Ruth J. Kiley interview, January 24, 2013: transcript

AN INTERVIEW WITH RUTH JANE KILEY An Oral History Conducted by Claytee D. White The Boyer Early Las Vegas Oral History Project Oral History Research Center at UNLV University Libraries University of Nevada Las Vegas 1 ©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, Joyce Moore Transcriber: Kristin Hicks Interviewers and Project Assistants: Barbara Tabach and Claytee D. White 2 I he 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. I he 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 3 1 Preface Ruth Jane Kiley was born in Newark, New Jersey, and lived in California and New York before her family moved to Las Vegas in 1957, when Ruth was thirteen. Ruth worked in the insurance business for almost thirty years, dealing with casinos during the most expansive period of the city's growth. As a graduate of Rancho High School, Ruth participated in the rituals that teenagers in 1960s Las Vegas practiced, from celebrating Helldorado Days to cruising down Fremont Street and stopping at the Blue Onion - though since her father, 'Jack the Cop,' worked security at the drive-in, she had a slightly different perspective on the experience. After graduation, Ruth remained in Las Vegas and worked with a variety of unions and casinos regarding their insurance claims, and discussing how even this somewhat staid business had a peculiar Vegas twist. After a short time living in Texas, Ruth and her husband returned to Las Vegas where they and their grown children still reside. 2 This is Claytee White. It is January 24th and I am with Ruth. Ruth, I want you to pronounce your first and last name exactly the way you want us to title the book, and please spell your middle and last names for us. My name is Ruth Jane Kiley. Jane is just J-A-N-E. Kiley, K-I-L-E-Y. Wonderful. So how are you doing today? Good. Great. Now, I'm trying to get that painting in your background and I think I have it. So let's get started. Tell me a little about your early life. I was born in Newark, New Jersey, on May 7th, 1944. I was the first of five children in my nuclear family. I have a half-sister by my dad's prior marriage, but she did not grow up with me. My parents met in Newark and they were married exactly nine months and five days when I came along, so it was a good thing they got married when they did. When I was seven months old, in December of 1944, they decided to move out to Southern California where my dad's parents had moved to a year or two before. They did; they took a train. My mom often tells me that—or she told me; she's been gone for eighteen years now—but she told me that when I was on the train it was full of troops because this was during World War II, and that one of the guys said, oh, can I hold her for a little while, because I was seven months old and my dad tells me I was the prettiest baby he ever saw in his life. My mother said I totally disappeared and when she went looking for me, she found all these guys that were missing their kids that were playing with me. Of course, when she was telling me this story it was more than twenty years ago, but she said in today's world there's no way I could do that, but back then those guys in the Army or Navy or whatever they were in were going off to war in the Pacific because they were headed for California. So it was a different world back then. 3 They moved to Sunland, California—or they lived in Sunland, California for a while. Sunland? Sunland, S-U-N-L-A-N-D. It's in the San Fernando Valley. When I was sixteen months old, my sister was born. Fler name is Marilyn. Then after that they decided to wait awhile before they had another one. But we moved to San Fernando, California. Then right after the third one was born, who was another girl, Jackie, in 1948 we moved to Pacoima, California next door to my grandparents. Those were really good years because living next door to grandma and grandpa, my dad's mom and dad, was just really fun. We could run back and forth. My grandma's yard was full of olive trees, lots and lots of olive trees. We would pick them at certain times of year and take them to some factory. I can just remember going there when I was very little. We lived in Pacoima until 1951. Right after I had made my first communion—that was in May of 1951— and my mom was pregnant with their fourth, which was going to be our first boy, my dad decided he didn't want to live where there was only one season, so he was going to go back east again. So he moved us all in August of 1951 when my brother was six weeks old. There were us three girls—I was seven, my sister was almost six and the other one was four—no—three, because I'm four years older than her, and my brother was six weeks old and my grandmother decided she would ride back with us to visit her other sons. And we all went east in a 1938 Dodge and it was cramped; I remember that. I remember going through Texas and my mom pointing out a man that was walking into his house and he had on a jeans jacket and Levis and cowboy hat and she said, "See that man there; he's an Indian," and it wasn't what I envisioned that they should look like because in western movies they had feathers in their hair. That's about all I remember of the trip back east. But we settled in Lyndhurst, New Jersey, which was across the Passaic River from where 4 I was born in Newark. That was another time that I think was really good memories in my life. I loved living in Lyndhurst. It was the early fifties. I do remember little bits about the Korean War. I remember lying in bed at night wondering if bombs were going to come in my house because I didn't know where Korea was. I went from second grade to almost the end of sixth grade and then they moved us up to New York. So what did your father do for a living that allowed him to move like that? He was a short-order cook and he had done that most of his life. When we were in Southern California he opened a little restaurant that he called the Meatball Inn. It only had seven stools in it and no tables. People used to come in there for lunch a lot. My mother would make meatloaf and that was their big thing about selling that. And he did work in a cement block plant for a while, but most of the time he was a short-order cook. That's what he was doing when they met and when we lived in Newark when I was born. And then when we went back to Lyndhurst, he went to work at a place called the White Clock that was in Belleville, or North Arlington, which is right next to Lyndhurst. He was a short-order cook where he got to work in the front facing the counter so that people would come in and my dad would tell all kinds of stories. He would talk about how one day he sneezed and his teeth fell out of his mouth and they ate up all the hamburgers before he could get them back in. He would tell tales about how it got so hot in Texas one time that all the corn started popping and the cows thought it was snowing, so they all froze to death. He used to sing songs to us; that was his big thing. He used to sing songs to us, "Jimmy Crack Corn." The first song he ever taught me was the "Tennessee Waltz." He loved to sing. And when he and his brothers would get together—he was one of five boys; he was the second to the youngest—they always used to sing Irish songs. Their parents were Irish and my grandpa 5 was half-Irish, half-English. It was just a big part of their life. So whenever we would all get together it was always singing, it was always singing. What about dancing? No, we didn't do much dancing, just singing. One of my cousins played the guitar and he had a beautiful voice and he would sing and play his guitar even when he was a little kid. So things started to change in 1956 and things weren't going so good. Mom tried to find another place where we could live a little less expensive than in New Jersey and she found a house out in the countryside in West Nyack, New York. West Nyack and Central Nyack are right across the Hudson River from New York City from Tarrytown and places like that, very pretty. It's in Rockland County right across from Westchester County where all the rich people live. So we lived on the other side of the river. I went to school there for a year and that was kind of a fun time because we were out in the country and I was used to living in town outside of Newark, one of the suburbs of Newark. It's not exactly—even back then it was a little crowded. In 1957, in March of 1957, my dad got in an automobile accident. For the time he got a settlement from the insurance company that seemed like a lot of money to him at the time. So he decided I'm tired of all the winters here, so we're going back to California. But I had an uncle who was living here in Las Vegas and working as a maitre d' at the Stardust Hotel and his wife also worked at the Stardust as a showroom waitress. They had a boy who was two years younger than me. So my dad decided—we were staying at my grandpa's in Southern California—and he said, well, let's take a drive up to Las Vegas and see what it has to offer. Well, they left us girls with my granddad and took the two boys. I forgot to mention that we were living in Lyndhurst my mother had a fifth child, which was another boy. He was born also in Newark on the same street I was but in a different hospital. So he and I were born on the East Coast in New Jersey 6 and the other three were all born in Southern California, in the middle. But anyway, so the two boys and my mom and dad went up to Vegas. Back in those days, that was a long drive because we had to take Highway 91; there was no Interstate 15. This was August of 1957. They came up here and Daddy got a job right away. Now, it was his brother who was living here already? Yes, yes. And my aunt and uncle lived down at Sixth and Bridger, which is right down about a block from the old Las Vegas High School. My mom and dad found a house on East St. Louis. At that time this little house—I grew up very poor—it was in what they called the Eastwood section of town. It's still there today. So Eastwood, is that near— It's St. Louis and Eastern Avenue. So it's on the other side of the Huntridge neighborhood. It's farther east. Yes. It's east of the Huntridge. It's right across from the Jaycee Park down there at Eastern. So at the time that they were looking for a place to live, here they had five kids from thirteen—I was thirteen when we moved here—to three. They rented this little, tiny, two-bedroom house that wasn't six hundred square feet. Across the street where the Jaycee Park is today was St. Viator's Church. My mother was so excited that there was a Catholic church right across the street from where we were going to live because that way she could just send us across the street to church; we could just walk over there for our catechism classes and all that stuff. It was right there. Well, three weeks later they closed the church and tore it down because it was built over the old city dump, the original city dump. And that was only two miles from downtown, but in the beginning that was a long way out. You were way out. 7 Yeah. So that's when they decided to—after they tore down the church. I can remember—you wouldn't see this going on today, either—all the neighborhood kids, whether they were Catholic or not, didn't care, they all came out to help Father Crowley, Father Richard Crowley. He was the first pastor of St. Viator's Church back in those days the bits and pieces of wood that were left after they hauled everything away, we burned them. You could just do that then. Today you couldn't do that. All of us kids were over there, teenagers and everybody in the neighborhood. Father Crowley was like that. But there was nothing—our house was on the north side of St. Louis. And except for St. Viator's Church, there was absolutely nothing across the street looking out into Paradise Valley, looking south, nothing. There was East San Francisco Avenue. Eastern Avenue was a dirt road. St. Louis only had a half-street because they hadn't built on the other side; there was nothing across the street from us. I can't even picture that. I know. It's amazing today for those of us who lived here a long time. This year will be 56 years since we moved here. It's amazing the changes that we've seen. My mother would never believe where I live today. No. She wouldn't even be able to imagine it. No, not at all. When you mentioned the other neighborhood kids a few minutes ago—I can picture where your house was located. So there were lots of other houses in that general area? North of us. See, East St. Louis came down this way and when you got to Eastern Avenue it became a half-street, just a half-street. The neighborhood that was west of Eastern was pretty well settled. The neighborhood where we were, from what I remember, when they did some 8 remodeling work on my mom and dad's house, they found something inside the walls that something about 1953 with the construction. So we're figuring that's about when it was built. We moved in in 1957. And it was a rental and we rented it from M.J. Christensen. It was on the other side, on the north side of St. Louis, and there were houses that went all the way down to Charleston. That whole area was called the Eastwood section over to the Showboat Hotel and down to what is now Atlantic that runs through there where K.O. Knudson School is and everything. Well, none of that was there. No police department. No Department of Motor Vehicles. It was downtown. We went to John C. Fremont, which was an elementary school when we moved here; that was 1957-58 and I was in the eighth grade. That summer after eighth grade and just before school ended they started adding a gym on and putting in more classrooms. When it reopened in September, it reopened as a junior high school, seventh through ninth grade. So I went to the same school twice, once as an elementary school up to the eighth grade and then once as the junior high school. Those were kind of rough years. I wasn't a happy teenager in those days. Why? A lot of home problems and things like that. My closest friend Nancy, her mom bought a house in North Las Vegas in the old College Park section on Flower Street over in North Las Vegas. She was going to be going to Rancho and I would have had to go to Vegas High School. My mom worked at Mission Linen Supply, which was on Foremaster Lane right straight down from the back entrance into Rancho across from Woodlawn Cemetery. So she had this idea that it would work better for her getting me to school if I just used Nancy's address and went to school at Rancho because I could ride over with her in the morning. And 1 used to sit in the car and wait until it was time to walk to school, then I'd walk down to school. When I got old enough to 9 drive, I used to drop her oft and then I would drive over to Nancy's and stay there until it was time to go to school because she went to work at six o'clock in the morning or some awful thing like that. So I wasn t supposed to go to Rancho, but I never regretted that I did because I really enjoyed my time there. I met a lot of nice people and was able to continue my friendship with Nancy, which to this day we're still friends. Next to my sister, she's known me longer than anyone. So is Nancy on our list of interviewees? I don't think so. So I'll ask you about that later. Tell me about your father's job. Did he get a job at the Stardust along with his brother? No. 1 lis first job was at a place called the Strip Cafe or something like that. It was on Las Vegas Boulevard. He worked there for a while and then got a job at the old Mint where he got to cook out front again and talk with people, which was his—I mean my aunt used to say he could throw the bull better than anybody she knew [laughing]. He worked at the Mint as a short-order cook and then he went to work for—the name was right on the tip of my tongue—Yvette's Cafe, which was in the shopping center where the World's Biggest Gift Shop is there at the corner of the Strip. Well, Yvette's Pancake House was in there and he worked there. While he was working there he decided he wanted to go—he always dreamed of being a police officer; that was something he always wanted to do, that and a cowboy. He wasn't a very tall man; he was only five foot seven, five foot seven and a half. So he never could really pass the physical to become a full-time police officer. So he joined the Las Vegas Police Reserves for the City of Las Vegas. This was in 1959, so that was before they had the merge in '73. He wore the blue uniform and the whole bit. 10 So is that a paid position? No. It was the reserves. He worked most weekends. Sometimes they worked with a full-time police officer and other times it would be two reserves by themselves. He worked his way up to lieutenant on the reserves, eventually. But the man who was the captain when he went on with the reserves worked as a bailiff for the City of Las Vegas Municipal Court. So through him my dad went to work for the City of Las Vegas in the Municipal Court as first a bailiff and then eventually they called them marshals. He worked there until his retirement in 1985. So he started working there in '63 I remember because it was the year after my graduation from high school. He loved it because he got to wear the uniform. He got to serve warrants. When he was working in the police cars he got to do all the things that police officers do. But he didn't have to pass the height requirement on anything because they'd take anybody on the reserves. Since he was a person who always had guns, he taught me how to shoot a rifle when I was four years old. But he always had guns. So it was something that just was always there; either the policeman or the cowboy, one or the other he wanted to be. He really did enjoy it. It was something important. That's how he became "Jack the Cop". "Jack the Cop" was the guy who worked—he actually got hired to work weekends as a police reserve by the Blue Onion. Dick Longmire, who was the owner of the Blue Onion drive-in and restaurant, hired him. He had worked there as a cook for a while; I forgot about that. He had worked there for a while as a cook. So when he was on the reserves Dick Longmire hired him to work the parking lot of the drive-in because back in those days we used to cruise through the Onion, the BO, we'd come down Fremont Street, go through the Onion, go out onto Charleston Boulevard and flip a U right in the middle of Charleston Boulevard going across Charleston and coming back through. Slowly over the years they started cutting things off, like 11 they wouldn t let you flip a U and you couldn't come back through; you had to go around and all kinds of things they did to keep the kids from tying up the traffic. But all the kids in high school in those days knew "Jack the Cop". One of the things they always remember—oh, your dad, I saw your dad the other night; he called me "Cuz". Well, he called everybody "Cuz". It was a little hard on us girls because that's where you went after a date to have a coke and there was my father. So if I was sitting next to the guy I had to move over [laughing], 1 hat is great [laughing]. Tell me about the Blue Onion. Why was it so popular? I think it was just because it was a place to go and see everybody. The food, I mean hamburgers and 1 rench tries, oh, and cherry cokes and vanilla cokes and lemon cokes and things like that you could get. My sister, Marilyn, the one that's sixteen months younger than me, she worked there as a carhop for a while under the surveillance and the trusty eye of her father. I think she was about seventeen or eighteen when she went to work there. In our family being in the restaurant business was something they did; my mother and I were the only ones who didn't do that. I can remember the blue pants, the white blouses, and the carhops coming to the car windows. You roll down your window and then you give them your order. Most of the time it was just a coke. Okay, I'll have a vanilla coke; I'll have a plain coke. But sometimes we'd go in there and have hamburgers or something like that or just order a big plate of French fries and dip it in the ketchup and eat that. Then when you'd cruise through you always saw people you knew and you'd wave. If there was somebody that you wanted to talk to, you could pull up next to them if there was a spot open and chat and things like that. Then you'd go up Fremont Street and you'd go through the old railroad station and then come back down Fremont Street. You had to move so slow when 12 you got to the downtown area. Wasn't that the point of cruising anyway? Yeah, so that you can chat back and forth. Hey, there's a party over here; meet us at such-and-such a place. It was really fun. It was a social thing. It really was a social thing. You did it whether it was cold or hot or what. All year long that's what you did; you went to the BO, to the Blue Onion. So give me the exact location of the Onion. It was on fremont Street at what we used to call down there the Five Corners, but they did away with it because they put Eastern Avenue through. It's right next to the Blue Angel Motel, which my husband keeps telling me he owes me a night in, but now it's closed, so. Which husband? This one. Good. He didn't even live here when the Blue Angel was really active. Then the other place we used to go was—I'm trying to remember. The Blue Onion and then west of the Blue Onion was some kind of a car lot and then on the other side of that was a pizza place, the Venetian Pizzeria. I've never heard of it. Really? Okay. The Venetian Pizzeria was another place that kids liked to go after dates or if they were on a date or something. They had the best pizza in town at the time. It was a small restaurant, had maybe ten tables in it, maybe twelve. You could go in there, order a pizza, sit and talk, and go on your way. And you'd always run into somebody you knew in there. It didn't have quite the social aspect of the Blue Onion because the Blue Onion, more people could get 13 around. I can remember seeing kids standing up on the wall till my dad would chase them off between the Onion and this car lot that was next door. They'd be dancing to the music because the people would have their radios turned up really loud and they'd be up there dancing to the music and then my dad would—I even had my dad come home and tell me one night one of the boys in the class ahead of us—and I can't think of what his name is now—but he drove a backhoe or something through the Blue Onion to cruise through the Blue Onion one day in this backhoe. Daddy had to chase him out of that. The Blue Onion, I think for those of us in my generation, we have so many good memories of Blue Onion. And it didn't matter that you went to Rancho High School way over in North Las Vegas. You came over there anyway. A lot of the kids from Vegas High School— there used to be two other drive-ins, Sill's and Roundup. Sill's was at—because my sister worked there for a while, too—at Charleston and Las Vegas Boulevard and the Roundup was where the Five Corners, where St. Louis and Main Street and Las Vegas Boulevard and the Strip all come together there at the very west end of St. Louis. Where Jerry's Nugget is now? No, not Jerry's Nugget. The one that Bob Stupak built. Oh, Stratosphere. Yeah. Oh, on that side. Okay, yes. Right there in that corner was the Roundup Drive-In. So the kids from Vegas High School kind of went to those places, but then they closed down because they couldn't compete with the Blue Onion. And eventually the Blue Onion closed because drive-ins went out of style and it wasn't 14 the thing to do. So now, with those kinds of memories, how do you feel when you go downtown now or when you hear about what's happening downtown now? Oh, I don t like downtown at all. We were down there for the reunion because we had a get-together the night before the big party. Two of my friends and I from high school, we walked up the street in the Fremont Street Experience and went into the Horseshoe and had dinner in there. It just wasn't the same. Back in the day you'd go downtown; you'd take a bus and get ott at Fourth and Fremont in front of Trader Bill's and you'd walk up and down the streets and there d be, oh, there was Eaton's and Arden's and JCPenney was downtown and Sears and Woolworths was on the corner of what was Fifth Street at one time, but Las Vegas Boulevard and Fremont Street. Centel was down there. The best place of all was the Circus Room, Sixth and Fremont across from Centel, the Circus Room. They had the best chili dogs in the whole world. No chairs; you had to stand up. They had like a counter around a pillar in the middle of the room and you could go and lean over there and eat your hot dog. But they had the best hot dogs and I loved their chili dogs. Then in the same room across the way was the only orange Julius in town at the time. That was where we'd go and get our drink over there, orange Julius and a chili dog. And never in my life have I found chili dogs that were any better than that. They moved eventually on to Highland. I think it's called Martin Luther King now where they were. They were on Highland and they had a regular restaurant and they never did as well because they opened up their menu to more than just chili dogs. I went in there one time after they moved and said, neh, not the same, not downtown. In 1965 Sears moved out to the valley to where the Boulevard Mall is today; that's when 15 they started to build that mall. Everything changed downtown. You mentioned Eaton's and Arden's. They were dress shops right next to each other. So now, I've heard of Fanny's and Ronzone's. Yeah. Ronzone s, the rich people shopped there. Fanny's, now I never went in there. Like I said, I grew up poor. I shopped at Sears and Eaton's and Arden's. But the high school girls shopped at some of those places? Yes, they did. And you had Lerner's. Is Eaton's and Arden's like Lerner's? Yeah. I hey were right next door to each other and you just could go. We always went downtown to the movies because except for the Fluntridge all the rest of them were downtown. The Palace, which was on Second Street or what's now Casino Center Boulevard, that one was kind of like B-movie type places. However, that's where I saw "Tom Jones," the movie "Tom Jones," and I can't remember what the name of that movie was, but Peter Sellers about seven days and—I can't remember. But they did have some first runs there, but most of it was "The Blob," things like that at the old Palace Theater. We had the El Portal Theatre. That was right near where the El Portal Luggage is now. It was right next to it. The Fremont Theatre was downtown. Then we had the Huntridge. And then we had three drive-ins. You had a lot of movie theaters for a town that size. That was as small as it was, yeah. There was the Nevada Drive-in, which was out on Las Vegas Boulevard North. The one that Joyce and I worked at, which was the Skyway Drive-In. Then there was one out by the Stardust Hotel and it was called the Stardust Drive-In. The people that owned the Skyway also owned Stardust, so they were sister theaters. Yeah, I worked at the 16 Skyway for a while in my senior year. Joyce got another job somewhere else and she asked me if I'd like to take her job and I did. It was a lot of fun. It was a lot of fun working there. Any other jobs? When I was sixteen I went to work for my aunt and uncle. On Las Vegas Boulevard just north of Sahara, they had a hobby store. It was called the Holiday and Hobby House. And this is the same uncle who worked at the Stardust? Right. And his wife. They worked nights. So she would come to the store in the morning right after she got done working and stuff and she'd open up. Then he would go in and sleep in and he would come in and do the afternoon shift. So during the summer when they first opened I worked six days a week for them. I got a dollar an hour and had to pay into my old-age pension and 1 never could understand why at sixteen I had to pay into old age. Well, now I know; fifty-two years later I know [laughing]. Aren't you happy that you did [laughing]. So I did that that summer and then on Saturdays through my junior year I worked. They tried to make it a very fancy hobby shop and it just didn't go over. They had glass shelves and all that. The people that were walking past weren't the ones that were going to just come in because they wanted to put a model car together or something like that. So it didn't work out for them and I lost my job. Where was the hobby shop located? Just north of Sahara on Las Vegas Boulevard. On the corner of Sahara and Las Vegas Boulevard across from the Sahara Hotel was this restaurant called Foxy's. You've heard of that? Yes. And we used to go down there; my Aunt would take me down there because she was from 17 Philly. She used to tell me all the time how they were the only gentiles in a Jewish neighborhood. So she grew up eating all this Jewish food. So she loved Foxy's Deli. So she would go there and have lox and bagels and cream cheese and all this stuff. Well, I went, ooh, I'll have a hamburger. But she was a character. So tell me about race relations in Las Vegas during those years especially near Foxy's, in that area. Well, when we first moved here and I was attending John C. Fremont, when I was in ninth grade, which would have been when it was a middle school, there was that I can remember one seventh grade boy that was black in that area. Any Hispanics or Native Americans? There were Flispanics, but not that I remember them being—see, I had lived in Southern California, so for me it wasn't a big deal. See, I just don't remember it being a big deal in school or anything, for me. I remember—he was a junior, so I must have been a sophomore at the time. I think his name was Stafford Simms. He was the vice president of the student council at Rancho. He was so good-looking. But that year the president of student council was Japanese or Chinese; he was Asian of some sort. We had Stafford Simms, who was a black kid, African-American kid. Then we had a girl that was on; she was the treasurer, I think, or the secretary, something like that. Then we had a white boy. So back in the early sixties we were cool. We were with it already over there, which is another reason why I wanted to go to Rancho because of North Las Vegas and over at Rancho there were more of a mix of kids. There were more Hispanic kids, there were more black kids than over on this side of town that I actually lived in. So you enjoyed the diversity at that time. 18 Yeah, yeah. See, in my life, my dad when he was a marshal and all that, one of his best pals was a man named Milton Armstrong that was also a marshal. He died a few years ago. But he was a big black man and he was just my dad's pal. Even long after my dad retired when my mom passed away my dad used to call him Miltie—he came over. They hadn't seen each other in a while, but he came over to the house. See, when we lived in Southern California we lived in a neighborhood that was really Hispanic. The kids I played with, all my best friends were all Hispanic kids. And my dad loved it