Transcript of interview with Sydney Wickliffe by Claytee White, February 1, 2013

AN INTERVIEW WITH SYDNEY WICKLIFFE 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: Clay tee D. White Editors: Barbara Tabach, Joyce Moore Transcriber: Kristin Hicks Interviewers and Project Assistants: Barbara Tabach and Claytee D. White 2 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 3 ORAL HISTORY RESEARCH CENTER AT UNLV Boyer Early Las Vegas Oral History Project Rancho High School Class of'62 Use Agreement Name of Narrator: Name of Interviewer: We, the above named, give to tKe Ortti History Research Center of UNLV, tire recorded inlcrvicw(s) initiated on <'X~ j I j oLl' /-3 along with typed transcripts as an unrestricted gift, to be used for such scholarly and educational purposes as shall be determined, and transfer to the University of Nevada las Vegas, legal title and all literary property rights including copyright. This gift docs not preclude the right of the interviewer, as a representative of UNLV, nor die narrator to use die recordings and related materials for scholarly pursuits. I understand that my interview will he made available to researchers and may be quoted from, published, distributed, placed on die Internet or broadcast in any medium that the Oral History Research Center and UNLV libraries deem appropriate including future forms of electronic and digital media. There will be no compensation for any interviews. /J Date hkLO/3 Library Special Collections 4505 Maryland Parkway, Box 457010, Las Vegas, Nevada 89154-7070 (702) 895-2222 ^ 1 Preface Sydney Wickliffe, nee Botkin, was born in Long Beach, California in 1944. Her parents, Donald and Betty Botkin, moved their young family first to Denver and then to the small town of Ulysses, Kansas before heading for Las Vegas in 1952, when Sydney was eight years old. Since then, she has called Las Vegas her home, graduating from Rancho High School's inaugural senior class in 1962. Growing up in a growing city, Sydney combined an active youth with long hours working in her father's North Las Vegas pharmacy and, later, would earn her degree in accounting from UNLV. As a CPA, she worked as an auditor for the Gaming Control Board and, in 1987, was promoted to deputy chief. From there, she took on the challenging role of director in Nevada's Department of Business and Industry as a member of Governor Kenny Guinn cabinet. As she says, even "one of the north-town girls" can go a long way - and in this interview, she shares memories that help us all see what the Las Vegas she remembers was like in the 1950s and 60s and how it helped to shape the person she is today. . ^ 2 This is Clay tee White and it is February first of 2013. Today I am sitting here with Sydney. Sydney, please give me your full name. And how are you today? I am wonderful today. Thank you, Claytee. My name is Sydney Wickliffe, W-I-C-K-L-I-F-F-E. My maiden name was Botkin, B-O-T-K-I-N. Middle name Anne. My mother used to call me Sydney Anne, usually when she was mad at me. Thank you [laughing]. So Sydney, could you tell me a little about your childhood? I was born in Long Beach, California in 1944. We lived there for three years. My little brother was born just six months before we left there. We left there in the early summer of 1947 and moved to Denver for a summer. Daddy was taking some summer school classes to become a pharmacist. And then after that summer we moved to Ulysses, Kansas, because in the state of Kansas he could practice as a pharmacist off of someone else's license in an apprentice manner. We lived there in Ulysses until I was eight; it was October of 1952. And my mother's mother had become very ill. Grandpa had retired. Momma was raised in Bisbee, Arizona, and Grandpa was manager of Phelps Dodge Mercantile for the states of Arizona and New Mexico down there. He had retired and for Granny's health they had moved to California and were going to retire there. Daddy could not get licensed in California because of the way he had obtained his pharmacist's license and the closest we could get was Las Vegas, in Nevada. Daddy had had quite an eventful young manhood. When he married my mother he was thirty; she was only nineteen. They had only known each other three weeks. It was quite a tempestuous and turbulent, I think, period of time for them. They got married there in Long Beach. He was managing the drugstore and she had come to work in the drugstore. I guess Granny and Grandpa were down there for the summer or something, and so she was working down there the year after she got out of high school. 3 But he had had a pretty lively life up until that point and had been a truck driver for a part of it and had discovered Las Vegas and he did like to play craps. So they decided they'd move to Las Vegas. So that's when we moved here. Good. Give me your parents' names. Daddy's name was Donald Botkin. My mother's maiden name was Stickland, no "R," Elizabeth. She went by Betty. She's still living. She's in a skilled nursing facility about a mile away—in fact, I just came from seeing her a little while ago. She'll be eighty-nine in three weeks. Daddy died in 1968. Great. So your memories really start almost in Las Vegas. Maybe you remember a little of Kansas? I remember a lot of Kansas and I even remember Denver. I remember my third birthday. It doesn't have anything to do with Las Vegas and I don't know if you have any interest in that. Oh, no. Please. Yes, we do. Well, I remember a couple of things about Denver. One was my third birthday because my birthday is in July. They had bought me a pink tricycle and it was in the trunk of this old car and they got that out and I thought that was okay. But I kept asking, I'm told, where is my happy birthday, where is my happy birthday, which was my birthday cake. So then they got the cake out of the trunk, also. Another vivid memory, more vivid memory that I have of Denver was this horrid apartment that we lived in. The washing machine was down in the basement and the walls were dirt. I think the floor was dirt, also. My mother, with her five-month-old infant, my brother, and her three-year-old daughter, me, she would carry the laundry baskets with Kip, my brother, in the laundry basket downstairs into the basement in order to do the laundry. I remember the bugs 4 crawling on the walls. And to this day I am horrified of bugs. We bought a car. I remember standing there and my mother had these gorgeous red strappy high-heel sandals that she was wearing that she let me play dress up in after I got a little older. But of course, I'm three years old, so I'm pretty close to the ground. So I remember standing there holding her hand while Daddy is negotiating for this 1938 whatever we had, this car that he bought. I do have one other memory of Denver. She had put a harness on me with like a dog leash on it for when we went downtown. She got a lot of criticism from other parents about having her child treated like a dog and whatnot. But I got ambitious about crossing the street one day and I started to run across the street and she yanked back on me, which probably saved my life. And so she never felt a bit bad about that. And then of course, the tiny town of Kansas that we moved to, it has 2,000 people in it now and is bustling; it had fewer then. It was the county seat. Very flat, very, very flat. Oh, wind, horrid wind, horrid cold. Kip and I would play in the snow in the wintertime. The street we lived on was not paved. We lived in a little one-story house for a year next door to the pharmacist that Daddy worked for. Then after that we bought a little two-story. Little, it was about eight hundred square feet at most, little two-story Cape Cod-looking house. I'm still very partial to two-story houses as a result. But the street was not paved and there was kind of a gully in front where I think the irrigation took place. There was a Mexican family who lived across the street from us and he was the local plumber. Every year for Easter he would make rabbit tamales. Of course, my mother being born and raised in Arizona, Mexican food was soul food to her. Man, I ate my share of Mexican food growing up. My friends, when I was in high school, raved about her tacos and enchiladas and everybody was always over at our house eating my mother's tacos and enchiladas. It was Easter Sunday and Daddy was going across the street to get the tamales, the bucket of tamales from Lee King, the plumber. He told me not to follow him because I had on my new patent leather shoes and my Easter dress and whatnot. Well, I was going to go wherever my daddy was going. Daddy and I were very close. So I followed him across the street. Of course, it was knee deep in mud. We get back to our house. And I can see it still; we're on the back porch, which is about three feet square, concrete slab, and he's there with this table knife scraping the mud off my shoes after he has blistered my butt. I'm standing there, still rubbing, and I'm crying, of course, and he's lecturing me. I have a lot of other memories of Kansas, which probably you don't have a lot of interest in. But that's okay. I enjoyed that. So you've already told us why your family moved to Las Vegas. So you were how old when you got to Las Vegas? I was eight. Eight years of age. And where did you go to elementary school? Well, when we moved here we moved to Thelma Lane, to a duplex on Thelma Lane. Which area of the city is that? Sixteen twenty-four was the street address and it's one block south of Charleston. It's still there. It's a series, a small, short block about as far as from here up to the street of this block, which is two-tenths of a mile, of duplexes. And this is Charleston near here where we are? No. This is Charleston on the other side of Maryland Parkway. This would be the sixteen-hundred block. So it's between Bruce and Maryland Parkway. Okay, good. And where we're sitting now probably didn't even exist. Oh, it didn't exist. When Jim and I moved into this house in 1982, Jones was not paved between ^ 6 here and the condo that we lived in. What are some of your first memories of Las Vegas? Well, my first memory was we loaded what we could into our car, the four of us, and we drove out here. And our furnishings and toys and so forth were put in a moving van and it took six weeks for the moving van to get here. My first memory—in fact, I was telling my mother this morning when I was seeing her about you coming and talking about this—my brother and I called it a hill. It was so exciting to us because this part of Kansas is as flat as this table top. And there was a hill maybe about this high in front of the duplex that we moved into. So about three feet high. Yeah, at most. At most. More like two, probably. And all the time after we get there my brother and I are rolling down this hill. We're just in ecstasy that we had this hill to roll down. Then of course, our furniture didn't arrive and we went to Hollywood Furniture, which was at the comer, the southern Five Points of St. Louis and Las Vegas Boulevard and Main Street, and bought bunk beds. Mom and Daddy slept on the floor and Kip and I slept in these bunk beds. We had big cardboard cartons that we would use for our tables to eat off of. We went to Mayfair School. I think it's on 15th and it's north of Charleston. We went half days. Well, let me back up. Living in the duplex was very different because we had been in a two-story house. It was a tiny little house, just two little bedrooms up in the pointed part of the house, but we had a huge, huge backyard with strawberries and hollyhocks and tulips in the front. And now we're in a duplex and I can't roller skate because the couple who lived in the other half of the duplex were very elderly and she was ill and she was just really grouchy. And so I couldn't roller skate. I had to go down—after my roller skates got here—out onto the sidewalk or onto the street to roller skate. But I couldn't play and I couldn't be rowdy and noisy like eight-year-old kids are. And I walked to Mayfair School, which meant I walked up Thelma Lane and jigged over and then crossed Charleston. Now, is Kip old enough to go to school, as well? Kip is in kindergarten; I'm in the third grade. He goes in the morning from eight to noon; I went from eight to four. Overcrowding at that time? Uh-huh, yeah. Surprisingly Las Vegas was having a little bit of a boom there in 1952. So that was after the war. A lot of people had moved here during the forties. And in conjunction with building the dam, of course. So going to school a half day was very foreign to me. Of course, it hadn't been my idea to move here. I was not happy with it at all, not in the least. Even with the hill? No. Even with the hill. Even with the hill. And so I went to school there. Ms. Pipkin was my teacher. I went there for the third grade. There was a house across the street from the school— several houses—and it had a big weeping willow tree. I remember my brother said that there was a girl who lived in that house. I thought the weeping willow—there were no trees in Kansas; it was quite a novelty there in the middle of the plains. It's a huge gas field where we lived in the southwestern corner, and so trees were quite a novelty to me as a result of that. But there was this little girl who lived there in that house with the weeping willow. My brother had a crush on her. So my mother asked him, well, what does she look like? Well, he said, she's got hair and she's got eyes. That's all the story that I recall of that. He's still teased today probably. Yeah, he still is. So after Mayfair—and that was only for the third grade—then I went to 8 Crestwood. And my bike finally arrived. I knew the moving van had arrived because I was walking down the alley coming home from school and Daddy was at home. And Daddy worked long hours and he was never at home in the middle of the day. He had gone to work at Frank Harp's drugstore, which was at Charleston and Main. He would walk over to El Sombrero Cafe for lunch or Momma would drive there and get lunch for him and take it to him because the pharmacist could not leave the store. In fact, that law was in effect until only about fifteen or twenty years ago. In the grocery stores if it had a pharmacy in it, if the pharmacist was not on duty, you had to close the whole store. Well, they changed that, like I say, about twenty years ago with the Nevada Legislature to where the pharmacy could be closed, but the rest of the store—Vons or Smiths or whatever—could stay open. Thank you. I have never heard that. So you see how important it is to get everyone's story. Well, that's true. And so anytime the store was open, he had to be there. It was just a small store. And so he could not leave the store. So at any rate, back to knowing that our furniture had arrived, I'm walking down the alley and there's my daddy. He was wearing a rust-colored corduroy shirt, which I was very partial to, and he squatted down and held out his arms and I went running down the alley screaming daddy, daddy. My mother comes running out of the house yelling at me, don't talk like that; everybody will think your father has abandoned you and has just come back. [Laughing] I like it. And my bicycle was leaning up against the side of the building, so I knew that all our belongings had arrived and my dolls and my dollhouse and the other things that were of great importance to me. So I went to Crestwood for the fourth grade and the fifth grade. We lived in various apartments there, duplexes there. In the same area? There on Thelma Lane. We lived in three or four different ones on one or the other side of Thelma Lane. We moved to a triplex over on Lewis on the other side of Charleston. It's just off Charleston and Bruce. In fact, they had a horrible fire there about a year ago where some children perished. It was an adjacent building or something. Jim and I take long walks on Sunday mornings and we like to walk in the old neighborhoods during the winter, not during the spring where the trees are because that bothers his allergies. But in the winter when it's cold, we go about to various neighborhoods. So we go down Thelma Lane at least once a year and generally over to Lewis and whatnot. So I know that that building is still there. I would walk up Charleston. My mother was telling me this morning that part of Charleston was still dirt road at that point and I would walk up to Mayfair or Crestwood from our house on Lewis. After we left Lewis we moved back to Thelma Lane to the southern side of the street. I was there when I was nine I remember. We were moving fairly frequently. I think we were moving into maybe a little bigger duplex each time. Then I think we rented a house on Eastern, 1501 Eastern; it's an insurance agency now. It's right by Sweeney and Franklin and I don't remember specifically the other streets that are right there. But Oakey was the next major street to the south and it was the last paved street in Las Vegas. That was the last paved street? It was, yes. Sahara was not paved. This would have been 1954 or 1955. Sahara was not paved. I was talking to my mother about it this morning when I was telling her that I was meeting with you this afternoon and the memories were coming back to her, as well. She was reminding me that Las Vegas Boulevard was called Fifth Street, which, of course, we all know and I still refer to it as ^ 10 Fifth Street on occasion. The last hotel to the south at that time was the Flamingo. Well, there was the Flamingo and there was the Thunderbird and there was the Sahara and there was the El Rancho and that was all dirt road. She said when we would go and we'd have the cloud burst that we still have in this climate—and of course, we didn't have flood control until fifteen or twenty years ag°—and so the streets. She said you'd drive out to go like to the Flamingo and you'd get stuck because the roads were not paved. But I remember Oakey being the last street that was paved. It was an east-west street, as it is now, but nothing to the south of it was paved. And then there were no buildings. You've seen the maps; you know what the aerial view looks like from that long ago. Yes, exactly. So at any rate, now we're living on Eastern. We were there for, I don't know, about a year or so and Daddy had an opportunity to start his own business, a drugstore, in North Las Vegas with a partner of his who was living in Los Angeles, but it was a partner from Kansas, because he was born and raised in Kansas during the Depression. Daddy had a most interesting history with his parents dying when he was four and six and he had a little brother who was two years younger than he was. They had a grandmother who raised them until Daddy was twelve and then she passed away. So they just kind of lived on their own. So a pretty rough and tumble life. And it's a hard part of the country to live in. It's still a hard part of the country to live in. The climate is very severe. The water is so hard; the last good hair day you have is the last day you wash your hair at home. Everything about it is just harsh. And so he had a very harsh childhood and, in fact, had been pronounced dead officially three times before he married my mother. One I know of was a car wreck when he was nineteen that took all his upper teeth. Then he lost a kidney. And I don't remember what the other occasion was. But at any rate, he had impressed upon Kip and I, you always have to take care of your 11 mother, because he didn't know how long he was going to live. He only lived until he was fifty-four. So we're still taking care of my mother. But at any rate, he had this opportunity to buy a drugstore and partnership with this person he was not related to, but they were always aunt and uncle to me. And so we bought this drugstore on College Avenue, which is now Lake Mead, in North Las Vegas. It's a real rough part of town now. It wasn't a too whoopee part of town at the time we were there. What did it look like? It was twenty by eighty feet. It was in a strip center. There was a dry cleaner next to it. There was a grocery store on the west side of it. Then there was a barbershop. And then around the corner of this little strip mall there was a beauty shop. And it was just desert around it. It's at the foot of I think Yale. You drive through Five Points, the northern Five Points, and you continue on down Fifth Street, which will bear to the west, then you'll get to College Avenue and you make a right, and you only go three, four blocks or so. There was Harvard and Yale and Princeton and all those other streets with, oh, these crummy little houses. They're still crummy little houses there. Did the family move to that part of town? Well, that led us to moving to Jefferson Street, which is in North Las Vegas. The grade school, Jefferson Street Grade School, is on the corner of Jefferson and College. J.D. Smith was on Tonopah just two blocks or so from Jefferson Street. I don't remember what month it was that we moved there, but when the school year started I was still at Crestwood and I was supposed to go to Sunrise Acres. Sunrise Acres was on 25th Street; 25th Street and Eastern is the same street. And I told Momma I wouldn't go because I had heard that it was too rough a school and all the boys carried knives. Tom went to Sunrise Acres and so I'm sure you got some Sunrise Acres stories from him. And he turned out to be a fine fellow. But I told her I didn't want to go to Sunrise Acres, and so she enrolled me at J.D. Smith for the sixth grade. So I went to J.D. Smith in the sixth grade. Of course, if you didn't walk somewhere, you took your bike; I mean that's just the way we lived. Kip and I played in the desert. When we lived on Lewis, there's a triangular section between Charleston and Fremont down there in that section. We were closer to Charleston and we would head over into the desert behind the Purple Sage Motel and we'd play in the desert. I remember we found an old egg carton and we found a milk carton and we found an orange rind, and so we played store. One of us was the storekeeper and the other one was the customer and we played store. Just such simple, simple things to do. Then when we had the drugstore, with this pharmacy law as long as the store was open, the pharmacist has to be there. The store was open from nine to nine six days a week. And so Daddy was at the store from nine to nine and my mother was the salesclerk at the store, also. And so when school ended I would walk to the store and Kip would go to the store. Now, he went to Tom Williams Elementary School and he went to Jefferson Street Elementary School. I don't remember precisely what grades. But I don't think J.D. Smith started until like fourth grade. So you went to those schools for grades one through three, which is what Mayfair was. And then once you're out of third grade, then you go to fourth, fifth and sixth, and then you go to high school, which was— no—fourth through eighth, and then you go to high school. That's right. What were the other kids in the area? Were they all white, Mexican-American, or what was the population in the area of the store? The dry cleaner s next door to us on the left, which would have been to the east—and it was about the same size as ours a Mexican family owned that. I can't for the life of me remember those boys' names. I should be able to, but I'm having a middle-age lapse here. I'll think of that, too. But at any rate, they were Mexican boys and the older one was really mean. He was a really mean kid. The story ran that he would take kids out into the desert and make them eat dog turds. That's how mean this kid was. The older one was, I think, a year older than I was and the younger one was between Kip and I. Kip told this story a couple of years ago when we went to visit him up in Salt Lake for Thanksgiving. They would take pennies. And the railroad tracks still ran down the overpass there. There was an overpass and College went underneath it. And this was a few blocks to the west of the story, only a couple, three blocks to the west of the store. He said they would take pennies up there and they would lay them on the tracks and then the train would come by. Like I say, my brother told me this only two years ago and this was all news to me. Their name was like McNamara or Mclntyre or something, this Mexican family. Robert was the older one, I think. And I said, I didn't know you hung around with them because Robert was so mean. He said, well, they never were mean to me. We played with them. And they were never mean to me, either, but I was always a little apprehensive around the older one. And we'd play in the desert. The grocery store next door was owned by a man named Jones and everyone called him Jonesy, real small man. His children were never at the store. But there was a—we called it "The Pigpen" behind the store where they stored the boxes that the produce would be shipped in or whatever. We would ask if we could have one of the boxes and we'd take it out and make a fort out of it and play in the desert doing that. Well, Jonesy inducted Daddy into the Masons and did all his instruction for him. Momma's father had been a Mason and Daddy became a Mason. He must have been fairly active in it because he reached the 32nd degree stage. And 33rd degree is what you retire at, apparently. So he was a first degree, a second degree, a third degree and then I think from third degree then you go to the 32nd. But at any rate, he had a Masonic funeral. Jonesy was 1 > 14 the one who instructed him and was his mentor in that. When we left the house on Jefferson Street and we moved to College Park, which was only about a year and a half later, Jonesy lived two streets to the south of us on Webb and Susie and I became great friends. We're still really, really close friends. And Donna and Susie and Sandy, who lived across the street from me, and I, the four of us still have a Christmas celebration and we celebrate our birthdays together every year. Name the friends again. That would be Sue; her last name is Watson now. Her maiden name was Jones and she was Jonesy's daughter. Then Donna Martin, whom you've met. She was a Twin Lakes' girl. So I didn't know her until our twentieth reunion when I started meeting Tom and Donna and getting close to them. I knew them in school. In fact, I knew Tom because Tom and I were in classes together, but all I knew of Donna was just as a celebrity, because of her dad. [Laughing] I know. I know, yes. Yeah. And so I never knew Donna other than to know who she was and to say hello to her. We may have been in pep club together or something, but I don't recall that. And then Sandy, her name was Harris, that was her maiden name. Her married name was Woodward. There were seven of us who all hung out together, I think. We moved from Jefferson Street, an old, old house—we called it the Spanish Colonial house that we thought was built during the Spanish Inquisition. The windows slid back into the walls and it had a gorgeous fountain out in front. Actually, if it were kept up, it would really be a very nice house. It had a separated living room; it was in like two parts with a big archway to make like two rooms out of it. Then there was a dining room and then there was a kitchen and the bathroom backed up to that. Well, you'd be in the living room in the evening watching television—I'll have to tell you about getting a television—and you'd go into the kitchen to get graham crackers or something and the cockroaches would all scatter. It had a septic tank that was sunken. I think we were connected to plumbing; I mean we had an indoor bathroom and everything like that, but I think we were on the city plumbing system by that time. But originally it had been a septic tank and it was adjacent to the driveway and there was a big hole that was like five or six feet square and about five or six feet deep. If you were really brave, you could jump down in it. Or if you were being really mean, you could throw your little brother down there. Ooh. Sounds like this is experience you're talking about. [Laughing] Yes. But it had a huge, huge yard and at one point it had rose bushes around the fountain and had been quite a showplace. So we lived there about a year and a half, I think, and then we moved to College Park. And it was a new house, just a cinder block house with a rock roof, swamp cooler. But it was the nicest house we had been in other than our little two-story house in Kansas, of course, which, as I say, was probably smaller. But at any rate, when we moved to College Park, I was twelve. So this would have been between the seventh and eighth grades, I think. So this would have been like the summer of 1957 that we did that. It might have been '56 that we did that. I'm not really positive. But Sandy lived across the street and three doors up from me. Lynn lived at the corner three houses down. Then Susie lived—we were like three houses from the corner and Susie lived two houses from the comer two streets over. I met Lynn first because Susie was visiting aunts and uncles in upstate New York that summer. Her mother was a seamstress on the Strip for one of the showrooms. Of course, all these people, all these girls had brothers or sisters who were the same age as Kip was. So I had my class and then he had his class. Kip was crazy about Nancy, Sandy's little sister. Unfortunately, she died of kidney failure when she was twenty-one. He went to school with Nancy. He went to 16 school with Launa, who was Lynn's little sister. He went to school with Barbara, who was Susie's little sister. So we all just kind of hung out and we'd play basketball in the driveway. Susie would come over to my house and hang around and do what thirteen-year-old girls do and it would be time for her to go home, so I'd walk her home, and then she'd walk me back and then I'd walk her home. This would last until like midnight. This is during the summer and nobody was worried about it. The crime rate was not such that children were not preyed upon in the way they are today. And we would just walk, covering all of our issues and our problems and our boyfriend problems and our parent problems and everything else, what color toenail polish to wear and all the rest of that stuff, just back and forth. We went barefoot all summer. I will always remember that the bottom of Lynn's feet—and she had such flat feet—they were just black. So were you playing out in the desert with no shoes? I don't think so. I don't know. I mean my feet were a lot tougher then than they are now. There was desert behind Lynn's house. See, we lived on Reynolds, which runs east and west. She lived on the corner of Reynolds and Statz. She was on the easternmost side of the street. Statz ran along this way and she was right here and there was just desert all behind her house. In the eighth grade—so this would have been September-October of 1957—her dad, who was a highway patrolman, had a big Halloween party and her dad built a big bo