas Oral History Project University of Nevada Las Vegas, 2007 Produced by: The Oral History Research Center at UNLV - University Libraries Director: Claytee D. White Editors: Barbara Tabach and Gloria Homol Transcribers: Kristin Hicks and Laurie Boetcher Interviewers and Project Assistants: Barbara Tabach and Claytee D. White ii The recorded interview and transcript have been made possible through the generosity of Dr. Harold Boyer. The Oral History Research Center enables students and staff 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 that includes 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 accompany the individual interviews. The following interview is part of a series of interviews conducted under the auspices of the Boyer Early Las Vegas Oral History Project. Additional transcripts may be found under that series title. Claytee D. White, Project Director Director, Oral History Research Center University Libraries University Nevada, Las Vegas iii Preface Frontispiece Interview Index Appendix Newspaper clippings UNLVino project Table of Contents 1 - 2 5 26 iv Preface When Shirley Mudra arrived in Las Vegas in 1966, she came tearfully. But as the wife of a Nevada Test site manager and mother of three young children, she was accustomed to adapting. Indeed, she adapted and remains a Las Vegas resident. Shirley and her husband Paul (above photo) met while both were in the Air Force. She was the daughter of a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, homemaker and railroad worker and describes her upbringing. She also talks about her joy of enlistment in the Air Force and the transition to being a wife, mother and her employment at the Department of Energy. Shirley's narrative includes details of early Las Vegas life, raising children here and becoming part of the changing community through friendships. Family photo of Shirley's husband, Paul Mudra with their children. < Oral History Research Center at UNLV Boyer Early Las Vegas Oral History Project Shake, Rattle & Roll: Stories of Nevada Test Site Wives and Children Oral History Project Use Agreement Name of Narrator: 'Jh AL/rlr^ Name of Interviewer: We, the above named, give to die Oral History Research Center of UNLV, die recorded mtcrview(s) initiated on along with typed transcripts as an unrestricted gilt to be used lor such scholarly and educational purposes as shall be determined, and transfer to the University of Nevada Las Vegas, legal title and all literary property rights including copyright. This gift does not preclude the right of the intervievver as a representative of UNLV, to use the recordings and related materials for scholarly pursuits. y I understand dial my interview will be made available to researchers and may be quoted b om published, distributed, placed on the Internet or broadcast in any medium that the Oral History Research Center and UNLV Libraries deem appropriate including future forms or electronic and digital media. Hi ere wilbbe no compensation for any interviews. Date Dale Library Special Collections 4505 Maryland Parkway, Box 457010, Las Vegas, Nevada 89154-7010 (702) 895-2222 Today is November 30th, 2011. I am in Las Vegas, Nevada, sitting in the home of Shirley Mudra. And how do you spell that? M-U-D-R-A. Hungarian. Okay. Hungarian, wow. Yes. So is there a strong ethnic influence in the family? My husband's Hungarian influence. His mother and father both came from Hungary, so he's first generation. I bet that's a whole story all by itself. This is. Okay. Well, we're sipping our tea. Thank you for letting me come in to your lovely home and for serving me some nice hot tea. So if there's a little clanging on the tape, you all will know that it's from our pretty blue-flowered china. This is pretty. Thank you. Thank you. So Shirley, let's start with you personally. Where did you grow up? Tell me a little bit about your background. I grew up in a small community that was a suburb of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I left when I was 21. So all of my upbringing was in this railroading town. We only had one side of the main street because the railroad was the other side. And that's where I grew up. What did your parents do? My father was a railroader. My mother was a homemaker. What did your dad do on the railroad? He was an air brake repairman and a foreman. I love the railroad stories. My grandfather was a railroad man. He was an immigrant and I always love the railroad stories. I did too. And how many kids were in the family? There were three girls. And where are you in the ranking of those? 1 I am the youngest. Was there an advantage to being the youngest? No. [Laughing] Why not? Well, at that time it was right after the Depression, so everything was a lot of hard work. This meant that many times my oldest sister was put in charge, and she was quite a controller. And even though there was nine years' difference, I think even when I was young I didn't like being controlled because when the chores came, I always had the ones she didn't like. [Laughing] So what was your least favorite chore? Oh, my goodness, the whisk broom. If I see a whisk broom now, I get shivers because in those days you had these maroon sofas that every little piece of lint stuck to it, and I would have to get every piece of lint out of this maroon mohair sofa and the carpet coming down the stairs with the whisk broom was my job. And, I, to this day, do not like whisk brooms. [Laughing] [Laughing] Deeply rooted scarring here. Okay. So then you graduated from high school in that community? I did. What did you do after that? I went to work for United States Steel for four years in a great position. I worked in the security office. It was exempt and we were all by ourselves in the building and the salaries were wonderful for people that worked at United States Steel. I worked there four years. I graduated from high school when I was 17. In fact, they interviewed me for a position at U.S. Steel, which was a few cities away, another suburb, and I got the job. And the salary was so good I stayed there for four years until everyone I went to school with got married and had babies. My mother could not understand why I did not want to get married yet. Oh, you didn't want to get married? Oh, no. Why? Well, I was born and raised in this little railroading town and I thought, you know, this is such a big United States. And while we would go on vacations to Canada every year, I just knew there 2 was so much more and different kinds of lifestyles. I could hardly wait to get out on my own. With marriage, that meant I would probably live there the rest of my life. In those days girls lived in the family home until they married. There was none of this get your own apartment. And at 21, with my mother pressuring me a little bit to get married, I thought, oh, it's time for me to spread my wings. So you made a bold move. You were single and you moved out. Very bold. Okay. Well, tell me about that. Well, in that day and age—you have to realize this was 1956—I think I was always doing things that weren't the norm: marriage, babies, cooking, gossiping. I thought where am I going to go that I'm not going to have to worry about getting a job and about finding a place to live? And I joined the military. I joined the Air Force, all on my own, and off I went. They didn't recruit you; you just sort of knocked on their door? I just went down there and talked to them a little bit and signed the paper and came back and told my family. Oh, my, what did they say? Well, it was so typical. They said oh. I came from such a patriotic family. All my uncle—and I had like ten uncles and aunts—every one of them had boys in the family that went into the military and I thought our family doesn't have that. So I said to my dad, "I'm going to go in the military and serve my term just so that our family also had someone in the military." And you chose the Air Force... Air Force because in those days going to the movies you always had a five-minute clip on what was going on in the world today in the military and in the war, and I fell in love with those airplanes. I thought, oh, isn't that wonderful? And I just was so fascinated by airplanes and I thought, yeah, I want to be a part of that. Can you kind of summarize what that part of your career was like? Well, in August I went to San Antonio. At that time the government issue was wool socks, your flight boots, long pants, and that s how you went through basic in August—no air-conditioning. So I did that. Then they recruited me to go to Denver. At that time the [Air Force] Academy was 3 there, Lowry One and Lowry Two, and the President [Dwight D. Eisenhower] even flew in there one day. I was one of the first women to be accepted in the AACS Squadron location. They put me right to work on the flight line. What's the acronym stand for? Oh, air traffic controllers and communicators. I'm a lifetime membership of that squadron. We got the military planes up in the air, all over the country. This was the hub of communications. I started out as a Teletype operator, taking the flight plan from the pilots, how many hours he would be up in the air, where his destination was, putting this information into a ticker tape, sending it on to wherever Air Force base he was flying to, how many hours of fuel, etcetera. Then if for any reason a plane was lost, we would start tracking. So that's what I did. That's amazing. I know. And because I was only one of three woman in the squadron to begin with, I was housed in the women barracks, but had no inspections because I was really attached to an all-male squadron. I assume that must have been unusual. There couldn't have been a lot of women. At that time did they call it the WAF, Women's Air Force? Like WAACs were the Army. WAF, yes. Well, at that time they decided to bring women into this squadron location. They sent some of them to on-the-job training. Others went to training centers. They wanted us to go straight there and to actually train on the job. I think your scores determined which way they would send you. They chose a few of us to come in to Denver and to be in that squadron. So it was a lot of fun. Over the years, as women have become more accepted in the military, I bet you've watched with keen eyes. I did. And if I go out to Nellis Air Force Base today, I am so jealous of the women out there and I just want so much to be a part of that again because those years were the happiest years of my whole life. What made those years happy? I don t know if it was the independence no, I know what it was. They gave women way back in '56 the opportunity to develop themselves in a technical field because when I left the military, the 4 only other job I could get again was a secretary. And I know the base commander sent his aide two times to try to persuade me to come up and talk to him. He was a General in charge of Lowry and he wanted me to be his assistant. I was able to refuse—I so wanted to not be a secretary because I wanted to do something technical. They had the most wonderful opportunities. They treated me so fine. No women had opportunities like that unless they came from wealthy families where their parents could send them to an Ivy League school, and that wasn't the neighborhood I grew up in And because I worked for the AACS, I was on permanent flight status. I could fly anywhere a pilot was going to get flight time in. So they would say, hey, are you off on Thursday? Yes. We'll have to get flight time in. Where would you like to fly to? And I always said Kemmerer, Wyoming, because Kemmerer was my maiden name. We had quite a family history and part of the Kemmerer ancestors stopped in Pennsylvania and the rest went on and settled Kemmerer, Wyoming. So I always wanted to fly into Kemmerer, Wyoming. And the one bartender—at that day they did not check your age—but he said to me, you look like a kid because I was only five feet tall, weighed a hundred pounds. So he said what are you doing here with these military people? And I said, well, I'm really 21. To prove it I pulled out my military identification. He saw my name, Shirley Kemmerer, and all the beer was free for all of us because everything in Kemmerer, Wyoming was Kemmerer Laundry, Kemmerer Insurance, Kemmerer this, Kemmerer that. That was just a fun little thing. Did you find relatives there, or did you look for them? I never stopped long enough to look because we were getting flight time in and flight time out. Of course, the pilot wasn't allowed to have any beer. I understand. So you were in the military how long? Two years. You're still single at that time? Well, I married when I was in there. Yes, and so I left when my husband did. He was in the military, as well? Yes. That's what they do in those days, so. Then that's when I became a homemaker. When did you start having kids? Well, let me see. Karen was bom in '58—so about a year and a half after I got married. I thought, 5 well, I had my independence. I want to hear how you met your husband. You two have been married for how long? Well, actually next month is going to be our 50th wedding anniversary. Congratulations. Yes. I met him in Grand Junction, Colorado. At that time we both went to work at Atomic Energy because I wanted back into the government. So we went from Grand Junction, Colorado to Price, Utah to Idaho Falls. We only stayed in each place two years because as he would transfer he would get a promotion. One day he said, "I'm interviewing for a job in Las Vegas." I said, oh lordy, I do not want to move to Las Vegas with three children. He said, "Well, this is where we are going to relocate." So I packed up the bags. Cried the whole way to Las Vegas. And now, are you driving here? Yes, in a car that had no air-conditioning because you didn't need it in Idaho. We arrived here in January from Idaho Falls where my husband worked then in a nuclear testing program and he transferred in as an operations officer. So let me understand: was he still attached with the Air Force? No. He was out of that. Okay. Yes. My youngest was six months old and my oldest was three years old. They were raised the whole time here in Las Vegas and we've made this our permanent home. We've been here for over 45 years. Las Vegas is our home. So when you moved here, though, did you think you were going to be here for just a short period of time? He told me two years. Two years. Two years. I go okay. Prior to moving here, here I was used to wide-open spaces. You know, there were none of these block walls around the yards. You had just rolling yards that everyone played in the backyard from one yard to the other. Then I came here and I thought what are these block walls? And no detached garages? All the garages were attached to the house and people drove in their air-conditioned cars with the windows up into their garage, put their garage door down, into their house, and there was none of that little 6 communication there that I missed terribly. Because in Idaho it was like that? It was totally different? Idaho, Utah, Pennsylvania, and then all of a sudden the drastic, drastic changes. What neighborhood did you live in at first? Well, you have to realize at that time — [laughing] you're going to love this ~ the end of the city was Decatur. And you know how you knew that? Sproul Homes that were building the homes and they had this great big, enormous arrow that pointed down to the ground. That was the end of town and that was Decatur. We lived by the Municipal Golf Course. And that would be where? Where was that located? That was on Washington and Decatur, right up from Lorenzi Park. Many of the Test Site people started to congregate in those areas, so that's where we lived. And Mary [Shaw], who you met, I met her there. She lived in that neighborhood. Many of the contracting people also lived down there. And then Sproul moved that arrow the whole way up to Jones—can you imagine?—to identify that end of the town. Now, Sproul, that's Sproul and that's a builder at the time? Yeah, that was a builder. They were known for their big golden arrow that marked "Sproul is building here," which means the town is growing. Oh, it was funny now that you think about it. We were all down in that area. So you cried all the way here and it was a big change. As you tried to make it a home, what were you feeling? Do you remember? Well, you know, it's interesting. Once I make a decision for any kind of change in my life I close that chapter and start from that point on. After about a week, I had a family conference with the kids and I said, you know, I have to tell you something; unfortunately, you're not going to be able to do what everyone else does in your school classes and that's going to seem odd to you. Well, they were little kids then, but I remember when my first one started to school and I even told the others. I said we're going to have to set up some rules here and that means, we do have people that I know who you've started to make friendships with. I don't want you in a home that's unsupervised, where the parent is sleeping because they are on shift work. So I said we're going to 7 have to make some adjustments in our lifestyle here that you're going to have to listen to me and it's not going to at times seem fair. However, anyone is welcome in our home. Many times I worried because I was so removed from my family that I didn't want to make a mistake. So I'm afraid I was a little bit more restrictive. I became the room mother and PTA president and the Girl Scout leader and the Cub Scout leader. But felt I had total responsibility. Now, when they were with Department of Energy children in the neighborhood; that was okay because if they did anything wrong, those kids were going to tell their mother and dad. We all heard about it. So they all felt, oh, if we make friends with all the people that my mom and dad know, we've got to do everything right. But I didn't want to tell them that's exclusively who you can have friends with because there were so many wonderful children in the neighborhood that came from different environments and we were strange to them, too, because our kids were not allowed to discuss where their father was and when they were not coming home for the evening or for a while, because someone might find out there's a shot scheduled at the Test Site. So the one restriction I had to say is they come to our house. So when your kids as they got older did they ask you or your husband, well, what do you do, dad? You know, it's amazing. In that day and age you leam, you don't talk about your father's employment. You don't say when he's gone or not. You set up the rules and these kids listened. They did. They said it was so stupid because you could see all the cars that were sitting around. You knew when there was a shot out there. But we never were allowed to talk about it because of security reasons and this was one of the big things is you just never said anything like that. So it was a good mix. Yeah. So what schools did they go to? They went to Western High School, Gibson Junior High School and Ruth Fyfe. It's a 24-hour city, so that's different no matter what era you are when you move here I think, isn't it? As I got settled here I started to think of the good things, oh, the sunshine. I thought what's that strange stuff, the sagebrush across the roads? I thought, oh, my gosh. In fact, when my father came to visit, he was amazed by that sagebrush. And the kids learned about horny toads and 8 lizards rather than grizzly bears and the different kinds of fish. But what I thought about was, my gosh, 24 hours, you can go anywhere, do anything any time you want, where everything closed up at five or seven p.m. in my whole living experiences except on the Air Force base. So was there a nightlife that you enjoyed here? Well, because I had the children, I did very little casino nightlife. It was signing them up for etiquette classes at the teen center that they rode their bikes to, letting them play in the desert, which all kids did, and teaching them about the lizards and the homy toads and which was a scorpion and which was not. I was so wrapped up with those kids because we were not anywhere around any family and I was so afraid of making a mistake that my total life was the home. And, of course, you entertained a lot then, the federal co-workers and contractors' wives. Tell me about that. My husband was in management. So you entertained an awful lot. Of course, Mary is good with this. She taught me this. Anytime any of our husbands had a few words, you know, with one of the other men, you immediately had them over for dinner. Here was the woman, then, that in many cases smoothed these things out. So we really had a role since they were gone so much that we raised the kids, we provided the home life, we took them to music lessons, and we took them to the doctor's office. You would travel with one of each hand and one on the hip when you even had to go for a doctor's appointment. You just got used to doing that. Now, your husband in his position there, was he gone for periods of time? Yes. When the activity in Colorado was occurring, he was gone for three months. When there was activity in the Aleutian Island out past Hawaii, he would be gone for six to nine weeks at a time. He also took a nine-month sabbatical and went to executive development up in the state of Washington. And you were left with the kids that whole time. Did you know where he was going? Were you privy to that? Yes. Okay, but were you privy to when he took off like to Aleutian Islands and all that? Yeah. You did know, okay. 9 Yeah. What did that feel like? Well, you know what? I didn't think about it then. Now I think about it, but I didn't think about it then. It was just like when you moved from one place to go to another, you just accept and you make the best of everything. Were the other wives as resourceful as you or agreeable? I don't know. They didn't share that? No. When he was gone those nine months, one lady came to me and said, you're never out of this house with these children. Would you like to do something? And I said, well, I'm not the going out type. She said, well, you know I am LDS, and she says you do all these home things. I always sewed for the kids, always was the cookie maker and everything. She said would you like to come to Relief Society with me? And she says my one daughter will baby-sit for you. And I did. And every Wednesday I would go to Relief Society with her. That was a wonderful activity for nine months. It just seemed like it would get me centered; that I would start to think, ah, I'm getting a little bit edgy here, and I'd go to Relief Society and it was so nice. Her husband also worked for my husband. So because we were that business family, they would offer things like this. So there was sort of a support system ~ Absolutely. -- that the wives helped each other? Absolutely. They thought about you and would do things like that. So when you're in with people that worked for your husband or with people that worked with your husband, you didn't complain. And I don't remember complaining to my family. You accepted what was and made it really as good as possible. Yeah. I remember from that era just fathers working and stay-at-home mothers and the fathers coming home that there was this thing, dad is home. Was that monumental when he came home? 10 You have no idea. I guess I'm in excess about everything. Whenever the kids were little and dad was coming home at 5:30 from a regular workday, at five o'clock I'd get out my little toy whistle and say, okay, dad's on the way home, so now we have to pick up all the toys and tidy up. And every child had two plastic laundry baskets. What toys fit in that and would go in the closet they could keep; when they became overloaded, they had to give the toys away. So, see, everything was so darn organized. You just organized ~ or I did. Was that part of your military background do you think? Yes. And it was a part of me. It's a wonder I didn't have a chalkboard, you know, with a pointer. You just did those things. You made it nice for the husband that came home. You cooked the meals and whenever someone in his office — if the wife or the husband was having a little bit of surgery or one of the children had a tonsillectomy, you went with her to the hospital and sat with her. You just did those things. It was really a substitute family. Going back to the housing, you talked about Sproul and what was available. You said something about the real estate economy was scary at that time. Well, it was. It was — Similar to right now? I think there was a period where they overbuilt. So for $50 you could move into a home and start to make payments on it. These homes sold for around $29,000, $35,000. When you looked at homes, some of them were in quite disarray because people just abandoned them. So it took a little while to decide where you wanted to live and how much you really wanted to invest into a piece of property at that particular time. And some of the people did go into larger homes. But those of us who came from smaller communities were more conservative and all had nice homes and we did a great job with them. We entertained in the homes then. So you just sort of took everything you had elsewhere and you just plugged it into where you landed. Now, did you buy right away or just rent? I waited about five months. I rented for five months so that I could really look over the school systems. And then we chose this area where a lot of other co-worker families were because the kids could walk to all three schools - the elementary school, the junior high school and the high school. The town was so much smaller. And we always wanted to live in the western part of this 11 town. Why the western part? Well, because we thought down in the other areas, you know, where there was PEPCON you could see the smog. Down in the Henderson area or the eastern part of the valley. Yeah. You could see that the air quality may not be as good. So we located in this area. It was a little bit higher than in that valley type of environment, or it seemed that way to me. Spousal support: so this was a very busy atomic testing period. We know bits and pieces about it. What was that like out there knowing that they were testing this stuff? You know, this again was just a total acceptance. It was so wonderful when you grew up right after the Depression that you had a job and that you were getting a monthly income coming in and you accepted it and you were proud of these men that were doing what they were doing and you were all involved with the children, raising them, so you didn't think about it. However, years later, after the kids were grown, I worked for Environmental Protection Agency. Then - and the kids were grown — you should hear the conversation between me and Environmental Protection Agency and my husband's whole career in nuclear testing. And my daughter used to sit and laugh. Well, describe that. So you'd be going back and forth with him, you mean? Oh, no. No, every once in a while. You know, in every man and woman's career, what they've devoted their whole life to, they think that's the only way. Okay. They changed from the aboveground testing to the underground testing, you know, things change. I always wondered what's the long-range plan for the Test Site? These men thought there was always going to be nuclear testing. Well, there isn't. Tell me again about these clouds and how they're tracked so that we can save people. So here I go into Environmental Protection Agency where we ought to be careful with the water we drink and the air. Then you start to think. And the wisest thing after that many years is to keep your opinions to yourself. [Laughing] But that had to be hard to do. No. [Laughing] After about a couple of questions, I thought this is insulting to this person that spent his whole life in nuclear testing to ask challenging personal opinion questions. So what did you do for the EPA exactly? 12 Oh. Well, first of all, I went to the IRS. I went in and said, you know, I stayed home all these years and raised my children, I don't even know if I'm capable of answering a business phone. I stayed at IRS one year and they were so excellent to me. I kept getting awards and accolades because I worked so hard because I wanted to prove to myself that I could use my brain in the business world. I left IRS only because they wanted to put me in career advancement. But in order to do this you have to spend one year going into people's homes helping them with taxes. And I have a phobia; I'm afraid of cats. So I couldn't do this. In a way I was kind of dead-ended in this office and knew I couldn't advance much without having the ability to do this. I even tried a therapist to see if I could get over my fear of cats because I realized this was my barrier. So then I was offered a position with Environmental Protection Agency. Let me ask so I can get a time line here, so about what year are you now entering the workforce? You said your kids were grown. Were they grown and out of the house? No. The one was still his last year of high school I believe. And I can't remember the exact year. Then I took a promotion and went over to Environmental Protection Agency. They were terrific. They were fantastic. And in fact, my boss said, you know, we have a policy here where our office is scientists and we have a few office managers, which is what the few of us were, he said, but if you want to take any classes at the university, we can flex your schedule. So I started taking classes at the university because we were located on the campus. I would use that as my lunch hour, run over and take a class during my lunch hour and come back. And if the class ran longer, I would extend my hours. What kind of classes did you take? Well, I just started out with basic classes, but it was in communications. In fact, you know, that UNLVino? Yes. I did the original artwork. I submitted it as a class project. That's my logo. No kidding. Oh, you're so talented. That's great. I was promoted into the manager's office. Loved it. But at that time my father had four strokes and my mother was dead and my sister was trying to take care of him. The EPA was good and let me go home every few months and spend six weeks to help my sister take care of him in the 13 home. But I went back and said, you know, this really isn't working because I'm keeping someone from getting a promotion. These girls are filling in for me. They said, well, can we offer you a lesser position part-time? And I said, no, because after I've been so spoiled in the manager's office and being so valued, it would be too hard for me to stay in the organization. DOE took me, then, on a very low-ranking basis until my father died. Then I, in the few years, I worked myself up to a management analyst in DOE until I finally retired. What does a management analyst do? Well, it started out that my boss would come to me and say, oh, my word, guess what? They just gave me another assignment. And I said, what is it? He said I have to take this other division, too. He says they have security things. I said, oh, well, good luck. He says, good luck nothing, you're going to be my security officer, go find out what security items we have and how we secure them. So what you did is you analyzed a situation or a problem, such as they then turned the Nevada Test Site standard operating procedures over to me and says look them over and tell