Transcript of interview with Maxwell Kent "Tim" Hafen by Stefani Evans and Claytee White, September 14, 2016

i AN INTERVIEW WITH MAXWELL KENT "TIM" HAFEN An Oral History Conducted by Stefani Evans and Claytee D. White The Building Las Vegas Oral History Project Oral History Research Center at UNLV University Libraries University of Nevada Las Vegas ii ©The Building Las Vegas Oral History Project University of Nevada Las Vegas, 2016 Produced by: The Oral History Research Center at UNLV University Libraries Director: Claytee D. White Editor: Stefani Evans and Vishe Y. Redmond Transcribers: Kristin Hicks, Frances Smith Interviewers: Stefani Evans and Claytee D. White Project Manager: Stefani Evans iii The recorded interview and transcript have been made possible through the generosity of the UNLV University Libraries. 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 and 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 Building Las Vegas Oral History Project. Claytee D. White Director, Oral History Research Center University Libraries University Nevada, Las Vegas iv v PREFACE With so much emphasis put on the growth of Las Vegas and Henderson over the past thirty years, we often forget about the development of the others cities in the Valley. Expansive growth in Southern Nevada in the mid-twentieth century shows the region being one of the last bastions of agricultural existence, and Tim Hafen has been a major player in the development of the city of Pahrump. Born in St. George, Utah, and raised in Mesquite, Nevada, he graduated from Virgin Valley High School and attended Dixie College. Before the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) was called as such, his father introduced him to the working of the land through dairy and hay farming, where a young Tim decided he would never milk a cow again. His rejection of cow milking didn’t deter him from following the influence of his father after he married his wife, Eleanor, in 1951 and moved to Pahrump to become a cotton farmer. At that time, there were only 150 people in the area with a third of the population being from the Paiute tribe. Once the city was incorporated in 1964, he founded the Pahrump Valley Utility Company to get electricity to the area along with Amargosa Valley. Top crops at the time included cotton, alfalfa as well as wheat that were picked by Mexican farm laborers used under a yearlong contract with the Bracero program. vi In this interview, Hafen shares how he began his career in politics from getting called for grand jury in 1963. From 1966–1974, he was a member of the legislature, where he served two terms in the Old Capital building and held various positions such as Chairman of the State Board of Agriculture for twelve years and President of the Nevada Farm Bureau. He was speaker pro tem and Chairman of the taxation committee and decided to call it quits because of the Nixon scandal. Between 1974 and 1975 Hafen ended his political career, which he did before brothels began to come to the area later in the decade. In 1982, in the wake of the gasoline crisis, Hafen, like other Pahrump cotton farmers, could not afford to continue farming; he decided to shift from farming to development. His first development done was Cottonwoods at Hafen Ranch, which was on 160 acres of alluvial fan, non-farmable land; in 2000 he opened his second subdivision, Artesia at Hafen Ranch. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Interview with Maxwell Kent "Tim" Hafen September 14, 2016 in Las Vegas, Nevada Conducted by Stefani Evans and Claytee D. White Preface…………………………………………………………………………………………..iv St. George, UT and Mesquite NV; Virgin Valley High School and Dixie College; dairy farming; moving to Pahrump; top crops: cotton, alfalfa and wheat; Old Pahrump Ranch; Pahrump Valley Cotton; Calvada Valley Development: 1951-2010; Pahrump Utility Company………………1-10 Founding of Pahrump; Saddle West Casino; residential subdivisions in 1982; Chicken Ranch and brothels; role in the legislature; integration of Pahrump; Bracero Program; cotton picking in Nevada; running for office……………………………………………………...……………11-20 Valley changes; real estate brokerage; Artesia at Hafen Ranch; Lois Kellogg; Louie Sharp; Mountain Falls housing development; Golden Gaming; population growth form 1985-2005; other community positions……………………………………………………………..…….20-30 Visiting Las Vegas; Great Dane story; county commissioners; Imogene Anderson……..….31-39 1 S: Good afternoon. This is Stefani Evans and Claytee White and we are with Tim Hafen in Pahrump. Mr. Hafen, would you please pronounce and spell your first and last name for us. Yes I will. My full legal given is Maxwell, after my dad, middle name Kent, Hafen. H - A - F - E - N. I have been nicknamed Tim since I was tiny and that is what I go by normally. Very few people know me by my legal name so I just use Tim as a nickname as that is what I am known as. S: Does anyone ever call you Kent? Only my old school chums because when I went through school that was the name I used, was Kent. So when I hear somebody say Kent I know it is an old school chum that I haven't seen in a long time. S: Today is September 14, 2016. I neglected to mention that. Why don't you tell us about your early life when you were Kent. Where did you grow up, where were you born? I was born in St. George, Utah, and the reason for that is that my folks lived in Mesquite, Nevada, so St. George was the only hospital. Back then for childbirth they probably kept you most of a week. I still claim to be a native Nevadan because even though I spent the first few days in St. George, Utah I was raised in Mesquite. Went through grammar school, Virgin Valley High School. I started Dixie College and was struggling, married to Eleanor Cox and had a child on the way. My dad had been on a Taylor Grazing Board, an advisory board, which was the forerunner to the Bureau of Land Management. He had been on this advisory board from the Las Vegas office and they took a ride through Good Springs up through Sandy Valley up through Pahrump Valley and out through the North back to the Reno highway which was a big trip back then because there 2 were no roads just trails and that is about it. Anyway, he had known Elmer Bowman previously because Elmer was established in Logandale, Nevada, in the Moapa Valley and he bought the Manse ranch, he bought about 6,400 acres out here in 1947 about. When my dad came through here it was 1950 and he talked to Elmer and Elmer said, "We are trying to get a town going out here. Why don't you buy some land and come out here and farm. There's lots of available land." Well, that interested my dad but he had a dairy farm in Mesquite and it would be impossible for him to do that. He was too established in Mesquite to move. When I was home Christmas time 1950 he was telling me about this and we drove out and talked to Elmer Bowman and he offered us 840 acres, bare land, thirty dollars an acre, nothing down, twenty years to pay at three percent interest and the big question was is there water in that 840 acres, wells that would produce big enough to justify farming. You needed volume out of a well to farm with. The deal was my dad put up three fifths of the cost of drilling that well. Elmer Bowman put up two-fifths of the cost of drilling that well. If the well didn't come in Elmer lost his money and my dad lost his money, but it just so happened that that well came in at 1,000 gallons a minute, artesian flow, free flow. We took that option, paid Elmer back his two-fifths, and I moved out here July 2, 1951. I did spend all my youth in Mesquite. My dad had a hay farm as well as the dairy. I must say that, I mentioned several times, that once I moved away from that dairy I would never milk another cow in my life. I've kept that promise. You know it doesn't matter. When you are a teenager and you like basketball and you go to basketball practice after school and you come home you still have to milk those cows. My dad never learned how to put a milking machine on a cow, so I was the oldest of four boys. My next youngest brother Gary was a year and a half younger. The point I am making is we knew we had to milk those cows. Now dad would help 3 but you know, run them in, wash the cows and everything, he never learned how to put a milking machine on a cow. I thought that was a little bit strange until I got to thinking about it later in life and then I realized that had he ever put a milking machine on a cow his boys would have let him done that and milk the whole herd. He probably wasn't nearly as dumb as I thought he was. I played basketball mostly at Virgin Valley High. It was a nice place to grow up. Almost exclusively Mormon back then. My dad was involved with the church so naturally the kids were. When I moved out here in 1951 I had married Eleanor in the fall of 1950, graduated high school in 1950 and started junior college in St. George. When we took up the option my dad said I'll would put up the money and we will form a partnership. Of course he didn't have a lot of money he had to borrow it. We formed a partnership and I moved out here with a 25 foot house trailer, an old house trailer with no bathroom and that was my first house. We had the well water in a ditch running by, not far from that old trailer house, so I could go out there and dip a bucket full of water and take it into the house. I could bathe in the stream except in the winter time it got a little cold, but we made out. My first-born was born on July 21st, three weeks after I moved out here. I left her mother in Mesquite until after my first daughter Vicki was born and then she came out when she was three weeks old. You have to kind of realize what the situation was out here. I estimate there were maybe 150 people living in Pahrump. One third of those, probably were Paiute natives living here and working on the ranches. There were no roads. There was a gravel road going up north over what we call Johnny Summit to the Reno highway 95 and Indian Springs and then it was seventy miles back into Las Vegas, from where it hit the highway. From this ranch, which is the south end of the valley, to that Reno highway was forty miles and it wasn't gravel it was rocks. 1951 4 we bought a pick-up truck but we didn't have air conditioning or refrigeration. If it was summer time when we would go to Las Vegas, which wasn't very often, we would have to keep the windows rolled down. Over that gravel road it was dusty as could be so we used to wrap a better set of clothes in a sheet and hang it in the pick-up and when we would get to the first service station in Las Vegas we would stop and change clothes because we were all dusty by the time we get to Vegas. That is the situation. There was no electricity, no telephones. We did get gasoline deliveries in barrels from the Charles Brown Company in Shoshone California which is about thirty-five miles from here. They would actually deliver us gasoline in barrels. The place we bought had an old grain roller mill that had never been put into service but it had a nice shed and a nice dock so we could keep the barrels of gas in under the shed. Motor oil we would buy by the case from Standard Oil. I will always have a soft spot in my heart for the Charles Brown Company which then was operated by Charles Brown's daughter Bernice who married Maury Sorrels. So it was Bernice and Maury Sorrels who were operating the businesses in Shoshone, which is mostly all, to this day, owned by the same family, the Sorrels and the Browns. The reason I will always have a soft spot is because you know with crops you have a good season you get good production, price may be down. Price may be up but don't have quite as good weather and don't produce as much. There were times when I couldn't pay my fuel bill and I would go talk to them. If I couldn't buy fuel I was done. They kept supplying me with fuel and kept putting it on the ticket, charging me for it, until sometime the following year because cotton is a once a year crop. It comes off in the late fall, takes all season here to grow a crop of cotton. We would start picking it usually in November and December. We would get a paycheck maybe in January that is what 5 we paid our bills with. And I paid them back. When I stop and think that they carried me for that long. I can't believe it but they did. C: Cotton was the only crop? Cotton and alfalfa and we grew wheat. In this desert soil, right out of sagebrush, it contained a lot of salt. Alkaline and cotton would not do well the first year or two but if you could grow a grain crop or two then that would leech a lot of the salt out and give it some tilth so cotton would grow fairly well. Alfalfa was really the secret because after you grew three or four or five years of alfalfa, alfalfa is a legume which puts nitrogen in the soil, and you could grow a great crop after you grew alfalfa for a few years. It took a while for the valley to grow and mature just because when you are starting with virgin dirt it is not very productive. S: How did you know this? My dad farmed over on the Virgin River in Mesquite and salt was a problem over there. That is just something you absorb. With Elmer Bowman and a few other ranchers out here, they certainly could advise you that this is what you needed to do, you need to bring that soil into production. You didn't just plant it the first year and expect to get a big crop. C: Did you have telephones and bathrooms in Mesquite? In Mesquite we had modern conveniences. C: How did Eleanor like moving here? Well, it was a big adventure. Our second child, Gregory, he came along two years later, in 1953, and we still didn't have any roads, or power or telephones. I would take Eleanor into Mesquite and leave her until she had the baby and then we would go home. S: So far is it from here to Mesquite? It was 80 miles east of Las Vegas. 6 S: Did you go through Las Vegas and then out? Yes, right through the middle of Las Vegas, highway 91, US highway 91, which is now basically Interstate 15. My dad had a cattle truck, what was classified as a two ton cattle truck which had a sixteen foot long bed, single axle. We bought a heavy duty trailer. He would loan me his truck and I would bring some of his equipment, like tractors, discs, and one thing and another, out and farm furiously, ‘cause I had to take them back. They were his and he needed them. That is how we got by the first year. Then the next year with his credit, co-signing, I was able to go to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, who had a loan program to farmers that would loan them money to buy equipment. The office for that department was in Logandale, Nevada. I went into Logandale, Nevada and made an application, with my dad's signature. They loaned me enough money. I'll tell you what the amount was. It was $7,000. I bought a John Deere A tractor. I bought a mower to fit that tractor. I bought a hay rake and I bought a small disc and a ditcher because everything here needed an open ditch. That set me up in business. $7,000 that was big money back then. S: Then you didn't need to borrow from your dad? Then I didn't need to borrow from my dad; that is true. S: Were growing seasons different here and in Mesquite? Mesquite is warmer, it is lower elevation, along the Virgin River and it is a little warmer than it is here. For example they are about 2,000 foot elevation there and we are 2700 feet here and we are open, lots of circulation of air and as a result it is a little colder. S: So that worked out? It worked out, just barely. We were right on the northern edge of the cotton belt. Most of the cotton is grown in the San Joaquin Valley, Imperial Valley, Arizona, New Mexico, those warmer 7 places that have a longer season. We grew what was called 1517C. It was developed in New Mexico because New Mexico, parts of it, were right on the edge of the cotton belt also, climate-wise. That worked pretty well for us. It was a good quality cotton. That is what we grew. We grew cotton, due to the old Pahrump Ranch, which was the big acreage in the center of the valley. Two big ranches that got Pahrump started. One was the Old Pahrump Ranch they called it and it had some big artesian springs and that was why it was formed. The other was the Manse Ranch which also had big artesian springs. That is the one that Elmer Bowman bought that we bought part of. In the early 1950s, late 1940s they had begun well drilling so wells were drilled throughout the valley and more people came in. The cotton expanded and was our chief crop. Cotton made Pahrump Valley. That is a statement I do not hesitate to make because that allowed us to get electricity because we were pumping with diesel engines previous to that because not all wells were artesian. Once we got electricity, because of the horse power load for pumping water to irrigate the cotton, we were able to get electricity. That was 1963. In 1965 we got telephones. Previous to that, the other big event was in the fall of 1954 the state highway was extended from Las Vegas into Pahrump. Now we are only 55 miles from Las Vegas. Hell, that is an hour away, not three and a half hours away. That was really the three big events but cotton made it all it 8 because it produced the horse power load for electricity and more people moved into the valley, a lot of people from San Joaquin valley, farmers from over there moved here just to grow cotton. Land was so inexpensive that we had a lot of California folks from San Joaquin move here to grow cotton. That's kind of the overview of how things really got going very early on. S: Who was your biggest client for your cotton? Who was your biggest buyer? We didn't have a cotton gin so we trucked cotton to Bakersfield for ginning. We would use trucks with high racks and tromp it in but you couldn't get any weight on those trucks. We found that if we took an old three-wired hay baler, one that you modified from the early balers, we were picking the cotton and putting it in three-wired balers. We would take the windrow pick-up off the baler and build a hopper and dump in from the cotton picker to that baler, push it through and tie it with three-wires and we could get 200 pounds per bale. The size of a three-wire hay bale would weigh 200 pounds of cotton. You wonder how that happened. Well, don't ask me because I know because I lifted them. Then it became more economical to truck it to Bakersfield for ginning into bales. S: How long did that take? Bakersfield is about five hours. S: Even back then? We would go out the back way because California had put a little paved trail to the state line, Nevada state line, so we still had about eight miles of gravel that the county had built so we could get out to the west to Shoshone and then down to Bakersfield. 1959 was when Arizona Cotton Seed Company from Phoenix built us a cotton gin up here. So now all we had to do was haul it in wagons to the cotton gin. The cotton gin sat right where the Pahrump Nugget Hotel is right now. 9 S: Is there anything left of the cotton gin or did they level it completely? Leveled it all. There was a group of us tried to buy that after it went out of business. It went out of business the same time we quit growing cotton which was 1982. The reason we quit growing cotton was several. The Pahrump Ranch, which had the biggest cotton growing allotment, was sold to the Preferred Equities people who developed Calvada Valley. There were 10,000 acres in that ranch. They broke it into 15,500 residential lots and sold them all over the world. They were specialists. The Rosen brothers from Florida bought the Pahrump Ranch, formed Preferred Equities called it Calvada Valley. They had written the book on land sales. They had a booth on Fremont Street and various places and they would solicit customers from all over the world. They would drive them out. By then we had that paved road. They would drive them out and show them. "Look at this, get in on the ground floor. Look at what we are going to develop here, a city." And they sell it; 15,000 lots is a lot of sales. That really put us on the map world-wide as Pahrump may became known. Sometimes not for the best reasons in the world because there were some shady land sales that went on. C: Out of that ranch that was divided up, did you have housing developments? They weren't farmers. They weren't interested in farming. They made bladed roads through and then put stakes on the lot corners and sold them. C: What became of it? Calvada Valley has developed a lot since then. From about 150 people in 1951 to 2010, our census was 38,000 people. So yes, it filled in. When you drive through the Calvada project there are a lot of homes in there. A lot were broken into 1.25 acres and you could put a domestic well and a septic tank on 1.25 acre so that is how some developed. Calvada did form a utility company which is still in business today. It is the largest utility company, serving water and 10 sewer, and it is called Utilities Incorporated of Nevada and they are the biggest one. We have two developments, Artesia and Cottonwoods that we had to become a public utility to serve, because nobody else would. It wasn't available so we formed our own utility company, still operated. It is small but it covers the south end of the valley. S: What is the name of your company? It is called Pahrump Utility Company. Let me tell you a little more about that. When we were trying to get electricity in here in the early 1960s, a group of us went together and formed a Pahrump Utility Company to try to get a rural electrification loan to put power in here. It just so happened that Amargosa valley was trying to do the same thing at the same time and REA came together and said you guys by yourselves are pretty small but if you join it makes it more practical to make you a loan. REA loaned, we adopted Amargosa Power Co-op as the name, Pahrump Utility went by the wayside and 50 years later we checked on whether or not that was a viable name. Well nobody claimed it so we did. That is our utility company. There is a third one, Desert Utility, up in the north end of the valley, which is actually a little smaller than we are. The thing that really allowed Pahrump to grow was the 1.25 acre parcels. Land was cheap. The first parcels were divided into five acre parcels because you could buy a five acre parcel for $1500, drill a well and septic and put a house, mobile home, on it and you are in business and it didn't cost you that much. That is one of the things that is a little strange about Pahrump valley, which is twenty miles long and 6-8 miles wide, but it is spread out. A lot of people drive through and say, “Where is Pahrump?” We do have a business district in the center that is getting bigger and bigger. 11 Because of the oil embargo in the late 1970s, when everything we purchased to grow cotton, gas, plastic, steel, fuel, you name it, was affected by the oil embargo. Gasoline went from thirty cents a gallon in bulk purchases to one dollar, imagine that. Sounds cheap now but it became uneconomical to grow cotton because the cotton price you get is set on the world market type thing and you just don't affect it, area by area, you don't change it much. So we all made the decision, and not only that, but the Calvada people had broken up that farm so much, that they leased it out and cotton was farmed on it for three or four years after they bought and broke up the old Pahrump ranch. The cotton acreage had been cut down from the Pahrump Ranch and the gin was kind of struggling, charging us a little more to gin our cotton, which we realized had to happen. We just all made the decision to go out of the cotton business. It just became uneconomical. That happened in 1982. That was when the residential sub-divisions were coming along. C: Most of those residential sub-divisions are from the Pahrump Ranch? Did they ever build regular houses on those properties or did they use mobile homes? They allowed mobile houses over most of it. They did have an area or two where they restricted it to site-built homes. When you travel through the Calvada property today there is a large amount of it that was mobile homes and still is mobile homes. Today there are an awful lot of very nice homes in there. C: Did you have a developer who came in and built a lot of those homes? No. Financing for a conventionally built home was very, very tough. If you didn't have at least enough money in the bank to build a house you couldn't borrow any. It was a new area. Who knew whether Pahrump would grow or not. There were two or three small builders. When the bust came along in 2008 there was probably ten to twelve home builders building homes 12 furiously, making good money out of it. Then all of a sudden the depression hit that year and it just completely shut down. The big part of the economy, which was the construction people, had no jobs, moved or tried to change jobs. It was pretty disastrous for a while. It was really depressed. Coming back now, but it has taken a long time. This is 2016 and that happened in 2008, so that is 8 years. It is slowly coming back. That is kind of the very early history of how Pahrump developed. We didn't have a place to hold a public meeting except there were two barrack buildings moved from Indian Springs out here to house the elementary school at the time. We didn't have a place to hold a public meeting except in those school buildings and those were for elementary kids and it was very difficult to fit grown men into those seats to have a meeting. In about 1962 a group of us decided we had to build a community building. A lot of them wives, the women of the valley, went around and solicited signatures of a petition to take to the county commissioners to form an unincorporated town district, which would give us a means then of borrowing money, bonding, to build a community building. You had to have the majority of the registered voters and the majority of the taxable property. You had to have both. We got it and took it to the commissioners and the town of Pahrump was formed by the end of 1964. The town boundaries took in all of the private land in the valley, very big area, even a lot of Bureau of Land Management land inside those boundaries, didn't have any affect. We bonded ourselves to build that community building up there that we still use. It is a 40 feet wide and 100 feet long, 4,000 sf 13 building. Has a kitchen, stage. We were really living then. We finished that in 1965. We had a great place to hold meetings. You could have a dance, whatever you wanted. That is how we got the first building in here. That was before casinos. Now the casinos furnish areas where you can have a large party or a large meeting or convention or whatever. That is how Pahrump started, it became Pahrump, an unincorporated town of Pahrump valley, which was nothing more than a taxing district and a boundary for the unincorporated town. C: What was the first casino? The first casino was the Saddle West Casino and it was started by moving some barrack buildings from Indian Springs and putting three of them together and opening a restaurant and gambling room. It has been added onto and become a major casino now. S: Who started that? That was started by Ron Floyd and some other partners, Bob Huffman, as I recall. Ron Floyd moved over here from Coachella, California, in order to electrify all the wells and the houses. He changed over from diesel to electricity most all the wells in the valley at that time and after that was over he went into the construction business building house pads, streets, septic tanks, etc. They moved those buildings over and opened up Saddle West. It just grew. Ron didn't stay with it very long. Ron Floyd died a few years ago. Bob Huffman came from the Las Vegas area and bought into it. Bob is still here. It has changed hands a time or two since then. C: How did the city feel about gambling? There was no problem with it that I remember. We were just so happy to have a facility that we hardly cared. Now I have to go back. I told you the town boundaries encompassed all the private lands in Pahrump and ordinance number three prohibits prostitution within the town boundaries. What happened was down on the south end of the valley a farmer from California took out a 14 desert entry, it is like a homestead entry but with a desert entry you are allowed 320 acres. He took out the entry just outside the town boundaries, farmed it, got a title to it and then sold it to Sherry's. Sherry's came from Lincoln County. They had a brothel there in Lincoln County that was not popular at all within the county. So they were kind of glad to find another area and move out of there. They built the first brothel out here and Walter Plankinton came along and built the Chicken Ranch from a piece of that property. S: How did the town feel about prostitution? The general feeling of the town, I believe, is that they were down on the far end of town, they didn't make much noise, and they were pretty quiet. They donated to things and they were pretty good neighbors. As long as that was the case nobody really objected. C: Today? Off the record. [Colloquy not transcribed] I can just imagine if Dennis Hof is elected to the Assembly, there will be all the major networks there every day just to listen to what he has to say. It would be nothing but a circus, an absolute circus. In my opinion a real black eye on the state of Nevada, which they don't need any more, and it would be a real black eye of this area up through here, of which we don't need any more either. That is currently what is going on. He is coming on real strong and he is calling Assemblyman James Oscarson a liar because he said he wouldn't vote to raise taxes and then he did vote for it, as did a lot of other people around the state and some of them are really paying for it, dearly. I've been there and there are things you do sometimes that you don't really want to. S: What years were you in the legislature? 1966 through 1974. 15 C: Before we get to your term in the legislature, I want to know more about the growth of the area. We just talked about the beginning of casinos and the beginning of brothels, building houses. The brothels didn't come along until somewhat later, probably in the late 1970s. That land was developed after 1965 and it went through two or three hands before it was sold to Sherry's Ranch. C: After that community building was built in 1965, did the downtown corridor start at that time, when you began to have some businesses? Kind of. The old Pahrump Ranch that sold to Calvada, wouldn't sell anything on the highway at the intersection going out because he either wanted to sell it all or nothing. He wouldn't make any land available and he owned most of it, except for Saddle West and Floyd's Motel. There was an area in there that the Pahrump Ranch didn't own so there was some businesses started there, primarily Saddle West. Then as time went on, you could buy a piece of ground in the commercial area and do something with it. S: What was your first gas station out here? There was a Union Station that the Revert brothers from Beatty put in down here and then it was sold to LeRoy Vaughn, a local guy. It was right on the corner of Highway 160 and 372, where the Bank of America is right now. It was lease ground and it finally went away and the Bank of America came in there. S: When did the Revert brothers put this station in? As I recall it was after the highway to Shoshone went in. I can't tell you the year. The one from Las Vegas came in during 1954. It was sometime during the 1960s that it went out to Shoshone, paved to the California line to hook up. Of course that road to Shoshone has been rebuilt now 16 because it was just a little paved cow trail. Whoever got some pavement on that I'll never know, it was about one lane wide. C: You had Native American people living in this area? Yes. C: What about other groups? Latinos? African Americans? Did you have anyone else out here? Africa