Transcript of interview with Roberta Kane by Barbara Tabach, September 6, 2017 and May 22, 2018

AN INTERVIEW WITH ROBERTA GORDON KANE An Oral History Conducted by Barbara Tabach Southern Nevada Jewish Heritage Project Oral History Research Center at UNLV University Libraries University of Nevada Las Vegas ii ©Southern Nevada Jewish Heritage Project University of Nevada Las Vegas, 2014 Produced by: The Oral History Research Center at UNLV – University Libraries Director: Claytee D. White Project Manager: Barbara Tabach Transcriber: Kristin Hicks Interviewers and Editors: Barbara Tabach, Claytee D. White iii The recorded interview and transcript have been made possible through the generosity of a Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA) Grant. 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 University of Nevada Las Vegas for the support given that allowed an idea 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 with permission of the narrator. The following interview is part of a series of interviews conducted under the auspices of the Southern Nevada Jewish Heritage Project. Claytee D. White Director, Oral History Research Center University Libraries University of Nevada Las Vegas iv PREFACE Roberta “Bobbie” Kane (1932 - ) is the first known Jewish child born in Las Vegas. Her parents, Sallie and Mike Gordon, were liquor stores owners and among the founders of the first Jewish congregation in Las Vegas. Bobbie’s childhood remembrances are as a young girl who was fully aware that “Friday nights were reserved for religious services. Saturdays were always reserved for gin rummy.” In the late 1940s, as a teenager at Las Vegas High School (and 1950 graduate), Bobbie recalls Las Vegas as a small town and a joyful place to grow up. She briefly attended University of Southern California before marrying and beginning her family. In time, life brought her back to live with her parents. She pursued a career working for the Desert Inn group of hotels and helped open the Stardust in 1957. She was mentored by Mark Swain, “a six foot-four hunk of a cowboy” who worked for Moe Dalitz. This experience included driving Mark’s pink Cadillac to pick up hotel guests. This provided her with a strong foundation for a public relations career at the Ilikai Hotel in Honolulu. Though Bobbie’s life story begins, and currently thrives in Las Vegas, she lived in Honolulu, Hawaii for over fifty years. In this oral history, she weaves a tapestry of memories that traverses the world, includes a building a business with her late husband Alex Kane. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Interview with Roberta Gordon Kane September 6, 2017 & May 22, 2018 in Las Vegas, Nevada Conducted by Barbara Tabach Preface…………………………………………………………………………………………..iv Explains how she is the first born Jewish baby in Las Vegas history (1932), the only child of Sallie and Mike Gordon; mentions the birth of Bernard Mendelson, son of Bill and Goldie. Family ancestral roots explored, mother’s maiden name was Diamondstone, from Ohio; talks about maternal grandparents Pauline “Polly” Diamondstone who married Abraham Schur, one of the first lawyers in Las Vegas. Saiger family, Uncle Max Gordon. Her nickname of “Bobbie;” her younger years of growing up in Las Vegas and her parents’ deep involvement with the Jewish community of the 1930s; mentions Nate Mack family, Mendelsohn family, and Moe Dalitz, Bernie Rothkopf, Milton Prell and others from that era……………………………………………….1 – 5 Explores the formalization that occurred in the Jewish community with building of Temple Beth Sholom; missing grade school for Jewish holidays; mentions Rabbi Lederman; in 1941 sent to Maybelle Scott Rancho School for Girls in Azusa, CA; back to Las Vegas Grammar School and graduated from Las Vegas High School in 1950. Talks about father’s ownership of a Las Vegas bowling alley; she was score keeper. Friendship with Billie Lee Schofield. Parents as business partners, memories of participating in their liquor store business, night drop of deposits as a teen; more about Sally Diamondstone, her great-grandmother, Mike’s private label liquor; father’s loyalty to his customers; lounge shows she attended with her parents……………………….6 – 11 Thoughts about how her parents got in the liquor business, relatives who foresaw Las Vegas market; Boulder City laws against liquor during Boulder dam construction era. Nate and Jenny Mack were duplex neighbors with her parents; recalls their son Jerry Mack; high school memories, including being yearbook editor, her friends and reunions over the years. Story of friendships including Jerry McCulloch, Frank McPeck, who became a priest; mentions educator Maude Frazier……………………………………………………………………………………….12 – 17 Talks about her aspirations as she graduated from high school in 1950; decision to attend University of Southern California; and marrying her first husband, an Irish Catholic who was enlisted in the US Air Force and stationed in Germany; became pregnant and returned to Las Vegas where her husband was offered a job in interior decorating business. Ultimately they divorced and she went to work at EG&G; memories of working for Mark Swain, who worked as Director of Sales at Stardust for Moe Dalitz and Desert Inn; feeling protected because she was Mike and Sallie Gordon’s daughter……………………………………………………………...…………...18 – 22 vi Recalls working for Swain for three years until she met Don Watson, married and moved to Hawaii with her three children. Don passed away in 1967; her parents passed away in the 1990s. She worked at Ilikai Hotel in Honolulu, then Sheraton hotel group; how she met Alex Kane of New Zealand, whom she married in 1979; connections with world leaders and New Zealand’s politicians; Fisher Paykel appliance manufacturing connection; how Alex came to Hawaii and how the two met, and finally married after several years………………………………………...23 – 30 Tells about setting up his international trade business in Hawaii, which still exists after five decades; her role in the business, as well as continuing in the hotel business. Describes their blended, international family of children, their careers……………………………………..31 – 33 Talks about return to Las Vegas after fifty-six years away; her part-time job as a secret shopper, care for her husband, reconnecting with the city and friends; wandering into Ner Tamid synagogue where her granddaughter Jennifer took her daughter to pre-school………………………...34 – 38 Session II Recalls the Wildcat Lair, a gathering spot of students from Las Vegas High School in the 1950s; her participation in a radio show broadcast from there. Mentions the Class C baseball franchise and memories of her and her girlfriends being usherettes. Friends included her best friend Betty Joann Cummings (Schofield), Marilyn Bradshaw (Naegle), Pat Thompson (Cram) and Bernard Mendelson, Jay Simon, Jack Cherry, Dayle Rust, Rod Imming, Talks about Ethel’s Liquors, owned by Ethel Rapoport, whose son Skip is now Bobbie’s son-in-law…………………………..39 – 43 Sallie Gordon involvement with USO at Nellis Air Force Base; her family’s involvement with the Sons and Daughters of Israel and the formation of the Temple of Beth Sholom synagogue. Discusses her college attendance at University of Southern California. Story of learning to drive, marrying Tom Morrison in Riverside, California; mentions family maids Clara Russo and Chris; describes the household of her youth. Becoming a mother and then a single mother who worked for Mark Swain at the Desert Inn Casino, picking up guests in his pink Cadillac convertible. Stories of Lido show at Stardust……………………………………………………………..44 – 50 Marrying Don Watson and moving to Hawaii; how she went to work for the Ilikai Hotel in Honolulu after it opened in 1965; on becoming the Public Relations Director of the hotel; gives brief overview of her fifty-six years of living in Hawaii and how after all those years she and her husband Alex Kane returned to live in Las Vegas area; caring for husband who had Alzheimer’s, enjoying her family here, traveling to be with others. Speaks about the large population of Hawaiians who have relocated to Las Vegas over the years and comparison of costs and lifestyles between the two……………………………………………………………………………..51 – 57 Appendix: Speech presented at UNLV, December 9, 2017; photos………………………..58 – 65 vii 1 Session I This is Barbara Tabach with the Southern Nevada Jewish Heritage Project. Today is September 6, 2017, and I'm sitting with Roberta Kane. I appreciate you inviting me into your lovely home here. I'm going to ask you to first spell your name and then we'll kind of take-off from there. Surely. It is Roberta, R-O-B-E-R-T-A; Gordon, G-O-R-D-O-N; Kane, K-A-N-E. When were you born? I was born November 28th, 1932, at Las Vegas Hospital on Eighth Street, which was two blocks out of town; the town ended at Sixth Street. I didn't know that. And you were the first Jewish baby born in Las Vegas. Yes—which is really quite funny, because my parents' best friends were Bill and Goldie Mendelson, and Aunt Goldie was also pregnant. But she didn't trust the Las Vegas doctors, so she went to Los Angeles to have their only son, Bernard Mendelson—who would have been the first Jewish child born here. Bernard and I, three months apart (and) only children, were raised as brother and sister here in Las Vegas. Isn't that something? That really is. That's a great story. We'll start with a little bit about your family ancestry, whatever you can tell me. Mother's family name was Diamondstone and they were from—I'm almost sure and I think it's in the paper that you've given me—Cleveland, I think, Ohio. Mother's family, the name was Diamondstone and there were eight siblings. I could give you the names later if you want them. The ones most close to us were, of course, my grandmother, (my mother's mother,) whose name was Pauline Diamondstone and when she married it was Schur, S-C-H-U-R. She was married to Abraham Schur, who was one of the first lawyers in Las Vegas, Nevada. They moved here in 2 1930. At the corner of Fourth and Fremont, he had a corner office. There was a little hotel there, as I recall. My mother was his secretary. Mother and Dad came in 1931. Grandpa Schur was really smart. He was so smart he was disbarred twice. Oh. How did he do that? Well, I'm not sure about the history, but I know that I was told that my Grandmother Polly was a sweet, unassuming, very gentle person, with great legs – had the best legs in the family. Grandpa did unusual things and half the time they lived in wealth and a half the time they did not. Half the time they had help and some of the time they didn't. Eventually, that marriage came to an end. Then Grandma Polly married a lovely little furniture upholsterer man who was a decorator, he also restored furniture. His name was Herman Adler. Grandpa AJ married again, Hilda, who was a woman from Germany, as far as I know, and they lived right on Maryland Parkway in Huntridge. He lived to a ripe old age and he always was a character. Now, on my father's side: that family came from Lithuania. My grandfather, Abraham Gordon, and his wife, I believe, came from Lithuania. He came as a boy. They came through Ellis Island. I am told that they were related to Sholem Asch, the [Polish-Jewish] author, and that somehow when Grandpa Abraham came through Ellis Island, for ease or something, they gave him the last name Gordon, so he was Abraham Gordon. After he was widowed, he came to live with us in Las Vegas and we had him until I was about fourteen years old. We lived at 615 Sixth Street, and the Las Vegas High School from which I graduated was in the 500 block of Seventh Street, so it was literally right around the corner. Of course, I walked to that until I got a car and I drove the block and a half to school every day to show off my little car. 3 What else would you like to know? My father, Mike Gordon, he was the baby of eight of his family. There were six boys and two girls – Ann Gordon who never married and Claire was the secretary to the president of Firestone in Akron, Ohio, and she eventually married much later in life. But my dad brought his eldest brother, Max, here. Daddy had more than one liquor store and he put Uncle Max in charge of one liquor store. The next brother up from Dad was Sam Gordon and he became a lawyer here and lived very nicely. He lived at the Las Vegas Country Club and played golf. They did very nicely here. The others came to visit or we would go back to Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, to visit with them. I have cousins on that side whom I have not seen in a long time. One cousin, Reba Saiger—Reba was the older girl of Uncle Max, and her younger sister, Annalee, was my inspiration. She was in journalism and I followed her in journalism. She went to SC and I started in SC. But she passed away very early. She was married and had three children. Gordon Saiger, Reba and Morton Saiger's son, I believe still lives in Las Vegas and was a sports coordinator, writer, very involved with sports. When you grew up you got the nickname Bobbie. Yes. Did most people know you as Bobbie Gordon? It depends. My school friends here all know me as Roberta. I still have two friends with whom I go to the movies every other Friday night or so. It depends. I never know what people are calling me, so I answer to everything. That's great. You graduated from Las Vegas High School. Where did you go to elementary school? Talk about the younger years that you can remember. 4 First of all, my folks were deeply involved in the Jewish community here. We had many lovely family friends who were the core of the Jewish community. The Mack brothers—Uncle Nate, Uncle Lou and Uncle Harry—were very close to us. Nate was Jerry Mack's father. Louie and Lucille had a son Michael, and Uncle Harry never married. Then we had the Mendelsons, Aunt Goldie and Uncle Bill. We had the Abrams. When Bernard Mendelson and Joey Abrams and I, were in grammar school. We were the only children who missed school for the High Holidays; that made us very different and it really had a reasonably profound effect on us. My folks were always working for the promotion for the establishment of the Jewish community here because they both came from very religious families. As previous notes have covered, they were one of the first presidents of B'nai B'rith, the men's and the women's, and of whatever they called the men's club—I really forget what they call it—but the men's and women's organizations. As I was growing up, every Friday night we all would get together somewhere. Now, Daddy's liquor store, Mike's, was at 106 Fremont Street and right across the street. Kitty Wiener, mother's aunt, and Lou Wiener, her sweet husband, had a little tailor shop and we would meet there. Upstairs there was an Eagles Club and they let however many of us there were—fifteen, eighteen people—get together for Friday night services. We moved it around wherever it had to be, but they would not give up Friday night services. Also, there were not enough men for a minyan, and so I believe that they allowed some of the women to participate because they didn't want to lose that connection. About what years are we talking about there, Roberta? Well, I would be a little girl. I had to be eight, nine, ten, so we're talking—well, from my beginning, but perhaps I started noticing those things more—it would be 1937 on. 5 I don't remember when Beth Sholom was built. But I will tell you for all of the things the mob fellows did, there never would have been a Temple Beth Sholom without them because they, too, came from religious families. Moe Dalitz and Bernie Rothkopf and Carl [Cohen] and Milton Prell of the Sahara and Debbie, all of those men got together, I don't know under whose leadership, but they all donated and they all got what little local people had and they made Temple Beth Sholom. Do you know what year that opened? [The beginnings of what is now known as Temple Beth Sholom started in 1946.] Were you living here when that happened? Oh, yes. Oh, yes. I was in school. We'll think about it. It was a very big event. When Beth Sholom was built, these men came not every Friday night, but they always came to the High Holidays. Yes, because at first it was called something else. Was it? Yes, it was—oh gosh, I'm going blank right now. It had a different title before it became Temple Beth Sholom. I didn't remember that. Then it finally started building and becoming more of a— Formalized. Formalized, exactly. Just to go back to something you said a minute ago, you said it had a profound effect to miss school. Yes. Can you tell me what you're describing there? Well, it created a little bit of a shyness. My friends...We lived across the street—we lived at 615 6 South 6th—we lived across the street from Berkeley Bunker, who was the senator at the time; Reed Whipple, who was the head of the Mormon group; Dr. Smith; Jack Cherry, Dr. Jack Cherry—and young Jack, who has just passed away, was in my class—Cahlan, who was the head of the Review-Journal. We just had a lovely street of people and friends. The kids could never understand why I had to miss—or really how I got out of school for the day to be able to attend religious services. It did have an effect, however we would like to pretend it didn't. It made us a little different, but we quickly recovered from that. Well, that's good to hear. Your father (and) Nate Mack, they were very instrumental in establishing the first synagogue and making sure that their children were educated appropriately. Yes. When did you ever have a sense that they were the founders of the Jewish community of Las Vegas? Oh, I think from the beginning because the folks were always having meetings and always calling people and pulling them together. They did try to have Friday night services always. Wherever they could be fit in, they all got together because that was their heritage, their tradition. I was always very proud of them because they were such leaders. Did your family try to keep kosher? Was that part of your ritual? No. In fact, I don't think either of my grandparents did, either. I don't think there was anyone in our family, to the best of my knowledge, who kept kosher. It was very difficult because it was hard to get good kosher food, for sure. Oh, yes. I will never forget—this may not be important—but when Rabbi Lederman—who was a very interesting fellow and treated my folks with such love and respect and me and my husband 7 when we came—he and his wife came to Hawaii one time and they brought with them packages, iced, of kosher chicken and various other things. We were having a chili cook-off, if you will, in the building industry where my husband and I had a business…in Honolulu, Hawaii. I was living there and they came to Hawaii. We were thrilled to have them. After they had been there two or three days, I invited them to the chili cook-off and they came and they tasted. I said, "Oh, Rabbi." And he said, "Oh, for God's sake, I'm on vacation." That's great. Shouldn't have, but did. That reminds me. Let's put some context, time line-wise. You were born— In '32. Essentially Las Vegas was your home base anyway until what year? That's right. It had to be when I was in about sixth grade at Las Vegas Grammar School. So what year would that be? I must have been eleven or twelve, so that would have made it 1941. All of a sudden, there were eighty thousand young airmen out at Nellis Air Force Base, and my folks had twenty-four-hour businesses, both Mike's and Sallie's down on Charleston, and they were really busy, and they were worried about all these young men tromping around Las Vegas with nothing to do, and they thought it would be a good idea if I went to boarding school for a couple of years. So I went to Maybelle Scott Rancho School for Girls in Azusa, California. It was beautiful, right on Route 66. There was a swimming pool and the horseback riding. There were only a hundred girls among twelve grades, so it was three or four to a class. It was like private instruction and well done. We were right in the middle of an orange grove, but we weren't permitted to eat the oranges because they were on contract to somebody else. But it was a wonderful school and I got a lot out of it. 8 Then I came back and I graduated in the eighth grade from Las Vegas Grammar, so that had to be 1946 because I graduated from high school in 1950 when there was only one, Las Vegas High School. So those years were just extremely interesting. Daddy and the men had a bowling alley on Second Street, and I was a terrible bowler and at that age where I was embarrassed, so I learned to keep score instead; therefore, I became a score keeper even for the men's league. I was quite good at it. We also owned a Class C baseball club, the Las Vegas Wranglers. The San Diego professional baseball team had what they called a farm club, which trained their young men and they moved up to the pros. So we had that and my girlfriends and I—you'll meet Billie Lee Schofield soon—had little denim skirts and shirts with cowboy hats. We must have been in about the tenth grade. But here we were thirteen, fourteen, and all of a sudden there were ballplayers, eighteen-year-old eager beavers, full of pizzazz. This is when girls were discovering boys, for sure. Well, that and the boys had nowhere else to go, so they hung around our families. Our fathers were just going crazy. They took us to some of the home games, some of the away games at Anaheim, Calexico, Mexicali. I will never forget driving in a car with my dad and some of the men and they all smoked cigars all the way there. I think it was Oscar Bryan and Bill Peccole, just the fellows who owned the club and I'm not positive it was them in the car, but men like that who were very, very prominent. But we had a great time. Let's name the businesses. What was the name of the bowling alley, do you remember? No, I don't actually. It might have been Mike's Bowling Alley. It had a small town feeling here, so, yes, you would just say, let's go to the Bowling Alley, right? There was only one? 9 It was the only one. My dad was over a two hundred average bowler. He was a little guy, five foot four, sweetest man who ever lived, really, very gentle. I think he was only about five foot—maybe five foot six, maybe a little shorter. And mother was small, too. They were married sixty-two years and in all those years he never learned where she put his socks. You could hear him every morning saying, "Sal, where are my socks?" And she would say, "Mike, they're in the same place they always were." So she would walk in and open the drawer and hand him his socks. Throughout this project hearing the name Sally and Mike Gordon and the fact that they each had liquor stores named after them, but they were business partners. Yes. That must have been an interesting example because women—well, even husband-wife teams—how would you reflect on that with your parents? First of all, I think it's marvelous. When Daddy and Mother were married twenty-five years, he said, "It was really fifty years because we were together every night but we were also together every day." She had taken shorthand in Los Angeles where they had lived, so she worked for my Grandfather AJ first, and then she was a partner in Mike's Liquor Store and Sallie's Liquor Store. Her brother-in-law, Charlie Goldring, in L.A. and her sister, my Aunt Katheryn, were also financial partners. They didn't own the businesses all by themselves. So it was not unusual to me at all. I was taking inventory with them when I was seven, I think. As I got to be a teenager, I learned to do the banking. We were open twenty-four hours. We took the receipts out after every 8-hour shift, of course, and put them in a safe, but they had to go into the night drop at the bank. So if my folks were out of town, I would go in at two o'clock in the morning and pick up the 10 deposits and walk around the corner. The bank was right on the corner of First and Fremont. You would. I would. I'd drop them in the night box. I had a key, I think, and I dropped them in the night box and came back and went to school. How old were you when you were doing that? Oh, probably fifteen, sixteen, whenever it was that you could drive. I was driving. Was there worry about crime? I don't think so. Liquor store robberies? Things like that? Not really. My father and mother had a beer bar in Mike's Liquor Store and it just became a family affair. The husbands and wives would come in together every night sometimes and sit and chat. Then you'd get the occasional telephone call from a woman who would say, "Is my husband there?" They would look at the men. In so many words, are you here? They'd say, "Well, he was in; I'm not sure where he is right now." That's a classic scene. Classic, just a classic. Oh, they were so good. But it was a family business. My great-grandmother Sallie Diamondstone, who was Grandma Polly's mother— So you had a great-grandmother named Sally as well. That's right. I don't know where she had been living, but she came to live in Las Vegas. Daddy used to give her a handful of nickels to play the shot machine because we had slots in both Mike's and Sallie's. She was like a little shill. You know what a shill is? She'd put nickels in forever and play to attract other players. She was quite a character. We used to bring our liquor in from the Brown-Forman Distillery in Kentucky. We 11 brought in Mike's Bourbon, Mike's Vodka, Mike's Gin, all labeled, and also Sallie's. It came in by the carload. Let me make sure I understand this. It was a private label, then, with their names on it. Private label. But not scotch, of course, because scotch whiskey only comes from Scotland. Daddy and the business were very popular with the managers of the hotel dining rooms, the maître d's, Andre of the Desert Inn and all the way down the line, and some of the captains as well. So it was very important to Dad to be loyal to his customers. Every Sunday night we were sitting somewhere at a hotel show ringside and he would tip very generously. There were the three of us. Sometimes we had company when a visitor from L.A. or friends. But primarily it was the three of us who every Sunday night were sitting somewhere. I saw Sammy Davis, Jr., when he was still part of the Will Mastin Trio; the comedians Rowan and Martin; Kay Starr and all of them as they were growing up in the business, too. Eventually when I got to be a real teenager, I said, "I don't want to be bothered to go. I've seen all these people all these years. I don't want to do this." We used to be able, high school kids, to go to the Flamingo for the second show and pay a quarter for a Coke and see Spike Jones and his band, or anybody we wanted to see. The hotel people were very good to us. So there wasn't an age requirement at that time. Well, apparently not. I'm sure we didn't drink liquor, but we were welcome at the hotel sometimes, especially the Flamingo. Did your parents ever explain how they chose the liquor industry to get involved in? No. I think Uncle Charlie Goldring and Aunt Kathryn from California foresaw that Las Vegas was going to grow. After all, the dam had just opened or was under construction in 1935. Of 12 course, you know why Las Vegas became Las Vegas. Number one, in 1905 it was the Union Pacific watering spot, and then when the dam was being built the law was that there could be no gambling or liquor within fifteen miles of a federal project. Somebody asked me the other day if that was still true and I honestly don't know except that there are bars; I have had margaritas in Boulder City, so it must not be true. I think Boulder City just by choice tries to limit whatever is going on there, not by— They serve liquor now. But in the days when the dam was being built, it was against the law. I really think it was Uncle Charlie who had the foresight when Dad moved here. I forget what he did first. But then when World War II came, he needed to do something that was for the war cause, so he went to work for the post office department and delivered special delivery mail. He let the people at the store and Mother run the store while he did his bit. He couldn't go into the military; I think he must have been too old then. But he did his part by working for the post office and then for the Clark County old age pension system. I forget why he went there, but that was before the liquor stores. What happened with the liquor stores? Eventually they were sold. I'm not sure which came first. The Mint bought all that space, I believe, and created the Mint, but I don't know if that's after the liquor store was sold. I really don't. Did you ever wish that your parents were in a different business? Oh, no. I was quite proud of them. Yes. They ran a very family business and people liked them a lot. Did he wholesale the liquor as well as retail it? I don't know. 13 You talked about going to the shows and everything. The casinos were buying direct from some other source? Yes. These were the individual managers and maître d's, for their own use. Patrons of your father's and mother's businesses. Yes. When scotch was rationed during World War II because it was so hard to get the shipments from Scotland, Daddy arranged to get a few cases at a time. There were people who offered him all kinds of money to buy a case, but he doled it out to the people who had been his customers, and one bottle each to each of them. He let them pay for it. But people wanted him to sell the whole case and he said, "No way." He took care of all of his customers one by one with whatever he had until the next shipment came in. He was a lovely man, really, truly. What street did you grow up on? Sixth. You had told me the other day that your family shared a duplex with Nate Mack. That's when I was a little girl on Bonneville. It must have been the two hundred block. There was a lovely kind of cream mustard-colored duplex. I don't know who moved in first, but I know that Aunt Jenny and Uncle Nate and Jerry, who was a teenager, were on one side, and Mother and Dad and I were on the other side, not long, I think maybe a year or two. I had such a crush on Jerry. I mean, who wouldn't? He was just a darling young man and a good student, I think. He didn't play football, I don't think. But then we were always together with the families with Bernard and Joey Abrams. He was older than me. He must have been seven years older than I, or eight, maybe more. What kind of activities were you involved in, in high school? We were very lucky. When we were in Las Vegas High School, somebody arranged for us—and 14 I think there was [an assembly woman] by the name of—I want to say Eileen [Brookman]. But she wanted us kids to have something to do. There was a city building about two blocks north of Fifth and Fremont. I think it must have been at Fourth and Ogden or something. It was unused. She arranged for the children of Las Vegas High School to be able to use it as their clubhouse. It had a dance floor and a stage and a bunch of little offices all the way around. We'd go there after every football game and every celebration. I ran a little radio show from there on Saturday mornings and I did the newsletter, the little newspaper, whatever it was, from there. Every dance and every homecoming and every...We were always there. It was a wonderful outlet. We danced a lot, mostly to taped music, I'm sure, but we had real bands, too. It just gave us a great place to go. I can't remember what else we did there. I was always so busy. I was also editor of my yearbook in 1950 and I missed half of my classes. To this day some of my knowledge of what I should have been studying has been missed, but I enjoyed it very much. Why would you miss class? Because there were always photographic sessions to set up and there was copy to write. People don't know what a demanding job it is to be a yearbook editor. Yes, exactly. I mean, it really is. It is, yes. I was an A-student, and so they let me out of class. But the older I got, the more I realized that I was missing quite a bit of history and other things, so I've had to ma