Audio clip from interview with Melody Stein, August 16, 2016

What was it like to move into such a beautiful new educational facility? For me it was like heaven because I had an art room. The Adelsons really liked my program. I had both of their kids every year. They just wanted it to be the kind of a place where we could do a lot of stuff. So it was no holds barred. I had an art room that was the envy of any art teacher. It included an outdoor art studio. It was like a covered patio that had some lights in it so that like in the evening if we wanted to have a little art thing, we could do that and we did. I had a bank of computers, I think ten or twelve Mac computers, so I could teach photography. It wouldn't mean anything to an ordinary person, but I had about four sinks. In the old building, they converted a classroom into the art room for me. It was so small that I had to always walk sideways like this. It was pretty funny. And there was only one sink. That's a very funny demonstration, too. I like that. Too bad they can't see. Right. Only one sink in the whole room. And that's important in cleaning up and... Oh, my gosh, for everything. So the art room expanded from that one little, tiny classroom, which it was a regular classroom. Then they decided that they would give me a double classroom and that was incredible. Then to go into heaven at this new building...There were actually two art rooms. Each of them were equally large, closets. In fact, I took one of the closets...There's usually no such thing as an empty closet in an art room, but I took one of them and I took all of my art books and I donated them to the school and I made an art library inside the closet. That's where I'm going to look for the book of the Las Vegas Centennial. I think it's in there. So you left behind a wall. Yes. You talked about that before we started this recording. This might be a good place to tell me the story of the wall that I took those pictures of. What happened was that I saw an announcement somewhere that part of the Las Vegas Centennial Celebration was going to include one hundred murals around the town and that if any group was interested, they could apply for a mural. I thought, what a cool thing. So I filled out an application. You had to say what the theme was going to be and I said, "The Jewish contribution to Las Vegas." I was sure they were going to turn it down, but they didn't; they accepted it. So I took my older kids, the seventh and eighth graders, they did the research for the project and they made the whole design of it. They put it on the wall of a multipurpose room that was being used as a theater, an auditorium, everything. They drew it on the wall. Then some of the kids in the lower grades helped to paint in the lower areas where there was ground and stuff like that. Everybody watched the progress of this mural. I think it took us eight months to complete. Every day we were out with the mural. It was so exciting. The kids got to go on ladders; that was a really big deal. The way the research worked, the way it was incorporated into the mural design is kind of interesting. And you can't see it in the pictures that I gave you. The center of the mural was a Jewish star and every other point of the star was a dove of peace. I'm not exactly sure what this is over here. We kind of did our version of the Strip in the middle, but it was only with the buildings that were owned by Jewish people. Of course, we had the Venetian and the Wynn. The Encore was not built at that time. We had the Mirage and Bellagio because of the connection with Steve Wynn originally. Anyway, they learned about all of that. Then we had various points of the story. This is the media. It turns out that the TV was really Jewish; it was owned by Jewish people. I wish I could see better. But they had a lot of details that you might not have thought of as belonging to the Jews. This slot machine was all the Jewish businesses in the area and there was real estate and doctors and stuff like that. Then the left side was a roulette wheel and there were hamsas on it. But the outside of the roulette wheel, all the white spaces were the names of each congregation. It's very, very small. You can't see it very well.