Transcript of interview with Brian Cram by Stefani Evans and Claytee White, October 28, 2016

i AN INTERVIEW WITH BRIAN CRAM An Oral History Conducted by Stefani Evans and Claytee D. White The Building Las Vegas Oral History Project Oral History Research Center at UNLV University Libraries University of Nevada Las Vegas ii ©The Building Las Vegas Oral History Project University of Nevada Las Vegas, 2016 Produced by: The Oral History Research Center at UNLV University Libraries Director: Claytee D. White Editor: Stefani Evans Transcribers: Kristin Hicks, Frances Smith Interviewers: Stefani Evans and Claytee D. White Project Manager: Stefani Evans iii The recorded interview and transcript have been made possible through the generosity of the UNLV University Libraries. 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 and 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 Building Las Vegas Oral History Project. Claytee D. White Director, Oral History Research Center University Libraries University Nevada, Las Vegas iv PREFACE "This is the most important place in our society." Throughout his career, former Clark County School District Superintendent (1989–2000) Brian Cram took his father's words to heart. He heard them repeatedly over the years as he watched and later, helped, his father clean classrooms at Robert E. Lake Elementary School: this place—the classroom—this is the most important place. v Cram was born in Caliente, where his father worked on the railroad. In 1939, when Cram was a toddler, the family moved to Las Vegas and his father found work first as a sanitation engineer at a hospital, and then at CCSD as a custodian. The elder Cram, who spent his formative years in the Great Depression, prided himself on doing "good, honorable work" as a custodian, because the work—the classroom—mattered. Even so, he wanted more for his son. Cram largely ignored his father's advice during his four years at Las Vegas High School, where he ran with The Trimmers car club, wore a duck tail and a leather jacket, and copped an attitude. Cram's swagger, though, dissuaded neither his English teacher nor the school librarian, who took time to mentor him and teach him to enjoy reading. Even so, Cram had no higher aspirations after he graduated in 1955. One Southern Nevada summer spent working on a construction crew and alongside his father convinced him otherwise. He worked his way through Dixie State College in Saint George, Utah, as a custodian. There, his English professor likewise mentored him. And there, Cram first became interested in education, teaching his first students by substituting for out-of-town professors. In this oral history, CCSD's longest-serving superintendent shares the path he took to occupy that position. He also offers examples of the challenges of, solutions to, and opportunities that arose from accommodating the unprecedented growth of the nation's fifth-largest school district as it nearly doubled the students it served during his eleven-year administration, from 111,000 students in 1989 to more than 215,000 students in 2000. Throughout his tenure as superintendent and with growth straining the District's administration, faculty, infrastructure, resources, materials, staff, and students the custodian's son channeled his father and prioritized his to-do list by asking, "How will this help the classroom?" As Cram tells it, his father "did not live to see me be superintendent, but I am sure he would have laughed and said, 'You finally got the idea that this is what is important.'" vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Interview with Brian Cram October 28, 2016 in Henderson, Nevada Conducted by Stefani Evans and Claytee D. White Preface………………………………………………………………………………..…..iv Downtown Las Vegas 1940s and 1950s; father custodian Robert E. Lake Elementary School; Fifth Street School, Las Vegas High School, Barbara Butler, and Velma McKay; railroad cottages, socio-economic status, and car as status symbol; Dixie College, Juanita Brooks, teaching, driving a cab; University of Utah, Arizona State University, Clark County School District, Clark High School, principal, assistant superintendent, and superintendent ………………………………..………………………………...……. 1–16 Sixth grade centers, Western High School, superintendent, growth, bulletin boards, and "How will this help the classroom?" Magnet schools, Richard Moore, Community College of Southern Nevada, Dual Enrollment For High School Students, School-Community Partnership Program, community support, educated workforce, site-based management; building program, recruitment, accommodating growth, charter schools, parent volunteers, CCSD population and demographics, and poor CCSD funding……………….……. 16–37 Teacher pay, parent involvement, Greenspun Family Foundation and Greenspun family, golf, technical unemployment and retraining, elementary v. high school principal pay, maintenance department, and phonics and UNLV…………………………….……. 37–49 APPENDIX: "Tribute to Dr. Brian Cram," and "Where I Stand: Schools Sprouted in '80s"……………………………………………………………………...……….…. 50–53 vii 1 S: Good morning. It is October 28, 2016, and Stefani Evans and Claytee White are here with Dr. Brian Cram. Dr. Cram, would you please spell your first and last name for the tape? Brian, B-R-I-A-N. Last name is Cram, C-R-A-M. S: Thank you so much. We like to begin by talking about your early life. We understand you were born in Caliente, Nevada, so we would like to hear what it was like to grow up there, why your family came to Nevada, and when they did. Tell us about your siblings and your parents. My family came to Caliente originally because my father worked on the railroad. Caliente was a railroad center in Nevada and he worked on the railroad for a while and lived there for about four years. I was born in 1937 and shortly after we moved to Las Vegas in 1939. My father got a job in Southern Nevada working for one of the hospitals as a sanitation engineer and eventually became a school custodian at Robert E. Lake School. That was his early interest in education. I came to Las Vegas at a very young age and really enjoyed myself. Las Vegas was a very small city at that time. We lived on the 500 block of Third Street, right where the Justice Center is now, across from the Justice Center, and we lived in one of the original railroad cottages. S: Do you remember the address? 521 South Third Street. That railroad cottage today resides in the Clark County Museum in Henderson and they have reconditioned it and painted it. I went out there to look at it at their dedication and was taken with how small it was. It seemed gigantic when I grew up in the home. Upon reflection it is a very, very small home. I had great times there. On 2 Third Street we were close to Fremont, just a few block away, so we spent a lot of time on Fremont when we were young. Early on I got jobs as a distributor of advertising for White Cross Drugs. I think it was on Second and Fremont. I would take the flyers around for things they had on sale and take them around to people in the city. The city was small, you could cover a lot of ground at that time. When I was slightly older I went to work for Vegas Materials, which was a hardware store close to Main Street. I worked there as the person who threaded the pipe and did all the grunt work there and eventually moved up to management as a young man. When I was still about 12 or 13 years old I worked at Von Tobel's Hardware Store. That was right downtown and I was known as the person that could bring packages down two flights of stairs the quickest. That was my claim to fame at that time. They were very good teachers. They taught me a lot about work and the importance of work and management. They kind of took me under their wing and taught me a lot of life lessons that I thought paid off very well for me later in life. I have a brother Bill who is nine years older. He lived here as well, went through school here, worked for the Post Office as an administrator. My mother was a full-time housekeeper. In Caliente she had suffered a stroke when she was very young and had lost the use of half of her body. She struggled with that with good humor and took good care of my brother and myself. At that time there wasn't a lot of attention paid to who was rich and who was poor. We all thought we were upper middle class, living there on Third Street. We never felt deprived or disadvantaged in any way. We had the run of the neighborhood. Our bikes were our vehicles to go almost everywhere. I covered all the territory from Roxy's house of prostitution out on the Boulder Highway to the ponds that fed the Las Vegas streams, which is now out at Alta and Valley View. When we were 3 young, in elementary school, we used to go out there and take a lunch. I recall our lunch was sandwich bread and ketchup. We would make ourselves some sandwiches and go out there and go hunt for crawdads. We would catch some crawdads by putting some string down with some bacon on it. The crawdads would seize on the bacon and they were so territorial that they wouldn't let go and we would pull them out of the water and take them home and cook them. That was a lot of our summer activity. At Fifth Street School I was a fairly mediocre student. I was distinguished by trying to answer all the questions they asked with something humorous, which was not humorous to my teachers. At one time they thought they should refer me to Special Ed. Then the principal intervened and said I was just a smart ass. I wasn't debilitated in any way. He threatened me. He said if I didn't do well he was going to have me in his office and I would be sorry when I came out of there. At Fifth Street justice was swift and impactful. He kept a paddle in his office, but more often he would ask you to bend over the desk and he would kick you in the seat of your pants. That would be unheard of today, in fact it would be child abuse. I can assure you that in that day and age that was a very powerful message to us. You only get that done to you once or twice and you were done messing around in school. C: Did girls get that punishment as well? No. Girls would receive a verbal reprimand, but for boys there was no mercy shown. He convinced me early on that it would be more productive for me to try to be a good student rather than be the class clown. I started learning some things at school. I had some very good teachers. Eventually moved from Fifth Street to Las Vegas High School, one of the few schools in the county at that time. It was an excellent experience for me. I joined a 4 car club, The Trimmers we were called. Most of the people in the car club were not solid citizens but were great to hang around with. We would take our customized cars and cruise downtown and then to Sill’s, a drive in, which was at Charleston, and Roundup, which was further out towards the start of the Strip. We would make the circuit, making comments at all the girls we met. Sometimes we raced, not very often. I recall that it seemed like I was at the best point in my life right then. I had a nice car and a customized tucked-and-rolled interior. I had a paint job with 18 coats of paint on it. I felt like how could life be better than this? What else could a person achieve if you had all that? C: Who were some of the other boys in the car club? Tony Molina and Jesus Molina were in the club. I can't recall his full name but he was called Pockets because he always kept everything in his pockets, great big bulges of things. He kept tools in his pockets. The Yardman was another boy who was in the club at that time. Our purpose in life was to show off our cars and sit around and talk about various matters of state. We had a car that we raced. It was called a rail, which was just the skeleton of a car with a big motor on it. We all put our money into that to race it. It was kind of like Fonzi stuff [Ed. Note: Fonzi was a character in the television show, Happy Days, which ran 1974–1984.] We all had leather jackets. We had duck tails in our hair. We felt like we were really cool. Meanwhile, the rest of the world was moving on. They were learning things they needed to learn. They were learning chemistry and we were not quite up to that level yet. In high school I found out that I came out with kind of a deficiency. When I was a sophomore or a junior I really started to discover that the other students knew a lot more than I did. I had a wonderful time in school and I did excel in speech. I was invited to 5 leave my English classes a couple of years in a row, so I went to speech. The speech teacher spent his time with me and helped me eventually. In my junior and senior year I ran into a teacher by the name of Mrs. [Barbara] Butler, who was just a legend to me. She epitomized everything a teacher should have: tough rules, and a tough woman. She knew her business and she felt infidels like myself could learn. She spent quite a bit of time with me, catching me up for the things I had not done. She put me in touch with the librarian. The librarian started me on the top shelf at the library. She said, “Let's have you read the books that are dusty. Let's read the books that other people aren't reading.” So I read a lot of the classics and other books. She would ask questions and mentored me and tutored me. Before I knew it I was learning. She was bound and determined to make me literate. I found, by accident, that she covered a lot of deficits that I had acquired. S: Was this Mrs. Butler or is this the librarian? The librarian. S: What was her name? Her name was Velma McKay. Thanks to their tutorship I thought I left high school fairly literate. I certainly didn't graduate at the top of the class. I was a class officer, however; I became president of the biology club. I have no idea how or why. Then I became vice president of the senior class, mainly elected by a coalition of car club members and a rainbow coalition of misfits who decided they wanted a representative in government and they felt I would be good in that role. S: What year did you graduate? 6 1955. I felt Las Vegas High School was a good place. People were kind to each other, very little violence or name calling. People worked pretty hard in those days. We enjoyed taunting the security guard by racing from the school. We did a lot of juvenile things that you are bound to do in high school. It was all tolerated. It was like they will get well later and they will discover what they missed. After that I went to work at a travel agency, became a shoe salesman, a construction worker, a mailman—I spent quite a bit of time trying to find myself. I found all those jobs interesting. The last job I had was construction worker. My assignment was kind of specialized. After the grader would go down the road, it was my job to pick the big rocks off the road and throw them off. I did that for about one summer and decided that perhaps higher education was for me. My father was delighted. I would go to Robert E. Lake Elementary School and help my father do his custodial work after school sometimes. He would always demand that the desks be lined up in perfect order. You would look down and there would not be any legs sticking out. I would complain sometimes about that. He would stop and knock on a desk and he would say, "In this place happens the most important thing in our society, and don't you ever forget it." Eventually, I didn't forget it. He was always stressing, "You can do what I am doing. I do good, honorable work. But you may want to think of something else." After my great physical exertion being a construction worker I decided that I would go to school, that it was a better alternative. I went to Dixie College, a two-year school in Saint George. C: Before you tell us about Dixie I want to go back to the railroad houses. How many were there? I am not sure, but I think there were about 200. 7 C: All in that area? Yes, they were built for railroad workers and eventually other people moved into them. C: Can you tell me the composition of people that lived in those? In the main there were people like myself, mid- to low-class income, very territorial. It was a great community. If I would get into trouble in high school, by the time I got home all my neighbors would say as I went by their house, "You are going to get it." It was a close-knit neighborhood. Everybody watched out for each other. My uncle lived across from us. My aunt lived two streets over on Sixth Street. My other uncle lived on Second Street. I lived on Third Street. There were four people in the family that lived close. C: How far did they go over? Over to Sixth Street. C: So those little houses that are attorney offices? Yes, they were somewhat better, upper class. I didn't realize that at the time. The good news was that no one acted as if it was upper class. I think people liked money, but I don't think they felt like they had to flaunt it. It wasn't like you are lower class and I am upper class. I never knew that we were fairly poor, that was what a good home I had. I do know that we would sit on the front porch—all those homes had front porches. My dad would sit in one chair reading cowboy novels; mother would sit in the other chair reading books, magazines; I would sit on the front steps, and we would watch all the traffic go by, going back and forth downtown. My mother would say to me, emphatically, "Those people in those big cars, they are not happy." I believed that for some period of time. When I got into college I started realizing that they were very happy. So I told my mother, "Apparently you don't know that those people are happy." She said, "Well, I 8 didn't want you to think that that meant happiness. That owning or being in the big car is what made you happy; that is not the main thing in life.” My mother was a fairly intelligent person, went to college. My father was educated to about the fourth or fifth grade level, but he was street smart. I attributed much of the common sense I got to my father. He didn't know everything everybody else knew, but he understood enough. He was great at reading people. He was a good judge of people. C: Were there any Latinos or African-Americans in the railroad houses? No. The African-Americans were mainly in the Westside. It was a segregated community even in that time. C: So even when you came in 1939? Yes, that was going on. Latinos lived further up. They lived out towards the Strip. C: About where the Culinary Union is? About, Boston area, the Naked City area. S: But you all went to school together. Yes. C: Because at that time you had to go to school together. Yes, there weren't a lot of schools in town. I would say that we knew some people were wealthy because they had cashmere sweaters. Below the cashmere sweater group there was a vast, vast group of us who wore leather jackets and things like that. C: Leather jackets were quite expensive back then. Yes, but you had to have that and a car. If you had those two things you were guaranteed you were going to be healthy, wealthy, and wise. Even the kids that were poor got those things. It was kind of an important symbol of what we hoped to be. 9 C: And now we can start with Dixie College. I went there. I became a custodian at the college. My parents weren't able to give me much to go to college. They gave me good wishes and were very supportive but didn't have much to give, so I felt I had to work. I worked during the summer and I went to Dixie College and found another English teacher, by the name of Juanita Brooks. Juanita Brooks is a local historian there. Wrote the book, Mountain Meadows Massacre. I first ran into her in college when I was cleaning her classroom. She took some interest in me, fortunately, and taught me the world, not only English but everything else. She was an awesome person, very, very bright, and very funny, and a joy to be around. She taught me a lot of things I didn't know about the sciences, the maths, and the things I had no idea about. She taught me those things very quickly, and did a great service to me, and taught it to me in such a way that it was fascinating to me. She was a story teller, and in the main the stories she told me were historically accurate. After class and when I was cleaning her room we would talk. She saved me from a life of servitude and poverty, I think. She said, "If you have the ability you have an obligation to use it. It is not given to those to waste." She felt that I had some ability. Got through Dixie fine. Worked my way through as a custodian, and I taught some of the classes at the university while I was there. The professors would go—like the football coach or basketball coach would be out of town, so I would go in and be their sub. I probably became interested in education at that point. I earned part of my money doing that. They paid me; the university didn't have subs available anyway, so that worked out. C: What subjects did you sub in? 10 I would sub in history and some sciences. I am not the scientific type—it is not my strong suit—but I was brash and confident enough that I could get through a class or two. They would leave me the lessons and I would do the best I could with them. I think the students who were bright knew that I was struggling, but they didn't care either. They were glad to have a vacation from the professor. During the summer I was at Dixie I came back and worked as a cab driver. That was a life-changing experience. In the first place, I made great money. Because they [my employers] knew I would be back every summer, they gave me great shifts—which are generally the evening shifts, where the tips were good. I became the patron saint for a number of ladies of the night. They would call me because I wasn't interested in anything but getting them home. After an evening out, they would all meet at a bar and get plastered, so they would call me to get them home. I would bring them home, throw them in the house, and close the door. The next day they would call me to pay me. I found out that they were people like everyone else. I can't explain why they chose that profession, but I can say that they were regular people. They weren't different than anyone else. C: Where did they live? They lived all over. I had a number who owned apartment complexes. They had invested their money, and they were smart. I would take them around so they could pick up the rents all at the same time. They showed me the other side of life, which was interesting. I had regular fares. I had a guy who got in the cab and said "I want you to take me to Los Angeles," which was unusual. I didn't typically do long trips like that. I said, "Okay, let me call and find out how much that is." He said, "I have one other request." He was downtown. He said, "I want to lie down in the back here. I don't want to see any lights or 11 anything until I get out of town because I won quite a bit of money. If I see anything like that, I will go in and lose it all." I transported him to Los Angeles. He was a stockbroker, but he was addicted to gambling, and he was a very interesting person. In the cab I learned a lot of life lessons. I learned that most people down on their luck were not in that position because of something they had done, right or wrong, but it was a matter of circumstances. They were unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the right time. No one wanted to be down on their luck. Fate had twisted their career in such a way that something happened to them. My patrons were 80-year-old ladies who I would take to the grocery store and help them shop. But overall it was very rewarding and I made a lot of money. It was a good job, and they saved the job for me every year. I had always been interested in people's behavior and hadn't realized it; at that point I became really interested in people's behavior. I started to watch, and learn, and see people's habits and how they held themselves, and see what they said. It was a great training ground for what would happen to me later. S: What cab company was this? Blue Cab Company. [Ed. Note: Vic Whittlesea of Reno purchased the Blue Cab Company in Las Vegas in 1941. By the late 1940s, Whittlesea's Blue Cab Company of Las Vegas was managed by H. Emmett Ingersoll.] As a result of that I made quite a bit of money, so I went to the University of Utah, finished up there. I had a slight fling with abnormal psychology. I had decided almost everyone in the department was crazy. I had a conference with the head of the department who said I had an attitudinal issue and he didn't mean that I was a bad person but he meant that I wasn't into this. I had pointed out to him that a number of his faculty had, what I thought, were undesirable traits. They had 12 ticks, and were strange, and they were weird. The other thing I noticed was that all the people in that department prided themselves on being different but they all looked the same. They all wore the same kind of clothing, they all walked the same, and they all talked the same. I thought if these people are in charge of my mental health, I better get out of here. By joint agreement I only stayed there briefly and then started tutoring some on the side. I tutored some people in school and got interested in education. I got a degree in education from the University of Utah with a minor in psychology. I decided regular psychology was okay as long as it wasn't abnormal. Then I moved on to Arizona State University, where I visited with the people who were the heads of the department of educational administration, because I thought that was where I should end up. I thought I was a decent teacher, but I felt I wanted to do something else, something where I could change more things. I went into the department of educational administration, met the chairman, introduced myself, and said, "I am in need of some financial assistance, and I'm thinking you probably need a great graduate assistant. I feel I am fully empowered to change this department into something worthwhile." He just laughed and said, "Well, maybe I do." I got a graduate assistantship in that department, which helped pay most of my expenses while I was at Arizona State. Taught classes there as well. Taught some classes for the professors that left. They treated me great; they thought I was a worthwhile person, and they encouraged me to go to work in the Arizona school system. I just felt uneasy about Arizona. I thought Arizona people were in a kind of time warp. They thought the frontier days were still here and many of them were practicing that in their behavior. I felt that I wasn't going to get along well there. I graduated with a doctorate and decided to go out on the market and see what I 13 could do. I was interested in some schools in Florida. I had talked to them some and felt I could have some prospects there. I was offered a job in Arizona, but as I came through here [Las Vegas], my father, who was still at Robert E. Lake School said, "Why don't you talk to my principal?" Her name was Edna Hinman. She was a force. She was a powerful woman who knew no limits, who felt she could do anything, and who subsequently did a lot of good things for the district. She is an important person in the history of the Clark County School District. She talked me into applying here. I had done quite well academically in college. I think I discovered that because I was paying for it, education had become more important than it had in the past. I became a fairly good student. She saw my record and saw what I had done. She decided she could find something here for me. She was most interested that in Arizona I had taught a couple of years while I was going to school—I taught at Alhambra High School. The principal said to me, "If you will take the sweat hogs, I'll give you fewer classes." It was a tradeoff. C: The sweat hogs meaning who? The academically uninspired. I said, "I like the sweat hogs, so you have the right guy for this." We were put aside in one of the wings, kind of neutralized out there. I said, "What are the rules here?" He said, "You can do whatever you want if you can keep them interested." The sweat hogs were both males and females. I said to the class, "I know you don't like our text book and you find it boring. Let's just write our own historical text book and let's start from scratch and we will write it." A couple of the girls were literate so they decided they would be the typists and they would straighten out all the syntax. We proceeded to write our history book. They did chapters. We had some kids that were 14 artists. One day I said to the principal, "Do you mind if we do some murals?" The truth was he didn't care what we did as long as I kept the kids from fighting, no disruptions. We were quiet. In the hallway I had them do a diorama of history. Once they got into it they did quite well. Our history book did not win any prizes. It is not published, but it was history in their eyes, and I was intrigued by what they thought was important in history. It was not the same things that I thought was important in history. They would read the book and they would look at it through the prism of their own eyes and said, "This is what matters to me." They would be interested in some little tidbits and they made sure that ended up in the book. I stayed there because I needed to get a couple of years’ experience in order to get my doctorate. I finished that and they kind of fudged it a little bit on the doctorate requirements. I finished and came here and was selected by a man by the name of Bill Bytes, who was a principal at Rancho High School. He then moved to Clark High School when that opened. I don't know what he saw in me, except I was literate, and he knew I was fairly good in curriculum. I had written some papers and done some stuff. He said, "Come on over. We are going to do this. We are going to start a new school." The school was constructed in such a way that it had classroom partitions between classrooms that didn't go all the way to the ceiling. The architect ensured us that they were movable and you could make any configuration you wanted with no interest of whether the noise would go over the top of the wall or not. We scheduled language classes next to each other. I recall that we had Latin, French, German, and Spanish. When all those classes were in full cry, it was what Babylon must have been like. It was really interesting. We discovered early 15 on that we had to put glass up to the top of all the walls in there. I did that for three years as assistant principal. I became principal there for about four years after that. I am not being overly modest here. I don't know how, but somehow, Redbook magazine had picked Clark High School as one of the five best schools in the country. The visitors started coming in, and we got visitors from all over the world, which was interesting. I am not sure that our program was distinguished enough to merit the attention, but I felt like, why not? They did that because we had a block schedule, where you took science longer, and we did some of that early stuff. My contribution was that we had an honor card. If you had a grade point average of 3.5 or higher, you could leave class at any time as long as you stayed on campus: go to the library, go where you wanted, as long as you kept your grades up. That was wildly popular with the kids because they spent a lot of time in the library and other places talking to friends, but they managed to keep their grades up as well. As a result of that I became a consultant in California. I worked there 30-40 days a year consulting with groups in California. They had a regular administrators group that flew a group of us from place to place. We would go to different school districts and talk to people. I received a number of good job offers, but I liked Las Vegas and wanted to stay here. I felt that this is where I should be. Kenny Guinn decided I should be an assistant superintendent. He made me assistant superintendent from '65 to '68. I was ov