Transcript of interview with Ed Fleming by Mark Lucas, February 8, 1977

UNLV University Libraries Edmund Fleming i An Interview with Edmund Fleming An Oral History Conducted by Mark Lucas Ralph Roske Oral History Project on Early Las Vegas Special Collections and Archives Oral History Research Center University Libraries University of Nevada, Las Vegas UNLV University Libraries Edmund Fleming ii © Ralph Roske Oral History Project on Early Las Vegas University of Nevada, Las Vegas, 2018 UNLV University Libraries Edmund Fleming iii The Oral History Research Center (OHRC) was formally established by the Board of Regents of the University of Nevada System in September 2003 as an entity of the UNLV University Libraries’ Special Collections Division. The OHRC conducts oral interviews with individuals who are selected for their ability to provide first-hand observations on a variety of historical topics in Las Vegas and Southern Nevada. The OHRC is also home to legacy oral history interviews conducted prior to its establishment including many conducted by UNLV History Professor Ralph Roske and his students. This legacy interview transcript received minimal editing, such as 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. The interviewee/narrator was not involved in the editing process. UNLV University Libraries Edmund Fleming iv Abstract On February 8, 1977, Mark Lucas interviewed Edmund “Ed” Fleming (born 1915 in Virginia, Minnesota) about his experience in Southern Nevada. Fleming first talks about his moves to and from Nevada before describing the mining practices within the small towns in Southern Nevada. He also talks about his experience as a teacher in Pahrump and Goodsprings and his eventual move to Las Vegas, where he continued in the educational field. Fleming also talks about religion, transportation, funding for education, inflation, and cultural arts as they all relate to Las Vegas. UNLV University Libraries Edmund Fleming 1 I am interviewing, today, February 8th, 1977 two p.m., Mr. Ed Fleming at the Doris Hancock Elementary School, 1661 Lindell Road, Las Vegas, Nevada. Mr. Fleming is the school’s librarian. My name is Mark Lucas, and I live at 865 Canterbury Road, San Remo, California. This interview is being conducted for the local history project, life of a person who has spent many years in Southern Nevada. [Audio starts midsentence] first in the summer of 1934. I stayed out of college that year and worked in the large ranch in Pahrump Valley, the only ranch—there were two or three, but it was the main ranch, it was called the Pahrump Ranch. What was the ranch’s purpose? Cattle and alfalfa. And we had a little bit of everything, as a matter of fact, but primarily was the hay and cattle at that time. We had no row crops although cotton had been tried within the few years before then, and the field, at that time—now it’s a very prosperous crop in that valley. So how long did you stay here before? Well, I stayed only for the rest of that year, and then I returned to Minnesota and finished college there and returned here as soon as I got my degree. What college was that? St. John’s University of Collegeville, Minnesota. And I returned here in September rather than July of 1938, and I’ve been here ever since. Why did you come out here? Primarily for the weather. I had the earlier experience here and enjoyed it very much, and I like the freedom of the west and also the freedom from snow. I enjoy it here. Did you bring your family with you at that time? UNLV University Libraries Edmund Fleming 2 Oh, no. I was a gay, young bachelor at that time, and my family stayed back east. My brothers and sisters pretty wells scattered after that also. I was the youngest in the family. My mother and father stayed in Minnesota with one or two of the older children. What sort of vegetation was here back in the 1930s, ‘40s? Well, it was the same as what we have now. It was nothing different as far as the—if you get out into the outskirts of Las Vegas, why, those are the same plants that were here then. They might have been a little smaller, but they were here. And then there was nothing uniquely different from what the high desert has always been. Of course, we do have these striations where, which we wouldn’t raise a thousand feet, you know, running to the different fauna and flora, and both as a matter of fact, and as you go up into the alpine regions, you’ll got through a number of different areas of different types of vegetation. There was some farming and so forth in this valley, up in Paradise Valley primarily, at that time, and you remember the McGrith range—they raised prize food, for instance, apricots—apples never seemed to do very well here. But grapes and apricots, figs, and so forth all did quite well. They required the irrigation, obviously, and there was a large artesian basin here, so they could tap the water from that. These were all flowing wells, which are no more. Could you remember what the water table level was at that point? No, I have no idea. It probably wasn’t a great deal different—well, it might’ve been 200 feet, so a difference from now. There were, at that time, flowing wells earing up within the city. I remember seeing the picture taken about 1906 of them bringing in the flowing well of, oh, around Twelfth and Fremont Street. The water just shot up in the air. And I had seen this phenomenon happen in Pahrump Valley also. (Unintelligible) well down maybe 4- or 500 feet, UNLV University Libraries Edmund Fleming 3 and the water would come up in the column and shoot through the air perhaps twenty feet from a twelve-inch pipe. Those days, I guess they’re gone forever. They’re pumping everything now. What was the population then? It sat around 8,000 when I got here. It stayed pretty well (unintelligible) for about two years (unintelligible) when they started construction of the Basic Magnesium Plant, it blossomed out and almost tripled in about three years, four years to around 25,[000]. Were the people clustered together, or were they sparsely (unintelligible)? No, because of the city services and so forth, they were concentrated in a small area Downtown, around the Downtown area. The people were inclined to settle there, even as they do now along the sewer lines and water lines and so forth. So, the main concentration as in the Downtown area. Were many of these people miners, or what were their occupations at the time? Well, I think primarily, you got a pretty well mix of population, but primarily, the town was a trading center for offline mines, and of course it was a big railroad town because it was a division point. And a big number of permanent railroaders who lived and made their homes here—mostly area between Main Street and Fifth, for instance, or, what they called Company houses were built by the railroad and inhabited by the railroad people. Those houses still exist. They were very sturdy houses, except where they (unintelligible) in town (unintelligible). Where did the railroad lines go to? What time period are we talking about now? Oh, this is in the forties. In the forties? They followed the same line that now exists; there was a spur from here to Boulder City, and they ran a train a day between here and Boulder City. Otherwise, it was the Los Angeles to Salt Lake—main line was the Union Pacific. There were no other railroads in this area at that point. UNLV University Libraries Edmund Fleming 4 I see. But you’d have to go back about forty years before that until you got to—the only railroad that ever came into town was from Tonopah here. And there were two competing lines, and that road that is (unintelligible) occupied by Highway 95, which is the main route from here to Reno. Did the railroads also service the mines in the area? Well, yes. Goodsprings, for instance, was the center of mining here, closest to Las Vegas probably, and there they did have the spur line, narrow gauge line, which ran to the mines. But by the time I got here, why, even that was gone. They were using trucks to haul their concentrates, for instance, to the mainland to the UP, and then from there it went to the (unintelligible) in Salt Lake City. What was, with the mining industry, the railroads, what was the social life back in the forties? Oh, it was just a microcosm of what it is now, I thing—you had the same activities, and where we only have one high school and two or three elementary schools here (unintelligible) town’s activities revolved around things like Helldorado and mostly community-sponsored and community-funded events, just to break the monotony, I guess, and also to forget about the weather during the summer. It was no different from, I don’t think, any other semi-cosmopolitan town. Even as the small town went, Las Vegas had beginnings of cosmopolitanism about it. During the forties, of course, they started building the resort hotels—the El Rancho first and the Last Frontier. And then, on the Strip, that got started then. There have been very few, but there were small little dance halls and that sort of thing. The Bingo Club, which later became the Sahara, was there. Actually, I can think of nothing different about the activities in the town from what you would see in any small town in the United States. UNLV University Libraries Edmund Fleming 5 You mentioned weather a couple nights ago; how did you stay warm during the winter and cool during the summer, let’s say, back in the 1940s? It was about ’38, ’39 when the swamp coolers came into more or less common use. Even at that time, many people did not have one, and you just sweated it out. For some reason, it didn’t seem as hot as it does now to me or to many people, I think, perhaps, the air conditioner has something to do with that as far as (unintelligible). And you did notice a very distinct cooling off at night, which does not seem to apply any longer. During the winter, we used ordinary heating devices: the stoves and furnaces with coal that was all from Utah, for instance. How did the gambling affect Las Vegas, let’s say, from the 1940s to the 1950s? Well, of course, it was a big tourist draw. It’s provided a great deal of tax revenue for the county and the state and also (unintelligible). As far as it affecting the social community, religious, life, and so forth, I don’t think it had all that much influence. Were the churches predominant at the time? Was there much religious activity? Oh, yes. You had, of course, the Mormons who had been here for many, many years, formed the, probably, the majority of the people. But there were Catholic churches and also Episcopalian and Methodist and Baptist and so forth. For some time, the chamber of commerce was stressing, of course, and they still do in Las Vegas, as a community of churches—(Laughs)—improves the image or something else (unintelligible). But they’re still singing that song, and in many ways it’s very true. There are people who are completely divorced from the gambling and never even thought about it or anything. I have never been infected with the bug myself and could take it or leave it or I play at it, perhaps, once in a while, just for fun (unintelligible) preoccupation or anything. I always lost anyway, so it doesn’t make any difference. Your field is education; how long have you been in education? UNLV University Libraries Edmund Fleming 6 Since ’38. Since ’38 when you came here? Mm-hmm. I taught for two years in Pahrump when I first came here in a one-room schoolhouse that was constructed from (unintelligible) hauled in from the Tonopah (unintelligible), which ran through Shoshone, which is about thirty miles from Pahrump. It was pretty well isolated; it was about 110 miles from Las Vegas to the Pahrump community, if you had to call it that. I had about thirteen kids in grades one through eight. Six of them were Indians, or Paiutes. So you had them all in the one room? Yes, with a very minimum of embellishments, shall we say—we did have desks, and that’s about the end of it. It was the whole idea of, was it my (unintelligible) sitting at the end of the log and teaching. It really happened out here. For running water, we had an irrigation ditch in front of the school we had to jump over to get to the school. The building still exists (unintelligible) part of the schooling in Pahrump. I guess it was easier to just do that than tear it down because it was very ruggedly built. Which one is that? The one in Pahrump. Is there just one there? No, now they have a high school and a large elementary school. The area has grown that much—I think there are probably a couple thousand people there now. When I was there, there was perhaps fifty. I had thirteen (unintelligible). And from there, I moved to Goodsprings, which was a gold mining town, but I lived there in the hotel, and there were about forty mining men, miners, who also lived in the hotel throughout the year. And we had meals there, also. It was a pretty pleasant experience. There, it was a two-room school. (Laughs) UNLV University Libraries Edmund Fleming 7 (Laughs) Was getting up in the world—got about forty kids there, two teachers. And then I only spent one year there, and then I went down to Nelson in Eldorado Canyon and spent a year there. The thing that always is the glaring thing about Nelson, as far as I was concerned, was my predecessor was chased out of town by one of the irate parents with a shotgun. It was the real Wild West at that time. They built the paved road, the year I was there, down to the river and also over to the main Highway 93 between Searchlight and Las Vegas, and it still exists. What building was the school in? Was it just a one-room building? No, we had a large two-room building. It was fairly modern; it had just been built about five years or six years before. But there, we’d have the gold mining people. The gold mines were all running wide open—the Duplex and the Techatticup and the Wall Street—and these were all operating mills then. So there was quite a centering of people there much more than now exists. What was the population at that time? Oh, I would presume to know, these mines were in various locations, and here you just had a central point where the stores were in the schoolhouse and so forth. But these people lived at what you might call locations which would cluster around each of the mines, the Techatticup and a number of people, because they were running their mill three shifts. And so, the larger mine, which was still over the hill from the Techatticup—I forgot what its names is now ‘cause it slipped my mind—and the Wall Street, they were all running three shifts, and there were quite a few people there, except that a good number of the miners, of course, didn’t have their families with them. The families stayed wherever they came—these fellas would go home for the weekends or that sort of thing, maybe once a month. They’d get three or four days off and then UNLV University Libraries Edmund Fleming 8 take off. So, we did have about fifty or sixty kids, and one time we had forty-five kids in one room, fifth through the eighth—that was a very active year. Why is that? With that many kids— (Laughs) (Unintelligible) So how many people would you say just clustered for the area, if you had to guess? Oh, about over 300, 400, I think. Was there much law at the time? Yes, there was enough. You ordinarily would have a resident deputy sheriff in any of these towns, and a justice of the peace. But there wasn’t much hooliganism or anything, just they attended to settle their own problems. Sometimes, of course, if somebody would escape to this area, the sheriffs from Las Vegas would come out and round ‘em up with the help of the resident deputy. But I don’t think that happened too often, as I recall. What did you use at means for communication between that area and Las Vegas? The U.S. Post Office. There was no other— Well, it was better— We did have a little Pony Express that was associated with the store, and he would run into town, perhaps, once—it was only about sixty months from Las Vegas, and he’d make the trip once or twice a day, sometimes. And there was always a problem there because the water was not portable, and we had to haul out of our water from Las Vegas, our drinking water. It was the surface water that you would use for bathing and so forth, but it was not portable. And they did, at Techatticup, I believe they pumped water from the river in Colorado. But even then, most of UNLV University Libraries Edmund Fleming 9 the people hauled their water from Las Vegas. I had five or six big (unintelligible) cans that had been made for pack mules or pack burrows. And I used those in the back end of my Ford for hauling the water. And I got married that year. What year was this? It was in ’41. During the summers, I was a ranger in the Mt. Charleston area, so I worked for (unintelligible) spent the winters down in the desert and the summers in Mr. Charleston. Was this out of interest or to beat the weather or both? Both, and also financial. And I enjoyed the work there, both types of work as far as that goes. I wound up there, I was driving around in the same sort of thing, public service and public relations, because we did not get the host of people that where we get now. And there were not a great number of people living in (unintelligible). So what did you do after that year in 1941? Well, I had a contract to teach high school in Boulder City, and it was during that time that they were building Basic Magnesium, the big plant, and there was no housing here. It was much tighter on housing. These people would come to (unintelligible) the big plant being build, and there simply were no places to live. So, I couldn’t find a place to live in Las Vegas and (unintelligible) in Boulder City. Although I went to the first teachers’ meeting, I had come to the superintendent and resigned the day before school started. (Laughs) And that (unintelligible) after work in the plant. And I wound up as a production foreman in the preparation plant at the mill where we prepared the magnesium. And (unintelligible) five years, I suppose, and then I (unintelligible). I worked in mines—even when I was at Pahrump, I worked mines because I enjoyed that. UNLV University Libraries Edmund Fleming 10 How were the working conditions there? Well, it was pretty tough at Basic, especially in our area, and also we were snuggled up against the chlorine plant. We were getting quite a bit of gas and a terrific amount of dust. We had to use respirators all the time, that sort of thing. Aside from that, it was onerous work because we were working seven-day shifts. We didn’t have a day off. We (unintelligible) 365 days a year, so it was tiresome. How deep did the mines go? Well, the mines for Basic Magnesium were out at Gabbs, which was about 250 miles north from here, and it was hauled from there to our plant in large trucks. It’s where Joe Wells got his start. He was the truck—his Wells Cargo—he was the main trucker for hauling that, and he had come down, I believe, from Reno where he had a small trucking (unintelligible) and fell in to this contract and hauled all of the ore from Gabbs to Henderson. And then the other things that they used there—(unintelligible) for instance, came from Canada, (unintelligible) came out in the Union Pacific, and coal from Utah. And I believe some of the salts and so forth came out of Death Valley. So, it was (unintelligible). And did you use the products here or did you ship them off? Well, they were used primarily at the smelter for magnesium; magnesium, of course, was used to light the (unintelligible) and also had flares and bombs, the firebombs, they were (unintelligible) magnesium. This plant was designed after some of the European plants, and the top engineers with us were educated in England—that’s why I had planned to move there (unintelligible) plant was designed to practically to duplicate the plant there except on a much larger scale. We overproduced—there was magnesium coming out your ears by the end. (Laughs) UNLV University Libraries Edmund Fleming 11 They closed it down in ’45, and there was still a lot of magnesium around. So is that when you went to the war, then? Yes. In ’45? Just at the end of the—? Yes, I was here in the United States on both the (unintelligible) period. So, I never did get overseas, which I guess I should be thankful for—didn’t have any choice in the matter anyway. I just lucked out. When I got out, I came back and I worked in the mine for a year and then decided to go back to teaching. I worked in the Argentina Mine at Goodsprings. So was this in ’46, then? Mm-hmm, and I went back into teaching in ’47. Where was that? At Goodsprings. At Goodsprings? I stayed there three years and then came to Las Vegas. I’ve been here ever since (unintelligible) 1950, I believe. So you were able to find housing, then? Yes, while I was in Henderson, I bought a house in North Las Vegas, and we had rented throughout the war years to officers who were out at Nellis, training. So, we never lived in the house ourselves, but I had rented it out for a number of years. Then, when we moved into town, we just bought another house. [Recording ends] So this was, what, in 1947 when you began teaching, or 1950 was it? UNLV University Libraries Edmund Fleming 12 Well, in ’47, I had started teaching again after Goodsprings; I spent three years there. And then in ’50 I came to Vegas because my children were getting to about the age where I was afraid I was going to have to teach and behoove me to (unintelligible). Is this the same house you’re living in now, or have you moved? No, still have the property, but we bought another house around ’60. Where was this first house located? It was on North Main Street, across the street from the North Main Street School on North Main. What grades did you teach then? Well, most of the time I was there, I taught on the west side for two years, and then one year at North Main for the fifth grade. And then I moved into the central office, and I was supervisor (unintelligible) education for the county for about twelve years, and working out of the central office and servicing all of the schools in the city first. And (unintelligible) on the county system in ’56. We moved the school offices several times during that period. I was in the central office, then, for about twelve years. What technology was present at the time, in audiovisual? It was essentially the same as we have now. We didn’t have the cassettes (unintelligible) and some of the more sophisticated (unintelligible) videotapes and so forth did not come along until later. I started in audiovisual, I think, ’55, and we had more or less the same basic machines as right now. The ones that we used in the classrooms—there was no TV at that time. What type of financial condition were these schools in at the time? Well, were in kind of tough straits, up and down. It was hand to mouth until the sales tax was earmarked for more education—usually a good deal of money extra to the school, and prior to that, there had been (unintelligible) taxes. Originally, the sales tax in the state was passed for the UNLV University Libraries Edmund Fleming 13 sake of education. But with Las Vegas experiencing great growth (unintelligible) obviously, we had a stronger base. And we did have a five-dollar limit on taxation of real property, which still exists a state law, so that there was no way of increasing that. So, the only other way was to find some other revenues, and the sales tax turned out to be the least painful, I guess. But as Las Vegas was growing so (unintelligible), more and more schools had to be built and so forth, and it required a stronger financial base than we had to begin with. Several of the years (unintelligible) elementary schools (unintelligible). Every time a new hotel, for instance, was built on the Strip, this meant a new elementary school. The employees there would (unintelligible) it completely, and it’d also give a (unintelligible) to the junior high and high school (unintelligible). When some of the people on the Strip object to some of the taxes and so forth, they evidently are not thinking (unintelligible) their business of starting a hotel causes the school district to have to (unintelligible) a new school to house the children. How many students were in the district at that time? Oh, I think when we consolidated, there probably were, I guess, about 15,000. And what year was this that they consolidated? In ’56. We are up to about to around 83,000 now, within twenty years, which is a quite an increase. There was some opposition at that time to consolidation because each of the little communities throughout the county, and throughout the state as far as that goes, had their own autonomous school within—Goodsprings High School or Searchlight High School and Henderson had one (unintelligible) Boulder City. Did you like that idea? I think it was probably like any idea then; it had its good points. And they’re now talking about decentralizing the district ‘cause it’s getting too big. But this is true of anything UNLV University Libraries Edmund Fleming 14 (unintelligible)—certainly their economy is in the (unintelligible) increase in supplies which you could not take advantage of (unintelligible) big number of small communities. When I was at Goodsprings, for instance, or Pahrump or so forth, they did have a book depository here in Las Vegas, which was a branch of our (unintelligible) in Reno. And you could just go in and shop and buy a book here or there, and you’d buy a couple reams of paper, and obviously you’re paying retail prices in those school district purchases for the whole county and thereby saves (unintelligible). But their objections (unintelligible). There was resistance, especially from the small communities like Boulder City, Henderson, and obviously the Virgin Valley and Moapa Valley, where they could do their (unintelligible) directly to the local people instead of driving seventy miles to cool off. Even the telephone (unintelligible). How was the religious activity in town, or had it changed since the forties? Not particularly, I don’t think. If you want me to say that Las Vegas is becoming more religious, I don’t think I could tell that. Did the religion have an effect on the education here? No, I don’t think so. You had a pretty good meld of people and mix of people in education. The parochial schools here only date back someplace in the fifties. They were started because people wanted—the influx of people from the east, for instance, other areas of the country—they were used to certain (unintelligible) they brought with. Certainly the tenor of the town has changed. It used to be Old West, (unintelligible). It was (unintelligible) to think that we’ve been here ten years. But when Bugsy built the Flamingo, (unintelligible) and so forth. It was a great deal more casual at that time, which doesn’t mean Vegas is not casual now. It’s more casual than a great number of places, most places still, but (unintelligible) people did bring their own mores with what (unintelligible) this is where you’re getting a great deal of the stress on dress and formal UNLV University Libraries Edmund Fleming 15 (unintelligible). I can recall friends—I spent one summer in New York for (unintelligible). My brother was there. But he wanted to take us to dinner a couple times, and they wouldn’t let us in. We thought that was (unintelligible) because we (unintelligible). And even in Los Angeles, like (unintelligible) for instance, my sister took my nephew and me there and you had to wear a coat, but they furnished the coat. They didn’t want to lose the customer, so they gave you a coat at the door. Unfortunately, I split mine right up the back, I don’t know if they caught that. How was transportation at that time? How easy was it to get around town, let’s say, oh, 1960 or so, right in that timeframe? Well, there was no real centralized transportation system any more than there is now. Those people had their own cars (unintelligible). The transportation system, if anything, I would think (unintelligible) is not anything now. It’s (unintelligible). And Las Vegas has the problem, of course, of being so diverse and so scattered, which it isn’t economically feasible to have mass transit. You can’t blame the company for not wanting to go out to once house up there. So, probably per capita, you’d find more automobiles and so forth in an area like this than any place else. An automobile was (unintelligible) only way to shop or visit or do anything else. What were the political affairs? What condition were they in at the time? What was going on? Well, Las Vegas was always pretty much a Democrat, I think, perhaps as a result of the people from the south coming here—it’s been heavily Democratic during all the time I’ve been here. The northern part of the state, of course, has claimed to be more conservative and more Republican. UNLV University Libraries Edmund Fleming 16 Why has it, I understand the last few years, ten years maybe, that Las Vegas is now outgrowing, or the growth has been at faster rate, than Reno? Is this true, and why would that be? Well, of course it’s true. The (unintelligible)—oh, I think perhaps Las Vegas has become more a winter resort than (unintelligible) the idea of sunshine and so forth, and also the notoriety we get from the shows and headliners and so forth that we just have better entrepreneurs than Reno now. We also have more room to grow than Reno does. Reno has its limitations, physical (unintelligible) that Las Vegas does not. It’s also (unintelligible) kind of a mean winter. Of course, this may be a kind of bonus now since people are becoming interested in winter sports. Some years ago, twenty years, winter sports were sneaking in, just read about it in the paper, to a place like Lake Placid or in the Alps someplace. I understand that there’s sort of a separation between Reno and Las Vegas. There’s always been a certain feeling of—for one thing, we’re farther away from Reno than we are from several other large urban developments, like Los Angeles. We are isolated by many things, I think, in physical characteristics. Also, makeup of the people, Reno is a great deal older town. It’s at least fifty years older than Las Vegas. And people are more established, more stayed, more conservative than they are here. They are (unintelligible) the economy there because it’s dependent on the branches and so forth. We didn’t have (unintelligible). Las Vegas was a railroad town. And now it has jumped into being a resort town. Reno is just now starting to develop some of the large hotels, and some are (unintelligible) we have. They’ve also been conserved. If I could get back to the education, when did you become librarian for the school here? UNLV University Libraries Edmund Fleming 17 Oh, I think it was about ’66 that—well, there was a change in administration and so forth. They decided that I wouldn’t have the department that I had at that time. The audiovisual? Yes, although they absorbed it into other areas. I had always loved teaching—I was always preaching that we ought to, all of us, get out of the ivory tower once in a while and see how the troops were working, so I went back and we’ve been very happy with them since. I had two or three libraries while I was at North Ninth, and then I came up here, and Dr. (Unintelligible) had been here since—getting pretty close to retirement, so this is as good a place as any. Have you noticed, in your years in education, that the reading ability of the students has changed here in the Las Vegas area? Well, I am inclined to think so, yes. I don’t really know what the reason is, and I’m sure that nobody else does. It may be the methods and tactics we use and so forth. And it also can be related to TV. When I started teaching, the kids’ enjoyment came from reading; now, it’s much easier just to flip a switch (unintelligible) interesting because you’re getting a combination of visual and the audio and you really don’t have to work very hard. I think this is a factor that they do a lot of talking about. I’m almost sure that this is a very great factor, as a matter of fact (unintelligible). And, of course, there is so many other things that seem to preoccupy, they simply don’t—reading is much of a ne