Transcript of interview with Roscoe Wilkes by Claytee White, March 19, 2009

i An Interview with Roscoe Wilkes An Oral History Conducted by Claytee White __________________________________ The Boyer Early Las Vegas Oral History Project Oral History Research Center at UNLV University Libraries University of Nevada Las Vegas ii ©The Boyer Early Las Vegas Oral History Project University of Nevada Las Vegas, 2012 Produced by: The Oral History Research Center at UNLV – University Libraries Director: Claytee D. White Editors: Barbara Tabach, Melissa Robinson, Maggie Lopes Transcribers: Kristin Hicks Interviewers and Project Assistants: Barbara Tabach and Claytee D. White iii The recorded interview and transcript have been made possible through the generosity of Dr. Harold Boyer. The Oral History Research Center enables students and staff to work together with community members to generate this selection of first-person narratives. The participants in this project thank the university for the support given that allowed an idea the opportunity to flourish. The transcript received minimal editing that includes the elimination of fragments, false starts, and repetitions in order to enhance the reader’s understanding of the material. All measures have been taken to preserve the style and language of the narrator. In several cases photographic sources accompany the individual interviews. The following interview is part of a series of interviews conducted under the auspices of the Boyer Early Las Vegas Oral History Project. Claytee D. White, Project Director Director, Oral History Research Center University Libraries University Nevada, Las Vegas iv Preface Roscoe Wilkes was born in Bonanza, Colorado, and moved with his family to Pioche, Nevada for what his sister called a 75-year pit stop. Soon after their move to this rural Nevada town, Roscoe’s mother became a widow, raising two children during the Depression. Like many families in Pioche, the Wilkes’ made due with what they had, and were creative in sustaining their livelihoods. Roscoe has never stood still. Before enlisting in the military, Roscoe worked various jobs, as a PBX systems operator, a lead zinc miner, and grade school teacher, before enlisting. During World War II, Roscoe became a prisoner of war in Romania, and was rescued a few months later when the Germans began retreating. Returning to the United States after his release, he relocated to a base in California, and married. As soon as Roscoe was relieved of his military service, he took advantage of the then new G.I. Bill and enrolled in the University of Southern California School of Law. He immediately took his degree to Pioche, soon becoming its district attorney, and later a judge. He spent 18 years based in Seattle as a federal administrative law judge, hearing cases prosecuted by the Coast Guard. Roscoe ended his 45-year career in law in 1990, and moved to Boulder City, where four generations of Wilkes live. v Table of Contents Interview with Roscoe Wilkes March 19, 2009 in Las Vegas, Nevada Conducted by Claytee White Details current family members living in Boulder City, where he now resides. Recalls family moving to Pioche as a child; father returns to Colorado for work and passes away; Depression hits Pioche; works at PBX switchboard. Talks about how family and others fed themselves; gathering potatoes; stories of deer hunting and pig slaughter….……...1-5 Continues talking about food; mother’s headcheese; availability of fruit. Discusses social life as an adolescent; plays cornet in band; vice president of student body. Mentions spiritual life in Pioche. Describes operating the county’s PBX system; works at local mine following graduation. Moves to South Dakota for college; plays basketball…...6-10 Talks about starting dance band for extra money. Receives teaching certificate; returns to Nevada; gets job in Pioche second year teaching, including band and athletics. Recounts time in military during World War II, including time in Romanian prisoner camp; rescue from camp; relocates to California, where girlfriend lives……………….……….….11-15 Discusses first wife; starting law school; subsequent career in Pioche. Describes process of becoming district attorney; being an administrative judge, focusing on admiralty law, in San Francisco and Seattle. Talks about losing first wife; meeting second wife. Retires in Boulder City, where daughters live. Talks about judging Exxon Valdez case…...16-20 Talks about inspiration to attend law school; G.I. bill; sister’s own accomplishments. Recalls story of missing school dance because could not afford appropriate shoes. Writes stories for local newspaper; writing feedback from daughter………………………..21-24 Index……………………………………………………………………………………..25 Appendix: Personal writings of Roscoe Wilkes…………………………………………26 1 Today is March 19th, 2009. And I'm in Boulder City in the home of Mr. Roscoe Wilkes. This is Claytee White. So how are you today, Mr. Wilkes? I'm fine. Thank you. Great. Would you spell your last name for me, please? W-I-L-K-E-S. Thank you so much. So tell me about Boulder City. You've only been here for four years. How did that happen? I spent most of my life in Nevada, but I left in 1973. I went to the state of Washington following a job. My second wife died there. I retired from that job, and then moved back down here to Boulder City so I'd be near my two daughters here. I have a granddaughter and a great-grandson here. I have a sister, a niece and her husband in Las Vegas. So I have family here. Most of them have gravitated more or less from Pioche. Tell me about growing up in Pioche. My father, mother, sister and I were living in a place called Bonanza, Colorado. My father had wanderlust. It was always: things are going to be better down the road. We left Bonanza in a 1923 Dodge touring car, open-air with isinglass curtains on the side in case the weather got bad. We had the backseat full of suitcases and boxes of things. My sister and I laid on our stomach and looked between the heads of Dad and Mother as we traveled across Utah. We came to Nevada. We were really headed for Oregon. But as we came into Pioche, that old Dodge car got sick. It started knocking. We pulled into Pioche September of 1927. My sister jokingly says we had a pit stop that lasted for 75 years. Both my sister and me were raised largely in Pioche. I was nine when we arrived in Pioche, and she was seven. 2 As you mentioned in the paper there, my father was there. He was working as a barber, and things weren't going too well. According to his usual plan, he decided to go back to Colorado. When he got some money and a job, he would send for momma and the kids, and we would join him. Unfortunately, he died in Colorado. My mother was left with two children, one 12 and one 10, in Pioche, Nevada, where you couldn't even raise a garden because it's just rocks. It was 1930, and the Depression was coming. How we survived was an interesting thing. I think one of the best things about it was if a woman has to be made a widow with two kids and a depression coming on, the best place to do it would be in a small town in Nevada where people have a bit more heart. We received help. We had some public assistance. In those days it wasn't very much; something like $20 a month. However, we persevered. My mother worked, and I worked when I could. I got through grade school and into high school. About midway in high school, I got the job running the PBX [private board exchange] switchboard for the telephone company, on the night shift. I slept in the back room. A PBX is a board; it had party lines. Maggie Warrens was three longs and two shorts, and somebody else was two longs. If you called a certain area, you'd hear five or six clicks. Everybody was listening in on what everybody else was saying on the telephone. That’s how we came to Pioche. I'm getting ahead of the story. You're fine. Give me the names of your parents and your sister. My father's name was Roscoe Hamilton Wilkes. My mother's name was Stella Maude. She didn't like that name so she adopted a screen name of Betty. She was known as Betty Wilkes. That was her screen name. Who else did you say? Your sister. 3 My sister was Katherine Wilkes. She married a man named Prest Duffin. So she's known as Katherine Duffin, D-U-F-F-I-N. And your mom worked a little. What kind of work did your mom do during the Depression? She did janitor work. She also had a little thing on the side selling dresses and shirts for a company called Fashion Frocks. She made a little spare change. We got shirts, and a few things like that, wholesale. Tell me about what life was like during the Depression. You didn't get that PBX job until you were in high school; is that correct? Yes, the middle of high school. Okay. Prior to that, give me some examples of what it was like. Then tell me what it was like on the PBX board as well. What it was like in what regard? Tell me about food. All right. I liked to think that there are three things that are important. One is a roof over your head. The next one is clothing on your body, and then food in your tummy. The federal government sent a boxcar full of flour into these little towns. You could go pick up a sack when you needed it. It became my job to go get the flour. We used that quite extensively for homemade bread, gravy and biscuits, and whatever else we could scrounge together. My mother being a widow, we were very poor. It wasn't so bad because everybody was poor during the Depression there. I recall that the farmers across the line in Enterprise, Utah couldn't sell their potatoes. So they invited Pioche people to come over there and get them free. If you wanted, you could dig and take them. I recall riding in the back of a truck with four or five 4 other men -- I was just a kid, but the others were men -- over to Utah to where we picked potatoes all day long. When we came home, I had two one-hundred-pound sacks as my share. That's some of the food we got. The government also shipped in some commodities. I recall lard. I recall cheese, peanut butter, rice, I think. How was it distributed? They would bring it in, and some local person would be in charge of distributing it. Mrs. Bowman was in charge of the flour. People used to joke that she thought that all that flour was hers because you had to really talk to Mrs. Bowman to get a sack of flour, even though it was government flour and she was just hired to dispense it. It was illegal to hunt deer, but it was not enforced. The officers knew that people were going hungry. If they shot a deer, it was fine. If some neighbor got a deer, he might bring over some chunks of venison for you. Also, some of the farmers near Lincoln County were very generous if they had surplus. I remember somebody bringing a big Hubbard squash to our house for us. That's sort of the way the food was. You told me earlier a funny story about a person. You said it was illegal to hunt deer. But there was a funny story that you told earlier about a man who did find one. Yes. This man had a pickup truck. He went out into the hills to get his winter's wood. While he was there, he was able to shoot a deer. He put the deer in the bed of the pickup truck, and then piled the wood over the top of it. Pioche is built on a hillside. So the main street has a slant. As he came back to town, he pulled up the street and then pulled in on a 45-degree angle in front of Johnny Valente’s Bar. He went inside to get a ten-cent beer. Well the deputy sheriff came by, and saw some drops of blood coming out of the lower part of the pickup bed and dropping onto 5 the road. He went into the bar and he said to this man, “Is that your load of wood out there?” And he says, “Yes.” The deputy says, “You better take it home before it bleeds to death.” Thank you. Now, farmers shared things also. I grew up on a farm. Did they ever kill farm animals and share any of the meat? No. Pigs? I had one such experience. A family in Pioche had a pig or two down below town. The boys gathered slop from the restaurants. I suppose maybe they bought a little feed for it, too, but it was primarily raised on slop. One of her sons, who was a personal playmate of mine, said to me, “Come on down; we're going to butcher a pig. You'd probably like to see it.” So I went down. This lady had a live-in boyfriend, and he slaughtered the pig. Then they hoisted it up with block and tackle, and doused it into a 50-gallon barrel of boiling water. After that, they pulled it back up and laid it out on some boards. Everybody grabbed a knife and started scraping the hair off of it. The mother of the family was Ma. They called her Ma Steward. She was a character of the town. She started barking out orders: “Goddamn it, scrape that hair clear down to the feet. Don't just scrape it on the sides and on the top where it's easy to get. Scrape it down on them legs. And hurry up now before it sets up, and you can't get it off there anymore.” When all the hair was off of it, the cutting took place. Ma Steward said to me, “Get that little cardboard box over there.” So I got the cardboard box. They put the head into the box. She said, “Now, you take that home with you. You worked hard and that's your share. Now, you take it home and your mother will know what to do with it.” So here I am a kid about 12 years old. I started up the street with the pig's head in the box. I would look down and that pig was staring at 6 me. So I'd immediately lift my head up and look up the street. In a little while, I'd look down again and his eyes were still staring at me. I finally got smart and I laid the box down and turned it around, so as I walked up the street I could look between its ears. I took it home, and my mother did, indeed, know what to do with it. She boiled it, and got rid of the teeth, the jawbones, the ears, the snout, and made headcheese. It consisted of little chunks of meat in a gelatin substance that hardened a bit. Then you could slice it, and it contained chunks of meat. It was all right. I think people that think about it nowadays, they wouldn't want to eat it. But it was okay when you're hungry. It's probably a delicacy now. Maybe. I don't know. Headcheese, I don't think whether they would like the thoughts of it. Did your mother use the brains? No, I don't recall using the brains. Okay. A few minutes ago you said that the pigs were fed with slop. From the restaurant. Tell me what slop is. Slop is all the leftover food that people scrape off the plate into a barrel or bucket. Jack and Charles were both friends of mine, and had the duty every night to go to two cafes, get their slop, and take it down to feed the pigs. Wonderful. That's what I needed to hear. What about fruit? Did you have any apples or anything like that during the Depression? Yes. There's a place out of Pioche about 15 miles called Eagle Valley. It's a valley that's farming country. Bill Dwyer -- we used to call him Billy Dwyer -- had some apple trees, but not an 7 orchard. He had maybe eight or ten apple trees. When the apples were ripe in the fall, he would load up boxes of them in his pickup truck, bring them into town, and peddle them door to door. When he had sold all he could and he still had some left, his last stop was at our house, the widow's home. My mother would go out, examine the boxes of apples in his pickup truck, pretending that she wasn't too interested. Finally, she would say, “Mr. Dwyer, I'll give you 50 cents for all you have left.” He would accept it because he didn't want to haul them back out to the valley where he had plenty more. We would get maybe four or five boxes of apples. We had a very small house with two rooms. We slid the boxes of apples under the various beds. We had them in our lunch kit at school. We had stewed apples. We had applesauce. We had fried apples, fried in a little lard or grease. We would have enough apples to last us quite awhile. Great. Now, you also had cabbage and things like that. You tell me you don't eat cabbage anymore. Oh, I can eat it on St. Patrick's Day, but I'm not really fond of cabbage. Okay. What about apples? I can eat apples. They're fine. Good. Did you have rationing books? Not that I recall at that time. That was during the war when there was rationing. That was World War II. Tell me more about the social life. Going to school as a young boy what kind of social life did you and your sister have? You kind of surprised me a few minutes ago because there was a woman, Mrs. Bowman -- Yes. 8 -- who had a live-in friend. No. Ma Steward had the live-in friend and the pig. Mrs. Bowman dispensed the flour. Okay. So the lady with the live-in friend, now, was that unusual for a small town? Yes, it was. I recall her son getting on her case about it. He’d tell her people are talking about you, and you should get married. And she said, “You tell those people to go to hell. I'll live my life, and they can live their life. None of their goddamn business.” I love it. So tell me what your social life was like. As a kid I did everything that the other kids did. My first two years there I was in grade school. I took the regular studies. We had a grade school baseball team. In winter, we had basketball. In the spring, there was track. Sometimes they had little plays, whatever they'd do in grade school. My sister and I participated in all of it. I make the point that even though my mother was a widow, and we were desperately poor, we were not socially ostracized in any sense of the word. We were accepted. Fortunately, my sister and I both were reasonably good students. I think that helped because the other appreciated that we got pretty good grades. Once in a while there'd be a little something that kind of hurt. People would make little snide remarks once in a while. But the majority of the time, there was no social ostracism. We were fortunate in that regard in our social life. I was in high school two years before my sister. When I started high school, I was in the middle of everything. I was heavy into sports. I was in music. One time I spotted a little cornet on a metal cabinet in the back room of the stage in the auditorium. I asked the band director, “What's that coronet there?” He said, “Oh, it's inoperable; it won't work.” But he let me take it, and I took it back to Pioche. There was a friend up there that played trumpet and cornet. We found we needed a spring for one of the valves. We fooled around with it, and got that thing to 9 working. I became part of the band and learned music. It's a hobby that I pursued for my whole lifetime after that. As an adult, one of my hobbies was blowing Dixieland jazz in the back of some smoky saloon. In high school I was in sports, and all of the functions that went on in the school band. In my junior year, I was honored by being elected vice president of the student body, even though my mother was still a widow and we were still poor. I had a lot of friends, and they liked me. Tell me about the spiritual life in the town. Spiritual, you mean like church? Church, yes. Most of the people in that whole county are Mormons. We were not Mormons. Never did join the Mormon Church, but we got along with them very well. I went to Sunday school a little bit at the Episcopal Church in Pioche, which was much smaller than the Mormon group. I can't claim to have been an ardent church-goer. I went sometimes. Now, later on in high school you got the job as that PBX operator. Yes. This was the PBX system for the town? The whole county. Oh, the county. Yes, it was the whole county. Tell me how that worked and the shift and everything. It was a little switchboard that was maybe two and a half, three feet wide, and as high as you are. It had a little counter and some buttons that you pushed. If somebody called, you went out there and pulled one of these little plugs up, and punched it in where they were calling from. 10 Right. Where the light came on. Yes. The little flap turned down. Then they would tell you who they wanted you to call. You'd take the other matching one, and plug into the proper line. Then you'd ring it over here. It had a little button you could ring three longs and two shorts, or three longs, or whatever. That's the way that worked. I had the night shift. It was part of a confectionary, drugstore -- newspapers and magazines, Vaseline, soda fountain, and so on. I would tend the store for maybe an hour, and then lock up and go into the back room and go to bed. I'm going to say many times, especially during the winter, I wouldn't even have one call, maybe one if somebody wanted a doctor or something like that. Mr. Christian paid me $25 a month, which was the biggest source of income in our family. I had that job the rest of the time I was in high school. That's great. So what happened after high school? Did you continue to live in Pioche? I graduated from high school on a Thursday night. The following Monday morning, I went to work in the mine, much to the amazement of my classmates; they couldn't imagine going down 950 feet below ground in the mine at age 18. But I did it. My mother had to sign a release, and she wasn't going to sign it. She didn't want me down in that mine, where they have cave-ins, gas, and bad air. I said, “Momma, sign it; we need the money.” I finally just pressured her to where she signed it, and I went to work in the mine for $3.75 a day. This was in '36. I never thought I had seen so much money. I was able to help my family, but also it helped me to go to junior college. My high school basketball coach had gone to Black Hills Teachers' College in South Dakota. Through his auspices, I was told I could have a job. So I went there. I played basketball on their team, and I went to school there. It was a very small school, about 300 students, but a good little school. It's 11 now about 4,000. Tuition was on the quarter system, and was $27 a quarter, $81 a year. They had a girls' dormitory, but they didn't have a dormitory for the boys. So the boys all found places in private homes. The going rate was $20 a month for board and room. The NYA came in, which was a government-sponsored thing. It's like the WPA, only it was just for students. We got 30 cents an hour, and could earn up to $25 a month. That paid your board and room, plus five dollars. I also started a little dance band. We would play for school dances after ballgames and such. We played for school dances across town at the high school. On Saturday nights, we'd go out to nearby little towns, and play. We'd make $15 for the whole band. Okay. How many people in the band? Five. So we each made three dollars a show. That was quite a bit of money in 1936. Yes, because you made $3.75 a day working in the mine. Yes. I went to school there for two years, and got a normal schoolteacher's certificate, which enabled me to teach school up to, and including, the eighth grade in most states, including Nevada when I went back. I went back to Nevada when I finished school, but I couldn't find a teaching job. I finally found one down in the canyon below Caliente, at a ranch, the Henry Ranch. They had a little one-room schoolhouse. My contract was for a thousand dollars for the year. It came out to like $118 a month. I had five students: two seventh graders, two fifth graders, and one third grader. I was there one year. The next year, I very fortunately got a job in Pioche, which was an eight-teacher school. I had the fifth grade, and also taught band and athletics. You taught band? School band, yes. Wonderful. 12 I wasn't that good at it, but I got by. We had a good little band when I was there. When you were working in the mine, what kind of minerals were you mining? Lead zinc ore. It was heavy to shovel. I recall the first day I worked there, I filled a wheelbarrow full, and I had to wheel it out and dump it in a chute. The wheelbarrows in those days didn't have rubber tires. They had metal tires. We laid down boards 12 inches wide and two inches thick, and make a runway. I started out with that load of heavy lead zinc ore in a wheelbarrow and I tipped it over. I thought, oh, my god, I'm going to get fired the first day. Some friends, fellow workmen, came over laughing, and we tipped it back up and filled it. I finally got it in the chute. For the first week or ten days, I'd go home, eat dinner and then go to bed. I was so tired. After about a couple of weeks, you get hardened in. I could chase girls all night, and work all day. Sid you ever get married? Married? Yes. Yes. I taught school until I went into the service. When I went into the service, I wanted to be a hot pilot, fly fighter planes and zoom around in the wild blue yonder. However, in the military, sometimes you get what you want and lots of times they tell you what you're going to do. I wound up being an aerial navigator on a B-24 Liberator. I flew 30 missions, and got shot down and wound up in a prison camp in Bucharest, Romania. Before you tell me about that -- so which year did you go in the military? I went in the military in June of 1942. Tell me about being shot down and going to a prisoner of war camp. We were flying. We took our own plane across. I had various trainings in a number of places. We flew our plane across, and we were finally in Italy flying missions. On the 30th mission, we 13 were bombing a place called Ploesti, Romania, which had extensive oilfields and oil refineries. Hitler had overrun the country, and that was his main source of petroleum for his war machine. When we were down at briefing that morning and they told us where we were going to go, we knew we were in for a catfight because it was very, very heavily defended. My plane got hit and was set on fire. We all bailed out at 20,000 feet. We were supposed to count to ten, and then pull the ripcord for the parachute to open. I'm going to be truthful. I maybe got up to four and I pulled that cord. The chute opened and I landed in a tree. Some Romanian farmers with pitchforks eventually captured me. I was escorted into town and turned over to the military. I wound up in a prison camp in Bucharest for five months. And did all the other crewmembers get captured as well? Yes, all of them got captured. The pilot had been hit in the leg with a bullet, and he lost one leg from the knee down. Another boy got hit with the flames. Next time I saw him he had bandages all over his face. I thought, my God, that poor guy is going to be scarred for life. When they took the bandages off, it was only skin deep. He had a perfect pink, beautiful complexion and his skin was improved. How many people were in the crew? Ten. So all ten of you went to the same place? No. They separated us. They had a prison camp for officers. There were four officers and six enlisted men. The officers were in one camp, and the enlisted men were in another camp with no connections between them. Okay. What was life like in a prisoner of war camp? We were lucky. I never saw anybody mistreated, struck, beaten, or anything like that. There was 14 none of that because they were Caucasian people. Had this been in Japan or Korea, they used to say don't open your parachute until you can see the ground coming up at you, because their fliers would shoot a person coming down in a parachute. This didn't happen over there. They were decent people. There were three worst parts of it. Number one, the food was bad and not much of it. Number two, the sanitation was bad. We had lots of lice and bedbugs; bedbugs in our bed and lice in our clothing that we couldn't get rid of. Thirdly, the prison camp was located about ten blocks from the railroad yards. Our people, our own bombers, were bombing them in the daytime and the British were bombing them at night. They didn't know we were down there. There was one bomb that hit in the road next to the building where we were. Every window was knocked out. But it wasn't a direct hit, so we were fortunate in that regard. I was there about five months when the tide of the war changed. Germany had invaded Russia. They had a bad winter. The Russians were tougher than they thought. That next summer the Russians were pushing the Germans, and they were retreating back to Germany. When they got to Romania, we were let out of prison camp. Were you rescued by the Russians? No. We were let out of prison camp, but we could still go in there and sleep. It was about ten days or two weeks. The highest-ranking officer of the Americans was put in a Mesherschmitt plane, fighter plane in the fuselage. They painted it white and put a red cross on the side. The pilot flew him back to Italy, and he was able to tell them how many of us were over there. In about a week, here came B-17s over enemy lines and landed in Bucharest, Romania. They picked us up, and took us back to Italy. We got back to the United States. Whew. So did that end your military commitment? 15 No. We went back to our outfit in Italy, and got deloused and a lot of good food. Eventually we went over to Naples, Italy and got on a ship, and came across the Atlantic to New York City. What a thrill it was to pull into the harbor in New York City and see the Statue of Liberty. We got new clothing, new outfits, new uniforms, everything first-rate. The military didn't know what to do with us. We were the first prisoners of war of any significant number. We heard rumors. About how many of you were there? In the prison camp? Yes. There must have been a hundred in our prison camp. Rumors were rampant. First of all, they announced that we would not go back into combat. The Geneva Conference for the warfare prescribed that if you're caught behind enemy lines once, you could be classified as a prisoner of war. If you're caught behind the lines twice, you could be classified as a spy and shot. So they announced we would not go back into combat. Then the rumors were that we'd done our share and more, and were going to be released from the service. Never happened. Finally, they said we could have our choice of any air base in the United States where they had work that we could do. I asked for Sacramento, California, where I had a girlfriend that I had met when I went through the cadets there. But they changed it from a navigation school to a fighter pilot school, so I couldn't go there. I chose anyplace on the West Coast, and I wound up in Long Beach, California. I spent the rest of the war in the Air Transport Command (ATC). They used skeleton crews, maybe three or four men: a pilot, a navigator, and an engineer. We took planes to the South Pacific and delivered them. I made several trips to Australia, and one trip to the Philippine Islands. They would gather up ten or 12 skeleton crews, and put us all on one plane and bring us back to Long Beach. Your name would 16 go on the bottom board. When you worked to the top, you'd go out again. Sometimes that would be two weeks. My wife and I -- I was married by that time -- we took in all the sights in Southern California in our spare time. I was also going 15 miles up to Los Angeles, and getting all of my paperwork in a row to enter the University of Southern California School of Law. When VE Day came and when VJ Day came, I had points running out of my ears. I was let out of the service early. When I was discharged from the service, within two weeks I was sitting in classes at the University of Southern California Law School. That's wonderful. I went three years there, and then went back to Pioche and became their district attorney. Wonderful. I later became judge of that district in the state of the Nevada. Why did you go back to Pioche? My hometown. I loved the deer hunting. I had a saddle horse and corral down below town, and all of my friends. That's where I wanted to live. So you passed the bar in California and Nevada? I never took it in California. I came back to Pioche immediately after I got out of law school. I graduated in June, and the bar had been given in May. I had to wait until the next May to sit for the bar. So I taught school again. I had a wife and a baby I had to support. I took the bar and I passed it the first time. Did your wife ever work? A little bit. But I made a living. She didn't need to work. What was it like being DA in your small hometown again? 17 I took my job very seriously. I was a prosecutor. I sent many, many men to the penitentiary. They couldn't afford to pay a lawyer full time on their small tax base. I was entitled to, and did, have a private practice on the side. About half of my work was advising the county officers and prosecutin