Transcript of a narrative by Lucile Bunker, March 10, 1977

UNLV University Libraries Lucile Bunker i A Narrative by Lucile Bunker An Oral History Statement Conducted by Herself Ralph Roske Oral History Project on Early Las Vegas Special Collections Oral History Research Center University Libraries University of Nevada, Las Vegas UNLV University Libraries Lucile Bunker ii © Ralph Roske Oral History Project on Early Las Vegas University of Nevada, Las Vegas, 2017 UNLV University Libraries Lucile Bunker 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 Lucile Bunker iv Abstract Lucile Whitehead Bunker (b. 1907 in Overton, Nevada), at the request of Doreen Day, provides an oral history statement about her experiences growing up and living in Southern Nevada. Bunker recalls her first experiences in Las Vegas and Overton and talks about her family, specifically about her mother, an ice cream maker, and father, the first assessor of Clark County. She then speaks about her various positions, including being a secretary at a school and law firm, a schoolteacher, and a deputy county clerk. She also describes her experiences as the wife of former Senator Berkeley Bunker, particularly living in Washington, D.C. where she met several presidents and attended several events with other lawmakers’ wives. Bunker additionally talks about her missionary work in her church and the various locations to which she travelled. She concludes the statement by talking about her interests in china painting, the early above-ground atomic testing, and the building of Hoover Dam. UNLV University Libraries Lucile Bunker 1 Doreen Day, a neighbor of my daughter, Ann Harris, has requested I give an oral history interview. I regret that I have to do it as a statement rather than an interview because I’d rather have it be done with questions and answer, but in my busy time, I don’t seem to be able to arrange for doing it another way. My name is Lucile Whitehead Bunker. I’m the wife of Berkeley L. Bunker, and yes, I’m a longtime resident of Las Vegas, Nevada, because I was born November 23rd, 1907 in Overton, Nevada, and I’ve lived in Las Vegas for many long years, almost all that time. We lived in Washington, D.C. four years and in Atlanta, Georgia four years, but all of those years were spent with my residence and voting privileges in Las Vegas. I was born in a small, two-room adobe house, and I’m the second of eight children of Stephan Robert Whitehead and Gertrude Eleanor Meader Whitehead. My hair was nearly black, my eyes very blue, and I’m five-feet, five inches tall. I’m the shortest member of my family of four boys and four girls. We moved to Las Vegas when I was four years of age. My father was the first assessor in Clark County, and there’s a plaque in the courthouse to prove it. My brother, William Clark Whitehead, was born here. His middle name is for Ed Clark, a banker and very influential man in this area in the early days. He was very kind to our family and even gave us a gift of a large sum of money to help our hospital bills when my mother had a terrible accident. She spent eight months in a Salt Lake hospital. We shall ever be grateful to that grand man. In those early days, we lived in the area of the company houses, they were called, the railroad houses that were built for the use of their employees. They were cement block small, square-looking houses, and comprised a nucleus of the homes of the town. There were no paved streets in those days, and with Las Vegas winds, you can imagine, sometimes you couldn’t even see the house across the street for dust. This was purely a railroad town in those days, and the trains were the big attraction—the only attraction. Many people would go down to the station to UNLV University Libraries Lucile Bunker 2 watch the trains come through and see if anyone got off. It’s hard to believe it was ever thus when you can sit now at the airport and watch hundreds file out to the waiting buses to go to hotels on the Strip. Right here while I think of it, I want to tell an odd, frustrating thing that we early residents had to put up with. In order to cash a check, you need two or three means of identification. The machine age has really taken over. It used to be a few years ago that we would just go and take up a counter check, as they called them, filled in our name and the bank we banked with, and it was cashed without any identification. Everybody knew everybody in those days. In 1911, my sister Feriland went to school in the first grade in a huge old building over on Fourth Street. At that time, my parents were advised that the building was condemned, not fit for use. And then it served all those long years as a housing for the schools without anything being done to it. Then it was changed over as a building for federal—the federal building is there now. We moved back to Overton for a while and I went through grade school there up to the eighth grade. A most interesting thing occurred there while I was a child. What they call the Farm Bureau Extension Train came down the valley as far as St. Thomas, and my family went over there to see it. It was made up of many cars loaded down with the best methods of doing everything: the finest handwork, quilts, cooking, canning, farming, and all kinds of cattle. I can still see those immense bulls—you started at one end of the train and walked down through the middle aisle with displays on both sides, like a fair on wheels. It was truly a great service to the area, and it was all a public service. Back to the early beginning, my mother is Gertrude Eleanor Meader, born in Kent County, England, February 9, 1884. She’s now deceased. My father, Stephan Robert Whitehead, UNLV University Libraries Lucile Bunker 3 born June 17th, 1880. He died in July of ’42, only sixty-two years of age. My father’s parents were Adolphus Rooney Whitehead and Mary Esther Wells. My mother’s parents were Alfred Meader and Fanny Hall Watson. My parents met in San Francisco was there on a mission for the Mormon Church. They were married in the St. George temple and moved to Overton to live almost immediately. My dad was what you’d call a go-getter. He owned a mercantile store, the phone company, the light company, and a canning process. He had an interest in a copper mine and sank a good deal of money into it. He always was going to get rich on some mine. It was the bane of my mother’s life. We had a string of about twenty-five burros which came in each weekend to the corral at our large lot, and we had that wild raying noise, ey-aw, ey-aw, all weekend long. We had a mine called—it was a copper mine. He expected to make money on it, but I think we lost far more than we ever gained. At the time I was nine, I was working in the phone office being paid three dollars a week. In the summer, I’d be busy peeling tomatoes on the assembly line of the canning of tomatoes. Kids worked harder in those days. At 10 P.M. I had the privilege often of turning off the light switch which turned off the lights for the town. If anyone needed light after that, they used oil lamps. We had the only two-story home in the area; it was a beautiful home. My parents had a lot of fun parties there with a lot of good music and singing. My father was a man of many talents. He never had a lesson in his life, and yet he could play any horn or any string instrument, plus he could play the piano and the organ. He made up songs, words and music, and even published some. His mother thought it was a sissy thing for a man to work in the music field, so he was never allowed to take up music, even though his soul was full of it. He had a rich, baritone voice and sang solos all the time. He and my mother sang duets, where she had a good soprano voice. She was a magnificent cook, and so you can imagine UNLV University Libraries Lucile Bunker 4 the wonderful parties they held in that house. My father was also a genius at figures and kept everybody’s books. The best fun of all for me was when he’d take me on the rounds of his bird and animal traps in the foothills. He fashioned his own traps and baited them. We’d go gather in the quail and the rabbits and then reset the traps. He sold them in his store. They were in great demand; he couldn’t keep up with the demand. My mother made homemade ice cream for the store every Saturday when the ice arrived. We had ice only once a week, so you can imagine the demand for the ice cream; it sold out in a matter of seconds. To keep our food cool, we had to make our own coolers, which were usually a box with some shelves in it and waterproofed, then burlap sacks tied all over it and a drip of water constantly on it to keep it cool out there in the breeze. It worked pretty well, but there wasn’t room for much of anything but butter and milk. We had eight children in our family: four girls and four boys, and I was the second child. Three of them were born in Las Vegas. We moved back to Vegas for good when I was fifteen, and I went through all of high school here. If I excelled in anything, it was English and commercial subjects. It was fun earning all those typing pins, and even though the state contests were scary, they were also exciting because I came out second in both shorthand and typing. I was extremely shy as a young person, so it was always rather a shock to me to be, like, the junior prom queen and queen of the church Golden Green Balls two years in a row. I was really more interested in being on the basketball team and travelling to Tonopah. The games up there were really something—and playing tennis, which I loved. After high school, I worked as registrar in the high school under Principal H. A. Whiteneck—that was funny combination: a Whiteneck working for a Whitehead, or rather, the other way around. Then I worked for a law firm in research (unintelligible) for a year to get UNLV University Libraries Lucile Bunker 5 enough money to go to Reno for school. I gained enough education there to obtain a teaching certificate and taught for a year in Beatty. It was much easier to get a teaching certificate in those days than it is now. That was during a terrible depression in ’29 that the mining town of Beatty where I was working was flooded with young men from Hollywood who were suddenly out of work. And they came over there to work in the mines. I had plenty of dates then but nowhere to go, so it made it rather treacherous for a virtuous young lady. Before the year was out, I was called home to help nurse my sister Marge who we thought was dying of rheumatic fever. She lived through that siege but died at the age of twenty—my, how I loved that little sister. My next job was for my father in his title company, and from there, to seven years in the county clerk’s office as a deputy county clerk. It was a really fun job; I took all the naturalization proceedings, clerked for all the visiting judges, issued marriage licenses, and even did a little court reporting when Ernie Cragin couldn’t make it—he was the official court reporter for years, and he ran the upper town movie house as well as an insurance business. I don’t know how he ever did it. Seldom did we get a full night’s rest because the phone would ring and it’s someone wanting a marriage license. Right after I left there, they changed over to twenty-four hour service, and a lot more girls were hired. I still hate to hear the phone ring after I go to bed. Berkeley L. Bunker and I were married December 29th, 1932, and almost from the beginning, he was interested in politics. And he was elected to the Assembly, eventually becoming the Speaker and having a good deal of responsibility. He was a good public servant in every job he undertook. There are not too many conscientious, honest men in politics, and it’s no wonder what with the offers of bribes in many forms with which they are faced constantly. We have two daughters, Loretta Derrick who is married to Paul I. Derrick of Salt Lake City. He is chief research man over the Salt Lake intermountain lands and a member of the high council in UNLV University Libraries Lucile Bunker 6 his stake, a high church position. They have eight beautiful children. The other is Ann Harris who is married to Morgan D. Harris, the public defender here in Vegas. They have three beautiful children. He is a counselor in the presidency of the east stake of the Mormon Church here. Politics played an exciting role in our lives. My husband was appointed to the Senate in the death of Senator Key Pittman, so we were in Washington, D.C. for two years with that assignment. Naturally, he ran for election to that office when the time was up. He had been a good senator, so, of course, he wouldn’t have thought of doing anything else but running for the office. But Governor Carville who had appointed him ran against him, and many people thought he should not have run against the man who appointed him, so he lost the election. But he ran for the House on the next term and was successful. Many interesting things happened to us in Washington. Most important was our daughter Ann was born there while he was in the Senate. When you first arrive in the city as an elected legislator, there are flocks of visitors to your home: photographers in droves, newspaper reporters, and all the brass of Army and Navy bring their wives to call as a part of their duty. Every Sunday after we’d retire from church, there would be a whole pile of calling cards in our mailbox, and our child was in demand for radio appearances. Of course, today that would be for T.V. appearances. After settling in our home in Arlington, Virginia, I was invited to a lot of luncheons and dinners. I think they go alphabetically down the list because I’d find the Browns and the Bakers and all those B-people would be invited at the same parties. I went to one party which was really a puzzle to me. I received an invitation engraved to come to a dinner party, formal, at the English Embassy, not for my husband but just for me. So, I wasn’t about to miss anything like that, so I dressed up and went out there, finally found the UNLV University Libraries Lucile Bunker 7 place, and it was for women only alright—formal dress at eight P.M. There were only ten of us there. I know only one other person there, and that was Mrs. Wallace, the vice president’s wife. We sat around visiting with a woman from England who is a famous author, and so the party was for her. She chatted with each person and then when she came over to me, her first words were, “And how are you invited to this affair?” I was at a loss of—know what to say to her. Not wanting to say, “I just have no idea,” I said instead, facetiously, “I suppose it’s because my mother was born in your country,” ha-ha. We ate a very formal dinner set up with elegant dinnerware: four forks to the left, two knives and three spoons to the right, three to four glasses overhead. I thought I knew my table manners until I was confronted with all that. As soon as the meal was over, one lady left in her chauffeur-driven car, and the rest all walked in a body up the street as if going to some other event, which no one had mentioned all evening. And I went out, got in my car, and drove myself home completely puzzled. There was a small piece in the newspaper that Sunday about the gathering, but I was still in a puzzlement about why I was included, and how. In those days, the wives of the big wigs in the service—the Navy and Army—would spend time at the clubs playing bridge and drinking, and I was invited two or three times as a guest of (unintelligible) Gary’s wife. He was a millionaire—billionaire I imagine, owning several railroads and mining properties. But anyway, I got to meet some very interesting people while I was with her. She had a very good friend who was a movie star, and she came with us often to—Mary something, I can’t even remember her last name—but anyway, we met a young man there: tall, fine-looking young fellow who walked over and sat down at our table, and as he put his feet under the table, he bumped my leg and he said, “Timber,” then he apologized for bumping me and he said that he had lost both his legs in the room. And he walked without a cane or any aid at UNLV University Libraries Lucile Bunker 8 all, and you wouldn’t know what he had both his legs, it was so smooth and easy. He was hired at that time by the services to work with Walter Reed with the amputees, and he was telling us about a young man he had visited that day—this came out in Reader’s Digest right soon after that—he had gone in to talk to one young man who had one leg off, and he was so depressed he didn’t want to live. And the man talked to him, tried to cheer him up and help him as much as he could, but he was having none of it, so this fellow walked over to the window, and the young boy said, “You wouldn’t understand, you haven’t had your leg off.” And he said, “No, my dear young man, I’ve had both my legs off,” and turned and walked out the room. After that, they had no more trouble with that fellow. He was eager to get out and be walking again. I had the opportunity to shake hands with President Roosevelt four times. My husband went in and visited with him several times in his office, and he was a very charming man, personally. I was invited to luncheon three times at the White House with Eleanor Roosevelt. She would go from table to table and have something interesting to say to every person there. I have never seen such a lady-like lady who knew all the rules. She really impressed me greatly, being a woman of great ability. I shook hands with the Trumans a couple of times, and Bess wasn’t much on that shaking hands. She just had a sour face every time and admitted that she hated meeting the public. I became friends with Mrs. Wallace, the vice president’s wife, who worked with Roosevelt. We were in a Senate Wives Red Cross Club together and wound many hundreds of bandages for the World War II needs. Driving in Washington, D.C. was quite an experience. They have rulings there were you can’t make a right turn unless you’re over in the right lane a good halfway back on the block. So, policemen were in great abundance, and you’d get a ticket if you tried to make a turn right unless you had done way back on the block. But anyway, I enjoyed driving, and my husband would UNLV University Libraries Lucile Bunker 9 have me take the constituents that came for a fast tour of the city. Usually, they had one hour or something like that in which to see everything, which was a hard job getting them all over to the main places of interest. I always started at the (Unintelligible) Gallery because I loved it—all the beautiful marble in there and the great thrill you get out of seeing the things in there. It’s a place of beauty without any pictures in it. And then we would go to the Hall of Justice and take the men to see the marble stairway that, the steps just come right straight out with no supports at all. And they were roped off; you couldn’t walk on it because it was forbidden to the public, but how they ever supported themselves out there, I don’t know, or to hold a person to walk up them because those slabs of marble just stuck straight out in the air—of course, embedded on the other side wall. That was a thing of beauty to look down there and to go in and see where the Supreme Court worked. We’d go to the Smithsonian Institute, see all the artifacts that are in there: Lindbergh’s airplane hanging in midair in the main floor—all those early, early things of the country gathered together. And each date has a portion of that gallery where you can go in and see things from your own state that have been sent in, things of interest. Now I’d like to talk a little bit about our experiences in church assignments. We had just finished building a new home. I had worked so hard, I made up the plans for it myself; my brother built it, my brother Ross. And so I was dearly loving being in this new house when we were called to go on a mission to the south, and so we had to leave our new furniture and all to someone else. While we went there, we went to Atlanta; the mission home was there, and the mission covered Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, and Alabama; and our travels were far and wide. We’d go down to Miami and as far over as Puerto Rico. I remember there very well the first time we went over there, one of the authorities from the church in Salt Lake had come over to go with us on a tour of the mission, and we got ready to go. We started out in the plane and UNLV University Libraries Lucile Bunker 10 just go up into the air, and it filled with smoke. So we had to go back down and land, and we all stood over by the fence waiting to see if they would get it fixed, most of them praying they wouldn’t have to go on it because they were afraid it was a faulty plane, and I was praying we’d go on it so that I could get over there and see Puerto Rico. Well we did go, and everything worked out fine. We’d hold meetings with our missionaries and with the saints throughout the mission. Every weekend, we’d be gone on these speaking tours and talking to our missionaries, giving them advice. So, it was a good deal of travelling, and more speaking than I enjoyed, but of course, we grow by doing, and it stood me in good stead for the jobs I had when I returned home; they were executive jobs, and my working in auxiliary, so it did me good. I had under my supervision sixty-nine small relief society organizations. At Christmas, our older daughter Loretta [who] was nineteen then came for the holidays from BYU where she was living, and she flew back there for Christmas, but we had a traumatic experience because in Chicago, her plane she was supposed to take out on was grounded. She had to wait for the next plane that she could get out, standby, all night long, and that was the worst night I think I ever spent worrying about that child with her first flight across the country being grounded in Chicago. But eventually she got there, and it was a very good thing that she came because while she was there that one week, a young man by the name of Paul Derrick returned to Atlanta from his mission in South Africa, and he met her and they fell in love. He changed his plans of going to Georgia Tech and applied at BYU and went out there to where he could be with her. They were married not long after that. While we were still on a mission, I went home for the wedding. Paul’s father was working for ABC, some network, and he travelled about a good deal—moved about—and he ended up in San Francisco as the state president of that area for fifteen UNLV University Libraries Lucile Bunker 11 years before he died. Our younger daughter, Ann, was anxious to be one of the Rhythmettes, you know, like all the young girls do when they get into high school. And she was looking forward to it so much that she just hated to go with us, but she went, and they had, in the high school she went to, a sorority called (unintelligible) which took her in and voted her in, so she really had an enjoyable time with that, and it helped to make up for the moving. It’s hard to uproot teenagers, take them to a new surrounding. We left the mission two weeks before Ann was supposed to graduate from high school, so they transferred her credit and, after all, she graduated from Las Vegas High School—after no classes there but transference of credit. Memories of the mission are wonderful. We had such a spiritual feast living there. The mission home in Atlanta was a great big old mansion, Southern mansion, with the colonnades of the front, a rolling lawn down to the street with dogwoods that blew beautifully in the spring. And we had so many stalwart young men working with us. One of them came out to be a fine doctor since in California, one is a noted brain surgeon in Salt Lake City, and other had large businesses. Berkeley Bunker certainly knew how to fire young men up to great things to bring out the best in them. So, it’s marvelous now to sometimes meet with them in Salt Lake and learn of the things they are doing. I have two sisters who are artists: Myra, who died, was a good artist. My sister Betty now works for AdArt in the city and is a good artist. So I always longed to do something myself but never did have the opportunity till I went to the South, and china painting is a (unintelligible) art in the south. There are quite a number of teachers there, and I happened to get in with the very best one in the city. I took lessons on my afternoon off from mission work. Mrs. Hempell was her name—sweet, little old lady, very generous with her time. But anyway, from learning china UNLV University Libraries Lucile Bunker 12 painting, I came home and continued it, and now I am teaching china painting myself part time. And at last, I’m doing something constructive with art. As a kind of a roundup of the things I’ve done, positions—I know the outline says we should do this—I’ve been a high school secretary, a law firm secretary, a schoolteacher, a deputy county clerk, a deputy county recorder, a wife, and a mother. And in church, I’ve been a ward MIA—that’s a young people’s secretary—and a MIA president, a mission mother, a stake MIA president, a stake relief society board worker, and now I’m a counselor in the stake relief society of the east stake. I sing in the choirs of the singing mothers, and I’m a china painting teacher. And that about covers what I have done. I’ve covered a lot in a few minutes, but I’d like to tell a few items at random. I’m from an early Las Vegas family, and my father was president of the chamber of commerce several years. He had a great faith in the future of Las Vegas, and at one time, we owned a great deal of property here. Let’s face it, we were land poor. We had let most of it go for taxes. Some of those are worth a mint of money now—corner lots in town which would have made us all wealthy if we’d have been able to save them. He really did a lot to promote Las Vegas; he had great faith in it. He and Dr. Martin, who lived here at that time, did much to promote Las Vegas. We often drove Downtown and would park down there, and everybody that went by, you could say hi to. You’d just know everybody there. During the building of the dam, we used to drive down there and watch its construction, and somehow it seemed twice more gigantic in its building time than it does now that it’s finished. It doesn’t seem half as big. It was so deep looking down in there, watching those cranes swing across the canyon. We heard all kinds of stories in those days about how many men had fallen to their deaths and were entombed in the cement as it flowed over them—how much of that was true I’ll never know, but there were great tales about it. We also had a bit of speculation UNLV University Libraries Lucile Bunker 13 about the effects of the atomic blasting when that started. The light from the blasts were so bright that it would wake us up from a sound sleep with that light in our eyes, right in our homes, and in a moment or two, then you’d hear the rumbling sound that would come over the country, and our houses would tremble. We have several cracks in our house from that blasting, above-ground blasting. The chandeliers would shake for quite a while after. I never did go out to the highway and watch it, but from our home we could see the mushroom cloud that would go up into the sky. I remember the day when the El Portal Theatre was the only movie in town, and my father loved movies. And before they had their building ready, they had an open air thing next door to the building they have now where you could go and see the silent movies, and one of my—a friend of mine who was an older girl than I was, was playing the music that went along with the movies. And it was the only thing, I guess, going in town that was worthwhile to see, so you’d go to about every change of movie. I’m one who always says you’re as old as you feel, and I’m a very busy, active individual, but speaking of these old times in Las Vegas, I’m beginning to sound mighty old to myself, and that’s not good, so I think this is a good place for me to close off for now. Yours truly, Lucile Whitehead Bunker, sixty-eight years young.