Transcript of interview with Velma Haselton by Catherine Bellver, September 13, 2001

1 An Interview with Velma Haselton An Oral History Conducted by Catherine Bellver September 13, 2001 Las Vegas Women Oral History Project University of Nevada, Las Vegas 2002 2 Velma, let’s start with your childhood. Why don’t you tell me where you were born and when. Well, I was born in St. Louis, Missouri. My father worked for the railroad. I had one brother and one sister. They are both deceased now. My sister died in ’55, my brother was two-and-a-half years younger than I am and he died about two years ago. He went – was in the service and when he came out he went back to his old job at Otis Elevator and they wouldn’t give him what he thought he was worth because he didn’t have a degree, so with a wife and two kids he went to city college in Long Beach for two years, worked for his father-in-law in a bowling alley and then he was accepted at Stanford. He graduated from Stanford at ’36 and went right to work with G[eneral] E[lectric] and he traveled all over the world. He was a specialist in testing big equipment and things like that. How about yourself, how much schooling did you have? Well, I graduated from high school and then I got my college in bits and spurts ’cause we moved around so much and I worked days and went to school at night. I have a – I went to San Mateo College in California and then I’ve got a lot of my education. I worked for an accountant in San Carlos and in those days you didn’t need to be a CPA, they had what they call a public accounting license and he was training me, and I worked part-time, but I did taxes on weekends and when I had time in between. The outfit I worked for, John Torres Supply, burned down and so I was without a job and that’s when I went to work for him. I learned an awful lot there. Then I – when I was with Lybrand in San Francisco, they encourage you to go to classes and things, and they paid for my tuition at a couple of the places where I was taking courses. I was more or less a specialist in non-3 profit organizations and foundations. And I was the only one in the office there who knew anything about payroll taxes and things, because at college, they knew there was some but they’d never done the work. And they didn’t know how to do it, so I had a lot of IRS interns in my office teaching them these things and there’s different payroll taxes for non-profit organizations and things are different than normal payroll taxes. So getting back to your schooling, do you think your schooling was so spotty because of just your family situation or because you were a female? Oh, no, it didn’t have anything to do with being a female. Because of your family situation. Well, yeah, moving around. I did some in San Francisco, and then I finished up some degrees at UNLV. Oh, UNLV too. Oh yeah, I’ve got some point, whatever you call it. Credits. Yeah, credits from there. And I took some of the exams. In fact, when I went back to school, I was taking – took my business law in San Mateo and I wanted to brush up on my math, so I took an accelerated class at college, and I couldn’t keep up with them. Now math is my big deal now, but in those days – and so the teacher said – he advised me to drop out that class before I got an F against my records and I went back to high school and took my math and algebra, and then went on. Then went on. Yeah. 4 When you were a little girl, what expectations did your parents have for you? Do you think they had different expectations for you than they did for your brother? No, we did it all on our own. My mother wanted me to play the piano. She wanted a piano. She bought a piano. I started lessons at about six – practice, practice, practice. I had a teacher take me as far as she could take me in St. Louis, then I went to the conservatory there and the man there, he says, “Well I can’t teach you anything.” He said, “You know – on some things you know more than I do.” But it was all classical. I’d sit there and if I didn’t do it right he’d slap my fingers with a ruler. So I entered a contest and I won a scholarship to Julliard, but it wasn’t all that big ’cause in those days – I was only 14. You know, and there was no – my family didn’t have the money for them to go with me and there wasn’t enough money or a way for me to live back there by myself. So some way or other we settled it, I was given a monetary amount. You went to Julliard. I didn’t go. You didn’t go. I didn’t take it, there was no way I could go to New York. To take the audition. The money was there for the scholarship as far as it went, but I’d have to live there, you know, and have to have somebody with me and everything. And I wasn’t all that enthusiastic about making music. I didn’t think I could make any money playing, but we did. My brother and another fellow and I had a little combo. We played Saturday nights at dances. 5 So your early life, you were more conditioned by just your family circumstances, than by your gender. How about the other girls? Just all you could do. How about the other girls? My sister. No, girls in general at your age. What were their expectations for them? Do you think most of them were thinking of making a musical career? No, when I was going to high school I had ten rhythm classes. I got two bits a class. A friend of mine, minister’s daughter, she had the other classes. We each had 10 classes, then I saved my lunch money of 15 cents a day and worked in the lunch room in high school, and I was like a cashier, took the money. Already with the money. Always with the money, and I worked all day Saturday and Monday night at Woolworth’s in the candy counter for a while. I was kind of rich in those days for – you know, times were hard, there wasn’t any money. Born in 1914, we’re talking about ’28 or ’29, and I got married at 18, I was still in high school. We were married for five years, but it was a problem because he went to school days and worked nights, and I worked days and went to school nights, and we didn’t get – we just didn’t see each other. And it wasn’t a bad divorce. I worked for Hart, Schaffner and Marx in St. Louis for a while as a cashier and assistant bookkeeper. And so when my vacation came up, I went to California because my brother was out there. And I was offered a job at Hart, Schaffner and Marx there by the boss who I had gone in to see who was a friend of the boss in St. Louis. He said, “Well, do vacation relief.” I said, “Oh, that’ll be fun.” So I did. I didn’t 6 go back to St. Louis, I never did. I worked there three or four years and became the Assistant Credit Manager. Had a lot of fun, lot of people you know, and were mostly women in those deals. I had a man boss there, but women were not, you know… Excluded. No, they weren’t -- just because they were women, that was no problem. I’ve never had a problem. Never had a problem. As a woman. You brought up the question of marriage. I know you’ve had a couple of them. I’ve had 3 marriages. In 1940 I married Don. When you were 18. No, that was Earl. He was 21 when we were married. Then in 1940 I married Don, the one who wanted to be a forest ranger. And our son was born in 1942, and in those days – I worked with little things, but I did alterations and made clothes and things. From the time I was about ten years old I have always made all my clothes. You made alterations for pay. Oh, yes, I got paid. I made a beautiful shantung suit for my dentist’s wife, and the department store said it would sell for about four hundred dollars. Then I made my niece’s wedding dress and four bridesmaid’s dresses. My mother-in-law had a stroke and she was paralyzed, so I had to alter all her clothes so we could open it up the front and slip it on her arm. My niece’s wedding, everybody had a new dress but me. So you worked all through the time your son was growing up. Yes. 7 [Did] that conflict in any way with raising— I didn’t have any problems because when he was younger, before my mother-in-law had the stroke, she’d keep an eye on him once in a while. We lived for a year in the Methodist Church. When she had her stroke she had been the custodian there and my husband had lived there with her before we were married. This is with your second husband, right? So we moved into the church and there was an apartment upstairs and while he worked I vacuumed the whole church, dusted the pews and straightened things. My son was about a year-and-a-half and he’d hide in the pews. Probably thought it was a great deal of fun. We had a great time. And then we made extra money by – they’d have dinners at the church, maybe about once a month. And we’d set up for it and afterwards we did all the dishes. Pearl diving until midnight. Excuse me. Pearl… We call it pearl diving. They had three sinks. And the dishes all went here and you did them good, then you rinsed them and then you really rinsed them good. Oh, you call that pearl diving. Yeah, we call it pearl diving. So your husband didn’t have any problem with your working, it was a necessity. Oh, he – in fact if I hadn’t worked we wouldn’t have eaten. Because there were times – we helped his mother. My mother-in-law didn’t like me because I had been divorced. She fought me every step of the way and I took care of her for ten years. I worked and I got up in the morning, dressed her, she had long white beautiful hair, and I’d do that and 8 I’d get her breakfast and then I got her lunch. My neighbor would see that she got her lunch because she was in a wheelchair. And then when my son came home from school, the neighbor had a boy the same age and they’d go see Grandma and then he’d sit with her and talk to her and that until I got home from work. So there was always somebody around to take care of him, except when he was very small. And then I worked at these little things where he didn’t interfere with anything. Before you were married, say when you were 14 – what sort of concept did a girl of 14 in those days have of marriage and of life that was in front of her? I don’t… Or did you even think about it. Didn’t even think about it. My girlfriend who was the minister’s daughter, we had the classes, we used to go over there on Wednesday nights and they could have in the basements we’d have little dances. And all the neighbors, kids that I went to school with, we’d all gather there. And for a while I went with Harry Babbot. You wouldn’t know about him. Later on he signed up and sang with Kay Kaiser’s Orchestra. And then he and Betty got married. I went to California and they were married, and then I visited them – a lot of funny stories about that, but we won’t put that. But that doesn’t have to do – Did you go to any of this schooling while you were in your marriages? You know, your extra schooling. Oh, yeah, I went to night school almost all the time. Especially when Earl worked nights and I wasn’t ready for bed, I’d sit and do classes. I had a lot of fun with business law and those things. 9 And he and nobody in your family said, “Well, what are you doing that for, that’s a waste of time for girls.” No, they didn’t. I was on my own most of the time. You said you had three husbands. So you had Earl and Don… And then Charles was 20 years older than I was. That was what, later on? Later on, I was single about four or five years before I met him through mutual friends and we got married. When did you get—when was that marriage? Well he died in ’85. I think we were married in ’71. I have two stepsons, one is 81 and one is 77. They give me a bad time. My bad kids. So. And California. You moved to California when? Well, I stayed out there when I went that summer. You stayed there. I never went back. Only once. You moved around several times in California. Oh, yes. When Don got out of Swift and Company, he worked for Gaif Atkinson Construction, and we were transferred up to Richland, Washington to the nuclear project up there. Washington, the State of Washington. Yeah. And we couldn’t live in Richland because we worked for a subcontractor, not the government. So we bought a little house in Pascoe, about 15 miles away on the Columbia. He was a timekeeper and I worked for a buyer of electrical deals for building 10 the wires and all the things they need there. Well, that was the year of the [big] flood and we were flooded out. I had water to my waist in my living room. Red Cross moved what furniture we had. I put everything I could up in the cabinets, and then we went to the little hotel there and I thought, “Oh, boy, I can have a shower and get cleaned up.” Turned on the water and muddy water came out of the faucets. No coffee, no anything. My husband had to go to work and we drove down along the river and crossed at Umatilla on an old barge that would take only ten cars. And oh, the river was rough, it was so flooded, so high, but we got there. We worked. I worked and still kept my job. We lived with his boss and I worked until Don got his vacation and then we came back to California. Then, instead of – yeah, then after vacation he was transferred back to McNarry Dam which is on the Columbia and oh, it was miserable, it was cold, it was – we never got up to zero for months. But anyway, we stayed a year and then he was transferred back to California, to Anderson Dam. Oh, that is where? That’s in California below San Francisco. Below San Francisco. Yeah. And he worked on Anderson Dam. Well, he got tired of doing that. Were you working during this time, too? Oh, yeah. I had a boarder and I did part-time books for a friend of the man I had worked for in San Carlos. I’ve never had to worry about a job. By word of mouth I always got somebody who knew somebody who would give me something to do. And my son went to school out there and… 11 He was what age by about that time? Yeah. What, was he high school age by that time? Let’s see. No, not quite. He didn’t go to high school until we got back into Belmont, San Carlos. And then my husband went into termite work. He had a friend who owned a pest control deal, and with his college education he had a lot of background so he took the exam and was able to do these spraying and termite inspections and all that kind of stuff. So your life sort of followed the job changes that your husband had. Oh, I had to. And then you found jobs wherever he stopped. Wherever I was. Wherever you were. Wasn’t that difficult to just uproot and change and adapt? Was it what? Difficult. No, no. I could fit in, I was sort of what you call a troubleshooter. I could go into these little companies that were having problems and set up their accounting system, their accounts receivable or something of that sort and then train a girl to take it over. And you said there were a lot of other women working in accounting. Oh, yes. My boss in Lybrands in San Francisco in the tax department was a woman. And that was in what era? Was that in the ’40s or ’50s? Oh, well, when I went up there that was about just after I joined Soroptomists in Belmont. The man at Lybrand in San Francisco had heard of the work I had done for one of their clients and he offered me a job at the Sequoias in Portola, which was one of the 12 first retirement communities. Very, very high deal, and I set up the books with his advice and I had a hundred employees. I was the assistant comptroller. We had four hundred residents, and I billed them and collected and [met] a lot of interesting people. Ernie Ford used to come down all the time. He lived up on the hill and he did the dedication for us. He was really interested in the deal. So he’d come and sit in my – my first office was in a trailer before the office was ready. And we’d talk over what was going on, and – he’d come down and you wouldn’t know him in his overalls and his – nice man. So when you came down from Washington, you settled south of San Francisco and then you went up to the San Francisco area and were there for several years. Yeah, we went back and forth. See, my sister-in-law, brother-in-law and mother-in-law were living in Burlingame Oh yes, I know where that is… Which is just below… Right, just below San Francisco. And I had been back one year to St. Louis when my husband decided he was going to do a job up there and he didn’t like it so he came back. So then I followed him. Now, this was which husband? Number Two. I was married to him 23 years. Oh, all right. That’s when you did most of the wandering around. Yes, all the wandering around. Right. And I left the Portola Sequoias when Don had gone back to the St. Louis area. And he had a dealership or something, and I went back there and I didn’t like it and he didn’t like 13 it so he left. And my son was still going to high school then, and he went with my husband out and we went back to California. Now, when he was in grade school and even high school, did you have to resort to babysitters? No. No. Not ever. Ever. He was self-sufficient. He was a good kid in high school. He’d come home. Well, he always got up and got his own breakfast. He’d sit there at the table studying and drinking a quart of milk and eating a loaf of bread and all that stuff. Now, when you had all these jobs, chief comptroller and all that, you didn’t find any prejudice because you were a woman? No, I worked very well with all the men. In fact, they’d come and have me do things for them if they got stuck and they were always nice to me. Was that the highest position that you got to as… At Lybrands. Anywhere. I mean. The chief controller. Well, yes, because I made more there. They put me out to various jobs. I worked for what they call land development, and it was – they owned a lot of property in San Francisco, and a 100-unit motel across the bay and I was in charge of the office there. I had one salesman and I had two help. And I audited. They had a mall down in, like, 14 Cupertino. And I used to go down and audit the farmers’ market and I figured up all of the tax bills and everything for them. Now, this was a nine-to-five job every day. Yes. Well, how long did you work at that intensity? Well, I worked there until the man who owned it had jumped out a window and killed himself and so the business went into a private foundation. He had left everything that way, all the properties and everything. So, the partner at Lybrands said, “Well, you’ve been doing it there, come into the office and work for us and handle that,” which I did. And I worked there for a long time. In fact, I worked there until I married Charles and I retired and we moved to Las Vegas. Now, where? I know you had a hotel/motel – how does that fit into all – the scheme? Well, the first one was when my son was still only about a year old, a friend of my husband’s wanted to buy this [hotel]. This was Number Two. No. This was Number One. Number Two. Number Two. [He] wanted to buy this old hotel up in what was then a ghost town, Johnsville. And it’s in the Feather River country and at one time the town had had about 2500 people because it was a mining town. I did the cooking and the books and was postmistress. Oh, that’s where you were postmistress. 15 Yeah, I was postmistress. I was open two hours a day and I had 16 boxes. I think I made about five-hundred-and-something dollars for the year. I was just – and we decided the hotel was too much of a problem in the wintertime, keeping the snow off, and it [would] get ten feet on the level and we’d have to go in the second floor, and we did some skiing. In those days skiing was – that was where the Thompson Ski… Resort. They’d have [it] up there. And the skis in those days were twelve feet long. They were big heavy things and you just slid your foot into the leather strap to hold it. And they used to come down that hill 70 to 80 miles per hour. Not me, I went across and across and back. But anyway, we had to leave Johnsville, because it was time – my son was six and he had to go to school. Was that when you used to get up at five in the morning and make a dozen pies? I made two cakes and six pies. At Canyon Inn I had to learn to adjust the recipes. My first cake came out of the oven and was about a half-an-inch thick. It was like a Frisbee. They threw it around the kitchen. Oh, because of the altitude. Yeah. I didn’t know how to adjust it and I had to learn. And during the winter months the water jet to the stove that spun the oil froze and I had to cook in the fireplace for about a month until they got it all thawed out and fixed. So this whole hotel/motel experience lasted how long all together? Well, one year at Canyon Inn and then we went back the next year and started the coffee shop and that’s where I had my post… Mistress. 16 …deal and I served guests things. It was beautiful fishing. I was in the Lakes Basin area and trout fishing and Feather River and all, we get all kinds of people up there and they’d eat in the coffee shop. They’d come over from Portola Valley to wait on Sunday mornings for the pies to come out of the oven so. I never had any of them left. Before coming to Las Vegas, did you do anything else besides this… We came to Vegas in 1950. No, before going, besides the accounting adventures and the hotel, you also… I always cooked – I did all the cooking, my husband would do the breakfasts and then I did the lunches and the dinners and on Sundays, we’d send them on a picnic. I’d fry ten chickens and made a big deep dish apple pie and potato salad and send them all off for a picnic up to the lake so they could fish. They had five bedrooms in the inn and then there were five double cabins on the grounds. So I had as many as 50 guests and ten helpers. Did you have to clean or did you have somebody do the cleaning? Well, yeah. That wasn’t the problem and I hired somebody to help in the kitchen and he did the dishes and one morning I had him peeling potatoes and he was sitting on the back stairs. He’s singing and peeling and peeling them all the way down and somewhere along [he drank] a whole big bottle of vanilla. Oh my goodness. You mentioned skiing. I understand you were also a pilot. Was that at this time, too? Oh, yes, I took – after Don died, very suddenly, at 55, I went back to St. Louis. I needed an operation and in the meantime I was offered a job to run the dining room at Aspen Lodge. And Aspen was a Red Lion or something, but here again was all that snow and I had nobody to help put the chains on. I could do it then, but I didn’t like to do [it] and so 17 I passed that up and went to St. Louis. Had my operation, lived with my mother. Lybrands had an office in St. Louis and I had a letter from one of the partners in San Francisco, and he gave me a job right then. I went as Assistant Comptroller for Diversified Metals, which was up just beyond the airport. So, I was alone and after work I didn’t want to go home, my mother went to bed early, so I took up flying lessons. And I did all the ground school in St. Louis. I did my first solo in St. Louis. I couldn’t qualify any more, I only had about 32 - 34 hours, but one of my clients, when I came back to San Carlos – I had my own business, you know, in Las Vegas. I had – one of my clients was Las Vegas Airlines who did the tours to the Canyon and if he was going to take a load over and come back deadhead, I’d ride over with him and then coming back, he was teaching me to fly a twin engine. And it got big. When I first worked for them – they as my client, they only had one plane, but by the time I left they had about six and it was getting too big and I wanted to get it on computer so we got a place in Los Angeles to do the books, sent the stuff there and I gave up that. By working – I worked in Vegas for… Before we get to Las Vegas, let’s backtrack. I wanted to ask you during your California years to talk a little bit about the civic organizations you belonged to there, Soroptomists and others. Oh, well, I joined the Belmont Club first, 1960, and like I said my business burned down, and I was working in San Carlos, transferred to San Carlos Club. Then when I went to Portola Valley, I was part of the time in Redwood City and then I was accepted in Palo Alto and I belonged to that club until I went back to St. Louis. So I found a club there and was invited to join and I worked with them. Always a treasurer, you wouldn’t believe. 18 They found out about your accounting background. I was there a year and then I – at Diversified Metals. I wanted to go back to California, so I called my girlfriend, the one who was my boss at Lybrand, and I said, “I want to come back, but I need a job,” and I said, “I’m coming out for vacation and then if you have anything, why, let me know.” So I came for vacation, I talked to her and then I went down to Vegas, my aunt – I had a couple of aunts here, and I was staying with her when the phone rang, and it was one of the partners at Lybrands. They had a job for me, and I had thirty days. I had to go back and give them notice at Diversified Metals and get packed up and get back in to San Francisco. And the job was the Comptroller for a franchise outfit that was trying to copy Arby’s Roast Beef, and they called [it] Yemmer’s Roast Beef and they had several places in Los Angeles, but they had opened about three in the Bay area, and I was in charge of all of them. I’d go to visit and check on everything, but it didn’t go over because… What time period was this more or less? When was this? Well, this was before I married Charles and after Don had died. So in the ’60s. So it would be Don died in ’64 or ’65. So late sixties. So late sixties. And then I married Charles in ’71. In San Francisco. In San Francisco. And in between there in the fifties when we came back from St. Louis, I had a cousin here who owned a motel out on the strip and he had built a coffee shop and wanted us to rent it. It was Park Lane Motel, and it was the only place where you could 19 get a cup of coffee other than the Last Frontier [that] was across the street and there was a motel next and then Club Bingo was up there and the El Rancho was still – not burned down. It wasn’t Las Vegas Boulevard South then, it was South Fifth. Oh, was that right? Yes. I always date me when I say we were out on South Fifth. And Sahara then was San Francisco, and there were only about 60,000 people in town. This was sixties. In the sixties, yeah. No, this was fifties. Fifties, excuse me. Yeah, and I used to feed a lot of the entertainers. Liberace and his brother George had the cottage in the back and they never came in the coffee shop, but I sent back their breakfast about two o’clock in the afternoon ’cause he had a late show and they’d sleep, you know. And so we always had a chance to go see the shows for free and one night I was playing blackjack waiting to go to the show and I was sitting at a table with one man and we were having a ball. Finally he says, “Well, I have to get up and go,” and so he left and the dealer says, “You know who that was?” and I said, “No, I don’t, but he was a nice man, he was a lot of fun.” Well, it was Victor Borge. Oh, my goodness. So you moved to Las Vegas in the fifties. Yeah, but we were only here about a year-and-a-half because my cousin’s wife passed away, and she had had 17 major operations and he owed the hospital so much money that he had to sell the hotel in order to pay for it. So we went back to California. 20 So your life has been motivated by differences in job situations that have made you… I just – wherever I went I could get a job. I never had a problem and I could still get a job now. Then, when you came back again, when was that? Well that – we moved back here – we retired back here about ’71. That was my third husband. You married Charles and then came here. Then came here. You married him in California. Yes. No, we were married down here at my aunt’s, but I met him in California. I see. Yeah. And why did you come here, to retire here? He liked it down here and the weather was good for him. See, he was 75 when we were married and he was 20 years older than I was, and he liked the heat, and so we moved back here. Well, I couldn’t stand staying at home. So again you moved because your husband preferred… The desert. Right. So when I got down here I applied for a job. First of all I went to the Sahara, and when I gave him my background and everything, he said, “Well, I’d love to have you, but I couldn’t afford what you’re worth.” He said, “You’d be making more than my managers here.” So I… 21 This was the seventies, right? So I got a job with United Pipeline. Anyway, they put in pipes and stuff here and I wasn’t very busy because we were training the man’s daughter to help in the office and there just wasn’t enough work. So, what I did, I went through the records and I pulled out all the jobs that they had done and I did a cost accounting recap of everything. I set it all up so when the estimator looked at he said, “This is wonderful. Now I know how to bid the jobs.” Nobody had ever done it for him. So, that was all in the records. Well, Kafoury Armstrong did the year-end taxes, and the partner came out to pick up records and stuff, and he happened to see this cost accounting stuff. He said, “Who did this?” and the estimator said I did. So he said, “Well, where did you get your background?” I said, well, I had worked for Lybrand. So he didn’t say any more and about two weeks later I got a call from Kafoury. They had talked to the owner and were given permission to interview me and they offered me the job at Kafoury. And I worked there when Clyde Turner was there. Now what kind – Kafoury is what kind of business? Accounting firm, CPA firm. Then Clyde left and went to work for Golden Nugget as the Comptroller there for Steve Wynn. And I did an audit of Clyde’s stuff so he could apply for his gaming license. His wife had a – she did curtains and drapes and… Interior decorating. Interior decorating, yeah. So then they were going to open the Golden Nugget in New Jersey. And Clyde took one of the other girls from the office and wanted me to go and go back and set up the books at the Golden Nugget in New Jersey. But Charles didn’t want to live in New Jersey and I didn’t blame him much, you know, because we had just 22 moved down. So I gave it up, but then Clyde talked me into renewing my business license – my accounting license deal, and I started my own business. And they gave me all the accounts I could handle. At one time I had about 40 or 50 different little outfits here that I did the books for, and then Kafoury would do the year-end stuff. And, so, gradually it got – it [got] heavy and my husband wasn’t all that well, he was getting along in age, and so I gave up some of them, and about the only ones I kept for quite a while was the Tennis Shop at Bally’s and then later the Tennis Shop and the Sunglass Shop at the MGM. And up until the first of the year I was still doing them. But I still go out there and help with the reports if she gets stuck. I’ve got a girl trained. So this is the second time you’ve been in Las Vegas. You worked because you wanted to keep busy. Now it was no longer because you had to work to keep the family going. Oh, yes – no I didn’t have to. Charles was fine. He had worked for Standard Oil all his life and there was enough when we sold the house, I didn’t have to work. But you know, you can’t sit at home 24 hours a day. Right. Now would you – how would you compare sort of the business or working environment from the California you know years ago and the Las Vegas of the eighties? Well, you made a little more money because of the time of the year and everything, you know. How about the situation for women, was it any different? No. I never had any problems. But were just as many women working here in Las Vegas as you were working with in California? 23 Oh, yes. Of course, at Lybrands there weren’t too many women. My boss was a woman in the tax department. The rest were all men, but there were women in the other little departments. I learned an awful lot working up there. And, I’ve never had a – I’ve never thought about being a woman making any difference. And you didn’t notice any difference in the women around you as you went from California back to St. Louis and then here. I got along with everybody. You know, I just worked with them. How about Las Vegas, it certainly changed from the fifties to the eighties. Well, there was a difference there simply because… The city grew. The city was small and there weren’t any jobs much for women, other than waitresses. In the fifties. Cocktail waitresses o