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I agree.Part of an interview with Irwin Molasky, April 23, 2014. In this clip, Molasky describes constructing his first property in Las Vegas: a motel called the Pyramids on the Las Vegas Strip. He then talks about the sanitation district as the reason that the city could not annex the county into its borders, and the related issues of a growing city.
Irwin Molasky oral history interview, 2014 April 23. OH-02154. [Audio recording]. Oral History Research Center, Special Collections and Archives, University Libraries, University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Las Vegas, Nevada. http://n2t.net/ark:/62930/d1f18w11z
English
The town was strictly a western town. Most everybody knew everybody else. When I moved here I moved into a rental house I rented on South Sixth Street near Charleston. That was a residential area over there. I had gotten out of the Army and moved to Florida for a year to build GI housing. I was a young kid, and quite successful I might add. My wife at that time didn't like it in Florida, so after a year we picked up and moved back to California where I did some spec building for six months or a year, and then I moved here and decided to build a motel. Okay. On the Strip, right next to the Flamingo. In the location that is now the Holiday Inn. I built a little motel of 19 units. Okay. Called The Pyramids. I actually built some concrete block pyramids in front to designate the name. It was right on the highway. My parents were my partners. We were on well water. There was no water to the area. We started a district called Sanitation District Number One and we put sewer lines out toward the Strip. That was, in effect, the reason the city never could take the county into its borders. Yes. So good, bad or indifferent, that's the reason the county has separate? Nobody knows this, I guess. That's the reason the county is separate from the city, because of the sanitation sewer district. Yes. So we were able to keep the county separate, which was our desire at the time. Why was that? It still is as far as I'm concerned. Why? What were the reasons for that? Why do you want to go into more supervisory boards and be relegated to the whims of politicians? Good point. We elected our own board of county commissioners who were friendly to us on the Strip. Okay. That's just a little afterthought. In those years, I went to get a telephone. I found out that I had to wait for three months to get a three party line. I bet you don't know what that is. No. That means that three different people had that number. Okay. They couldn't service everybody. There were no dial tones at that time, no rotary lines. You'd pick up the phone like this and say get me three four seven.