Ellen Barre Spiegel interview, December 4, 2017: transcript

AN INTERVIEW WITH ASSEMBLYWOMAN ELLEN BARRE SPIEGEL An Oral History Conducted by Barbara Tabach Southern Nevada Jewish Heritage Project Oral History Research Center at UNLV University Libraries University of Nevada Las Vegas ii ©Southern Nevada Jewish Heritage Project University of Nevada Las Vegas, 2014 Produced by: The Oral History Research Center at UNLV – University Libraries Director: Claytee D. White Project Manager: Barbara Tabach Transcriber: Kristin Hicks Interviewers: Barbara Tabach, Claytee D. White iii The recorded interview and transcript have been made possible through the generosity of a Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA) Grant. 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 University of Nevada Las Vegas 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 with permission of the narrator. The following interview is part of a series of interviews conducted under the auspices of the Southern Nevada Jewish Heritage Project. Claytee D. White Director, Oral History Research Center University Libraries University of Nevada Las Vegas iv PREFACE Ellen Barre Spiegel grew up in Jericho NY, a predominantly Jewish town in Long Island. Her ancestors had migrated to the United Sates prior to the outbreak of World War II. And for much of life her exposure to cultural diversity was limited. Ellen was born in 1962. She attended Cornell University, located in upstate New York, and graduated in 1984. Though the student population was 30% Jewish, the university expanded her knowledge of the world: her Protestant roommate explained that she had never met a Jew and Ellen replied, I have never met a WASP. Her college studies centered on consumer economics and she was a public policy major. Ellen was an early adopter of technology and her career path included positions at American Express, Prodigy (a joint venture of IBM and Sears), the Weather Channel, and Manufacturers Hanover Trust. Each company used her increasing experience with using technologies to improve connections with consumers. Ellen describes her Jewish identity as conservative and is a member of Midbar Kodesh Temple in Henderson. She talks about her bat mitzvah and her move back to New York to recite the mourner’s Kaddish for the year following the passing of her father. v Later, she moved to Santa Monica, where she met Bill, her husband, using a new dating site called Luvitt AOL. After marriage, the couple saw financial advantages to living in Las Vegas and relocated their business and home to the valley in 2001. Soon Ellen noted that there was no active Democratic Club in Henderson and it became her mission to reignite the club. This launched a long list of political and civic accomplishments for Ellen. She has been an assemblyperson in the Nevada legislature (2008, 2013-2017). Her list of accomplishments and affiliations are on pages 46-47. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Interview with Ellen Barre Spiegel December 4, 2017 in Las Vegas, Nevada Conducted by Barbara Tabach Preface………………………………………………………………………………………..iv-v Describes her consulting firm, which specializes in workers’ compensation services; also in her fourth term as assemblywoman for District 20. Talks about family’s Eastern European roots, Russia/Poland area; family coming to New York and other ancestors having to relocate to South America and Mexico; her maiden name of Barre and growing up in Jericho, New York; raised a conservative Jew, spiritual through not strictly observant; bat mitzvah in 1970s Long Island described.………………………………………………………………………………..…….1 – 6 Attended Cornell University, father was an attorney who had difficulty getting a job due to being Jewish and New York law firm quotas. Community support within a Jewish town, significant impact on business and educational success. Majored in consumer economics at Cornell; interest in policy. Describes mapping out her college education and setting her goals. Talks about her entry into workforce as an intern with American Express, which led to position in corporate public responsibility………………………………………………………………………………...7 – 10 Tells of moving to Atlanta four years later to work with Weather Channel; ran 900-numbers, launched Weather Channel Home Video Collection; Weather.com; bringing Weather Channel into compliance with federal regulations; changes observed in electronic marketing (audio, video etc.); online purchases being taxable……………………………………………………………..10 – 13 Explains leaving Atlanta to return home, father passes away and she want to maintain the tradition of kaddish and dealing with death of a loved one. Career experiences with early online banking; inspirational moment while riding a New York subway and creating an opportunity to pitch her idea to Manufacturers Hanover Trust (later Chemical Bank) and the impact it had on the bank’s business…………………………………………………………………………………….13 – 16 Tells story of meeting her husband Bill Spiegel, through technology and a personal ad on Luvvit AOL, when she moves to work in Los Angeles. Describes lack of affordable housing in LA, becoming domestic partners due to wording in a lease, their strategy to buy a vacation property, and the 2001 purchase of a house in Green Valley; joined Midbar Kodesh Synagogue, where meets Isabel Goldberg and forms a joint venture. Describes her current work in partnership with husband, since 2004, auditing businesses. ……………………………………………………………17 – 21 vii Tells how she became involved in local political scene during the 2001 Las Vegas population boom; difficulty of making friendships in a boom; exodus of doctors; being nonpartisan and watching Geraldo Rivera show on television and seeing Ann Coulter, who she knew from college; decides to join the Democrat party and discovers there is no Henderson Democratic Club for years. Bill goes to work for assembly speaker Richard Perkins and they restart the Henderson Democratic Club; she joins as well and becomes active. Tells story of architect Howard Perlman and her opposition to construction of Merrill Gardens, an assisted living project (2005), without licensure; lessons learned from the experience; gratefulness of Howard in the end. Community involvement continues to grow, as does the strength of her opinions. Runs for office in 2008, Assembly District 21; wins in 2008, loses in 2010, redistricting in 2011 and drawing women out of their elected seats. Mentions Bobbie Gang, Melanie Lockard, AAUW, Tick Segerblom....……………………22 – 28 Talks more about political career, redistricting of Assembly Districts 20, 22, 29; mentions Missy Woodbury; also her position on board of Green Valley Ranch Master Association; continued services as Assemblywoman for District 20. Shares anecdotes related to her successes from the 2017 legislature, including gender neutral issues; school anti-bullying; and other ways to be of assistance to those in need…………………………………………………………….……29 – 35 Story of pay inequity she encountered in a previous job; relates to Nevada. Talks about shooting on October 1, 2017, at the Route 91 Harvest Festival; grappling with gun-related legislation; speaking at vigil post-Charlottesville shooting. Mentions honors she has received; future of Nevada and what she might do when she terms out as Assemblywoman; her involvement with National Association of Jewish Legislators and topics deal with there…………………….35 – 42 Recalls receiving anti-Semitic literature at her front door when she first moved to Las Vegas; thoughts about Israel; knowing Holocaust survivors that lived in Jericho, NY; Passover seders during legislative session; mentions Bob Fisher; holiday observation and when legislature is in session…………………………………………………………………………………..…..43 – 45 List of Legislative accomplishments and affiliations……………………………………….46 – 47 Today is December 4, 2017. This is Barbara Tabach. I'm sitting in my office for the Southern Nevada Jewish Heritage project. I'm sitting with Ellen Spiegel. Ellen, give us your formal name and how it's spelled. My formal name is Ellen Barre, B-A-R-R-E; Spiegel, S-P-I-E-G-E-L. What is your current occupation? What are you doing? I own a consulting firm and we specialize in worker's compensation claims services for insurance companies and large self-insured employers. You also serve as assemblywoman. I do. I'm assemblywoman for District 20. I'm in my fourth term in the legislature. Awesome. That's great. Before we get into all of your Las Vegas life, we're going to go back and talk about your family heritage and what you know about that. Where did the roots begin? The roots all began in Eastern Europe. Some of my family was from Russia near the Polish border; some of it was from Poland near the Russian border. Apparently, the borders kept changing often. I didn't really get a lot of clarity where anyone was from with the exception of my dad's father whose family came from Romania and there was a wonderful story about that. They were from a small town and it was known, an open secret, that there was going to be a pogrom one night. The gentile members of the community alerted the Jews and said, "We're going to plan a big meeting in the church so that everyone from the whole town will be in church. The Cossacks won't know who's Jewish, who's gentile, and it should be safe." That was the night that my great-grandfather decided that it was time to get the family out. My grandfather was one of seventeen children. My great-grandfather, I guess, had hidden a boat, a little rowboat. There was a river that went through the town. They were going to get all 2 their belongings on the boat and kind of pull it along. The whole family did not leave that night. One of the brothers stayed behind because he was engaged and whereas my great-grandfather said that he could bring his fiancé, she wouldn't come unless her home family could come, too, and it was just too many people. Unfortunately, during the violence that ensued that evening, somebody threw a bomb into the church and he had one of his hands damaged, I think his right hand, and was never able to come to this country. Because he wasn't a perfect person. Because he wasn't a perfect person. Immigration laws, I think, were different then. They wound up walking to Turkey and then being able to get to a boat and then ultimately getting here. Some of my grandfather's sisters, one went to Mexico, two went to South America. Those whole branches of the family are lost; we don't know names or where they ended up. The family name originally was Groshacksky. How do you spell that? Do you know? My cousin has it spelled on Ancestry.com. We're going to have to find it for you. Sounds fair. My grandfather and his brothers on the boat were talking about how they were going to shorten the name to Barre and they argued about the spelling. My grandfather and one of his brother spelled it B-A-R-R-E, and the other brothers just spelled its B-A-R-R, so I have branches of my family with both spellings. That was the story of my grandfather's family getting here. I don't know any of the other stories. I don't think they were nearly as exciting, which is a good thing. Three of my grandparents were born in Eastern Europe and only one was born here. 3 Did they all end up immigrating and landing in New York? They all landed in New York. I was born in Manhattan, raised on Long Island. My family was also very fortunate in that they got here early and they got here before the Holocaust. We lost extended family, but direct family; we did not lose people within two degrees of consanguinity. Right around when I was born, real estate laws were different than they are today and it was allowed for there to be steering and redlining. As they were building out Long Island, they, whoever they are— The infamous they. —the infamous they would pick different communities and decide who could live in different communities. The neighborhood that I grew up in was about 80 percent Jewish and about 20 percent Italian. We had two Asian families and they were cousins and lived next door to each other, we had one Latino family, we had one African-American family, and everybody else was either Jewish or Italian. What town was this? This was Jericho, New York. My husband grew up in Queens, New York, in a town called Howard Beach; it was about 80 percent Italian, 20 percent Jewish. So they figured out that the Jews and the Italians could live together. As a result, it was a very homogeneous community. My hometown had three synagogues and no churches. If you wanted to go to church, you had to go to the town next door. My friends who were gentile actually felt left out. They would always join us for Seders and other holiday meals. I never grew up feeling as if I was in a minority group—because I wasn't. 4 That's interesting, really. Did you have a sensitivity to the minority representation in your community? Absolutely. And I can tell you about this later—but one of my best friends from childhood is of Italian decent and her family was always very connected to Italy. She went back every summer with her family for three months and she's fluent in Italian. She actually came back from a trip in, I want to say, 2002 or 2003, and she discovered that her ancestral village had had internment camps during World War II and she showed me a book. There was one book; someone had written a thesis talking about it. Nobody else had spoken about it. Her grandparents didn't talk about it. Nobody spoke about it. She showed me the names of the people in the back of the book who were there and it read like the phone book from my hometown, just all the Jewish names. She had pictures that were in there. She had pictures and there were stories of how when it was time for Passover, the nuns in the local church would invite the Jews to come in and bake matzah in the oven. It wasn't a death camp; it was just an internment camp. I turned to her and I said, "Elizabeth, you have to write a book about this." And she did. She wrote a book; it's called It Happened in Italy. I said, "There's nobody better. You're Italian and you grew up in a Jewish neighborhood. Who else could write about this?" I happen to be from Italian ancestors. What part of Italy, do you remember? Yes, sure. This was in Campagna. The name of her book is It Happened in Italy and then it was made into a documentary, also. There was always a lot of cultural sharing and enormous sensitivity to others and very inclusionary. For college I went to Cornell University, which is in Upstate New York. Before I started school, the school matches you up with a roommate and I was on the phone speaking to my 5 up-and-coming roommate and we got on to the subject of religion. This was the first time we had ever spoken on the phone. She told me that she is Protestant. And I said, "Well, I'm Jewish." She said, "Wow, I never met a Jewish person before." And I said, "That's okay, Laura, I've never met a WASP." I think she was more surprised than I was. I said, "They just don't have any in my hometown." That wasn't a deal breaker? No, no, no. We became roommates and she actually wound up joining a Jewish sorority, so it was fine. It was just interesting. Even at Cornell, Cornell was about 30 percent Jewish at the time. There were more Jews on campus than members of any other religious group. Again, I never felt that I was in a minority. That would have been about what year? 1980 to '84. That's interesting that even then that was the case. Yes. It's made me very comfortable in who I am and very solid in my identity. I've just never questioned anything. If anything, I've questioned why others aren't as comfortable. It's the way you were raised. Spiritually—what kind of Jewish spiritual upbringing did you have in a community like Jericho, which is predominately Jewish? On a typical Sabbath, what were you doing? On a typical Sabbath, I was taking feeder skating lessons. My family always celebrated all the holidays; my parents always belonged to a synagogue. I was raised conservative. I became a bat mitzvah. I then stayed on and went to Hebrew high school. I was very involved in Jewish youth group. I went to Jewish camp. We were very spiritual, but we were not very observant. I was not raised kosher. But I 6 was raised with a lot of spirituality. Your bat mitzvah, what was it like? It was a typical 1970s bat mitzvah on Long Island. It was Friday night because, again, the synagogue that I was raised in, as a conservative synagogue—again, the rules were different back then than they are today—a girl's bat mitzvah wasn't really the same as a boy's bar mitzvah. So we led the service Friday night. I read a little bit, excerpts from the Torah, but the Torah wasn't taken out, and I had a haftarah. There was nothing on Saturday morning. It was just Friday night during services. I asked my parents if we could have the party at a catering place instead of in the synagogue because I wanted to have a photographer and you couldn't have a photographer in the synagogue on a Friday night because of Shabbat, so my parents said okay. It was really important to me that there be pictures of my friends. It was one of those, as only a thirteen-year-old girl wants to chronicle everything, and the photographer didn't take any pictures of my friends. No. I have one picture. Oh, wow. It was just a lovely party. But one of the things that came up recently is—I was reading an article about the research into whiskey sours as a cocktail that people drink—I was reminded of how when we were kids and we would go to bar and bat mitzvahs at the time; they would make up these huge trays with whiskey sours; that was the past cocktail for the adults. But they'd always leave the trays on the side, so the kids would always go over and just sneak away whiskey sours. 7 That is a typical place where kids to take a sip, right? Right. Except we weren't taking sips. I probably shouldn't say that story. How did you decide to go to Cornell? My older brother went to Cornell. I fell in love with the campus. I fell in love with the curriculum. Again, something that was very interesting from my school that was different then, as I'm learning—almost everybody else's school is that the community was very invested in education and education was a very high priority. And I think that part of that was because of how many Jewish parents there were who were very involved in their kids' lives, kids' activities, and wanted their kids to be really good. They were always comfortable enough that they were able to go to the school district, which was just for our town, and say, "We want to pay more in taxes and have really good schools." People were fairly comfortable in the town and part of that came from necessity. My dad was an attorney and after he graduated from law school, he wasn't able to get a job because the big law firms in New York City had quotas of how many Jews they would have on staff. Discrimination was allowed and he couldn't get a job, so he wound up starting a law firm with two other men and it ultimately grew to become the second largest law firm on Long Island. Many of our neighbors were in retail or other kinds of professions where they were discriminated against when they tried to work for somebody else and started working for themselves. [It was a] community where you'd go support a Jewish vendor because you knew that they needed it and that nobody else would. As a result, the people were pretty comfortable financially and said, "This is our community priority, so let's make the schools really good." The school I graduated from, my school district, is always ranked as one of the top hundred school districts in the country for public schools. 8 That's impressive. Ninety-eight or 99 percent of my class went to college. We had one dropout; Evan dropped out after tenth grade to go to MIT. When I tell this story to people here in town, everybody kind of laughs and they look at me. I'm like, "Well, everybody needs a dropout in their class." We all went to good schools. The question wasn't, are you going to college? It was, where are you going to college? It was expected that the girls were going to go to school just as much as the boys. I joke around and I say that I was one of the slackers; I was the last person in the top 20 percent of my high school class; and, yet, I still was able to get into an Ivy League school. Part of that, I think—and you never know these things—is that I knew I wanted to go to Cornell and I knew that my grades weren't what they should have been. As a result, they have a summer program for kids in between their junior and senior year of high school, so I told my parents I wanted to go to this program and I wanted to be able to prove that I could do the work. I went and worked really hard. I did well enough. I showed the university that I could do the work and I could be there. Consequently, I was accepted. That's wonderful. I actually did much better in college than I did in high school; I was in the top five percent of my class in college. What did you major in? Consumer economics. I started as a public policy major. I've always been interested in policy. But I also, during my first semester, sat down and did some planning and it was probably the smartest thing I ever did. I speak with graduating seniors about Cornell, graduating high school seniors here in town. I do volunteer work through the alumni admissions network. I say no matter where you go to school, do this—I took a piece of paper and I blocked out the eight 9 semesters for the four years and I put down when each of my required classes was given. I knew that I wanted to do an internship my junior year and I had to make it work and the only way to make it work was to do the advanced planning. I saw that I couldn't do the internship and stay as a public policy major and graduate in four years, which was a big goal of mine. I started with fifteen credits; I started with a whole semester of credits, and so I said, "I'm not going over because that's ridiculous." I changed my major. It was very similar. There was a difference of one required class that I didn't have to take and it let me do what I wanted to do. That's how I wound up majoring in consumer economics. You got an undergraduate degree there? Yes. Did you go right into the workforce from there? I did. In that big internship that I had, they matched me up with American Express. Following that internship, they brought me back for another one. I actually started in the office of consumer affairs and then I was in the office of corporate public responsibility. Something I did there that was really interesting was I wrote a research paper for them on the effects of consumer literacy on children and prospects for their development. Tell me more about that. It was really interesting because American Express was looking to see, what do we need to be doing to be growing essentially our future customer base by having good literacy skills for people? They knew early on that computer literacy was going to be a very big component. That was a fabulous experience. After I graduated, I actually went back to American Express. I was working in one of the credit card operation centers. I left for a little bit and went to a bank. I was a budget analyst at a 10 bank. Then I went back to American Express. I was there for about five years on and off. I was on their worldwide quality assurance team, which was great. We looked at the best practices that the operations centers all over the world were conducting. I wrote the senior management report. We went out and did best practices audits. I spent a summer in Canada. I spent six weeks in England working. I worked in Rome. It was really a phenomenal experience. But I ultimately left there to go in the late eighties work for a company called Prodigy, which was a joint venture at the time of IBM and Sears; it was the very first online service with graphics. I started product development there and I was able to develop some of the first online banks, online supermarkets and online financial services companies. I was a pioneer in E-commerce. I led the team that created the very first application where somebody could buy computer software online, pay for it with a credit card, and download it to their computer. I created an application for Dreyfus where somebody could download a prospectus and be qualified to purchase a mutual fun. Phenomenal experience. It was great. I was there for four years. I did a lot of really groundbreaking and interesting things. I left there and moved to Atlanta to work for the Weather Channel. Now, there's an interesting step, or it seems to be on the surface of it. I was hired as the manager of the enterprises unit. We were responsible for revenues associated with everything other than on-camera meteorology. My main thing was I ran 1-900-WEATHER, if you remember nine-hundred numbers. Oh, yes. You'd call and for ninety-nine cents a minute you'd get your weather forecast in current conditions. I had forgotten about that. 11 I launched the Weather Channel Home Video Collection as a branded product. Probably my biggest claim to fame, though, was that I was one of the mothers of Weather.com and I launched the Weather Channel's first online presence. At the time I was doing that I also became the founding chair of what became the Internet industry's public policy committee. That stemmed from the work in the 900 numbers because right after I started at the Weather Channel—and I think it was my first day—I got a call from a fellow who was the executive director of the 900 number industry association. He called me up and he said, "Well, congratulations on your new job. This is great, but I have to tell you we just got regulated by the FCC and the FPC and you have fourteen days to get into compliance." And I said, "What does this mean? I have no idea." He sent me all of the requirements, but the biggest thing was that you had to add to the introduction of every 900 number call information about what the cost would be and… it had to say, “Hang up now if you don't want to pay this." You had to use the words hang up now. I said, "But that's ridiculous. If you tell people to hang up, you know what they're going to do?" And he said, "Yes, they're going to hang up." I said, "Well, how could this have passed?" And he said, "Well, we don't have a public policy committee; as an industry we never did anything and we couldn't band together to speak with policy makers." I was almost apoplectic. He asked me, "Well, would you want to start this? Would you want to chair this? We would give you support. We would help you do this." And I said, "Absolutely. We can't be blindsided anymore." So I was now able to take my work and my passion for public policy and start bringing it together. Then as things expanded and we saw that audio text, which is the fancy name for nine hundred numbers, was going away and that more video texts and word-based, written-based online services were going to be coming in, we then expanded out what we worked on. So the 12 committee that I founded went on to write the industry's email marketing guidelines, children's marketing guidelines, privacy guidelines. You've probably seen a lot of these, how companies will say, Here are our privacy guidelines. Yes, the ones that are so long that we don't get through them all. Yes, sadly. I was on the committee that wrote those. When you say you were on the committee, who were you actually— Working with? Yes. It was stakeholders from other companies, so AT&T had a very large presence, ESPN had a large presentation, there were numerous mom and pops, some very big companies, all the different RBOC, the Regional Bell Operating companies before they were broken up—well, actually after they were broken up, they were all playing in the waters of online services. Companies that were interested in E-commerce and working on E-commerce had representatives. Microsoft had somebody. Actually, by the time we got to working on those guidelines, I think the committee was chaired by somebody from Microsoft. So this is an independent— Independent through the industry association. What we said was, if we can write guidelines and get the good players to buy into them and be protecting the consumers ourselves, then we're not going to need the federal government to come in and regulate us because we will be good players and we will be getting the bad players out of the market. We said, if we do this we won't suffer the same fate as what happened to the nine hundred number industry. How did that play out? It played out very, very well. Actually, from all of the work that I did there, the only thing that 13 I've ever really come to question in my mind was the work that I did actually personally to help make sure that online purchases weren't charged sales tax. It was originally meant to be for about five years so that the industry could get off the ground, but it's been about twenty-five years. Will there be a day when people realize, it's okay to charge for taxes or will it be tax-free? There have been changes that have been made and they've been coming in mostly at the state level and we actually passed legislation, I think it was two legislative sessions ago, to be working on this as well. Because as a societal shift, doing the majority of our purchases at bricks and mortar stores and maybe a handful of things online, that economic has flipped and too many municipalities and states are missing the revenues that they can't capture any other way. Interesting background you have. It's very eclectic. I left Atlanta after a couple of years. This is just kind of sad. Right after I moved to Atlanta, my dad was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. I went home most of the weekends to see him or see my mom. After he passed away, I went to say Kaddish for my dad. I started out thinking that I would go for the first thirty days because that's what my dad did for each of his parents and I knew my brother wasn't going to do it. And that's the tradition. That's the tradition. Actually, the tradition for a parent is eleven months. I found it extremely helpful for myself. Part of why I left New York originally is that I had a very serious boyfriend who passed away and I couldn't get over his loss. He had worked for a radio station that was owned by the New York Times and everywhere I went there was a billboard or the music was playing or something and it was always a constant reminder and I just had to leave New York and my parents understood. But then it was just a lot of loss, one thing after another. So I said, "Okay, I'm going to go say Kaddish for thirty days." It wound up being so helpful that I went 14 twice a day for the whole eleven months. Wow. That's a big commitment. It was, but it was helpful for me. Most of the people who go to daily minyan are people who are saying Kaddish and it was almost like a support group. I saw that there were people coming out the other side and I knew that you could work through this and get there. They were just helpful, nice people. Then as you're there, then more people are coming in because there is more loss and then you're able to turn around and give back and help others and that also helps you with healing. So I was in Atlanta for a couple of years and when I finally got to a point where I was ready to start dating, I looked around and there really weren't any Jewish guys that were age appropriate. I joke around; I say there were four and two of them were gay, I dated the third, and I didn't like the fourth. I was offered a job in L.A. running the online division of an infomercial ad agency and I moved to L.A. where I met my husband, Bill. Because I was such an early adopter of new technology, one of the things that I always said is that I have to use the technology or nobody else is going to use it. I did a lot of work with online banking and I can go into one of those stories later if you want. Whenever it seems appropriate so you don't lose track of it. That was a different story. But I was heading down