Audio clip from interview with Arne Rosencrantz by Barbara Tabach, February 18, 2015

How does all of that family heritage trickle down into the next generation? My grandfather believed in education on my father's side. My father went to school and did very well in school. He started playing the violin at a very young age, maybe six or seven years old, and violin was really his passion, but my grandfather wanted him to go to school. So my dad actually got?born in 1904?he got through the second year of college, which was pretty amazing in those days. But the family needed my money and my dad was working part time playing his violin and left school and became a professional musician. In the meantime, my grandmother and grandfather had four more children, all survived, three more brothers and a sister. They all stayed in the Northwest and came out and followed my father here to Las Vegas when he moved here in the early '50s. So what kind of professional violin playing? Was it with an orchestra? He was concert trained violinist, but he made a living by playing...he played cruise ships. He played mostly in the Northwest. But he did cruises. I have pictures of him in Bora Bora and Hawaii, Tahiti and Cuba. He was able to travel quite well. He actually had a group and he was the orchestra leader. He had like...most pictures I see about seven or eight people in the group with him as the orchestra leader. He developed quite a reputation and that's what he did. He was a musician until he was almost forty years old when he met my mother. He was single and wanted to get married, but he waited until he was forty. How did they meet? He was from Portland. My mother was from Portland. I think my mother was working in a department store in Portland and she met him and he was a musician. And her brother was a musician. My mother had a brother named Harry York and he was a musician. He was a piano player and he was out every night. My mother said, ?I do not want a marriage??to herself, I think, said, ?I'm not going to marry a musician and have him be gone all the time.? She said, ?I would like to have a family.? So I think after a while...he went back to San Francisco. The families knew each other. They didn't get serious until my dad decided he...was not experiencing the kind of success as soon as his hair turned gray. In the music business they wanted younger people, and so he wasn't getting called. He was a union musician. If he was waiting for a job, they would take younger people. He decided to come back to Oregon and get into retail and that's what he did. That's when he joined with my mother and became a couple and got married. And got married and had kids and all of that. Right. Got married, had kids. We lived in Portland. He lived in Portland with my mother and I have a sister who was born in Portland. Then they moved to?he was in the jewelry business in Portland, Oregon. It was very small and not enough money. So he needed to move. He moved about 90 miles north of Portland?called Longview, Washington; that's where I was born?and he went into the furniture business, a small store. He stayed in that business for a couple of years. I was born and we lived in Longview for about two more years and moved back to Portland, mainly because he had two children and we were in a small city in the state of Washington with not a big enough Jewish community to have a temple and he wanted his kids to have a Jewish education. So he moved back to Portland and he went back into the jewelry business with his brother, also a very small store, and was not doing well enough to really just stay there. At the time, the Sahara Hotel, here in Las Vegas, was being built. That was being built by predominately guys from Portland, businessmen and people who had some experience in gaming. They said, ?George, if you're looking for a place to come and work, find a job or find a place to have a business,? he said, ?Las Vegas is the place.? So my dad came out and spent six months here working here at the Sahara Hotel when it opened as a musician. He was a violinist. Found himself a location to put a retail store and built a furniture store. The building was there, but he put furniture in it. He brought my mother, my sister and myself to Las Vegas with the intent of maybe only staying a few years. Make enough money and go back to his family where he had his brothers and sisters and parents were?his father wasn't living, but his mother was living. Go back to Portland where the family was. But that didn't happen. They were very happy here in Las Vegas and here we are.