Transcript of interview with Charlene Herst by Barbara Tabach, September 09, 2016

i AN INTERVIEW WITH CHARLENE HERST An Oral History Conducted by Barbara Tabach Southern Nevada Jewish Heritage Project Oral History Research Center at UNLV University Libraries University of Nevada Las Vegas ii ?Southern Nevada Jewish Heritage Project University of Nevada Las Vegas, 2014 Produced by: The Oral History Research Center at UNLV ? University Libraries Director: Claytee D. White Project Manager: Barbara Tabach Transcriber: Kristin Hicks Interviewers: Barbara Tabach, Claytee D. White Editors and Project Assistants: Maggie Lopes, Amanda Hammar iii The recorded interview and transcript have been made possible through the generosity of a Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA) Grant. The Oral History Research Center enables students and staff to work together with community members to generate this selection of first-person narratives. The participants in this project thank University of Nevada Las Vegas for the support given that allowed an idea the opportunity to flourish. The transcript received minimal editing that includes the elimination of fragments, false starts, and repetitions in order to enhance the reader?s understanding of the material. All measures have been taken to preserve the style and language of the narrator. In several cases photographic sources accompany the individual interviews with permission of the narrator. The following interview is part of a series of interviews conducted under the auspices of the Southern Nevada Jewish Heritage Project. Claytee D. White Director, Oral History Research Center University Libraries University of Nevada Las Vegas iv PREFACE In 2014, Charlene, n?e Friedkin, Herst retired from her state government career, settled into volunteer work, being a mother and grandmother, and being a grant writer for others. After thirteen years in Carson City, she came back home to Las Vegas. Charlene was eight years old when her parents, Patricia and Richard Friedkin, moved their family to Las Vegas from northern California. She remembers vividly the hot day that they arrived and moved into a rental house in the desert across from Woodlawn Cemetery. Her father, formerly in the grocery business, found work at Vegas Village. Two years later they moved ?into Las Vegas at the very edge?which was Oakey.? She recalls people she has known since those first years who have been instrumental in the growth of Las Vegas; the challenges of being a divorced single mother of four; and the career path that began with an invitation from Gene Greenberg to apply for a part time position at Channel 3, where he was sales manager. At Channel 3 she quickly went from part time to fulltime. She started the Community Projects Board, which brought together nonprofit organizations together at the studio in the 1980s to identify and develop marketing campaigns that addressed social issues in the community. Initiatives included Baby Your Baby and Smoking Stinks While working for Channel 3, she also attended UNLV and received a communications degree in 1995. In 1997 she worked at Sierra Health Services in public relations. Then in October 2001, Charlene started her career in state government as the Nevada State Health Division?s Manager of the Tobacco Program. Over the course of her thirteen year career with the state, she was promoted to positions that continued her dedication to improving the quality of life of all Nevadans. She was instrumental in the implementation of the Nevada Clean Indoor Air Act (2006); improving prevention services to women; reducing the rate of substance use and abuse in the state. The date of her retirement, October 10, 2014, was officially proclaimed in honor of Charlene Herst by Governor Brian Sandoval. [See page 41] v TABLE OF CONTENTS Interview with Charlene Herst September 9, 2016 in Las Vegas, Nevada Conducted by Barbara Tabach Preface??????????????????????????????????..iv Maiden name is Friedkin; shares paternal ancestral roots from Ukraine, Russia; maternal from Alsace France, las name Porte. Parents moved to Las Vegas in 1954; father Richard Friedkin was in grocery business in Bay area of northern California took a job at Vegas Village and then Market Town; recalls swimming at Sahara hotel and seeing Clint Eastwood and George Burns. Mentions Art Lurie; attending elementary and junior high schools, Las Vegas High School. Talks about Temple Beth Sholom as only synagogue in town; B?nai B?rith Girls [BBG]???????????????????????..?????????????.1 ? 4 Father-in-law was Harry Herst; mentions friendships that started in her youth, included Jacque Dvorak, Brian Greenspun, Valerie Wiener. Talks about Danny Kolod Youth Center; Annette Kolod; Jeanne, Lily and Henry Kronberg; Iris Torjman; Susan Greenspun Fine; Neil and Joyce Straus. Adopted son from Venezuela, Joyce Straus made him batik clothes; Dennis Kanter, owner of Lullaby Shop; best friend is Doreen Herst, her sister-in-law, background of Herst family and former husband???????????????????.?????..5 ? 9 Talks about single-parenting; volunteer work; getting her first job at Channel 3 through Gene Greenberg?s referral; started Community Projects Board at Channel 3. Story of personally keeping media from covering the funeral of an AIDS victim. Mentions Rick Reich of Clark County Health District and AIDS work. Remarks about Baby Your Baby project, an initiative of Community Projects Board??????????????????????????10 ? 14 Story about Jim Rogers banning smoking at Channel 3 in the 1990s; Sandy Heverly of Stop DUI (Mothers Against Drunk Driving); Smoking Stinks campaign. Recruited by Sierra Health Services to work for them in public relations department; a few years later took a position with the State of Nevada. Talks about getting a degree from UNLV 1995 and importance she places vi on education of her children; what it was like to raise her children in Las Vegas; Deni Congrad of Help of Southern Nevada, organization for displaced housewives????????..15 ? 18 Talks about working for the State of Nevada Health Division as the Tobacco Program Manager; Nevada Clean Indoor Air Act (2004); Health Program Manager for Chronic Disease, promotion in 2006; Yvonne Sylva; Richard Whitely. Next promotion to Health Manager of Substance Abuse Prevention and Treatment Agency in 2009; obtaining statistics with help of Clark County Coroner?s office???????????????????????????????.18 ? 23 Talks about living in Carson City for 13 years; contracting as a grant writer in her retirement; her passion for theater, Shakespeare Festival in Utah; taking theater classes in 1975 at UNLV; Meadows Playhouse at Tropicana and Maryland Parkway; being a BBG adviser for her girls; purpose of B?nai B?rith; place of Jewish values in family?????????????.24 ? 30 Explains why she liked raising her family in Las Vegas; being Jewish here; more about her parents; father?s work for Market Town and Shetakis; father?s liquor store, Lucky Ducky Liquors located on the Strip, he carried Coors beer when it was difficult to find.???????.25 ? 35 Reflects on growing up in Las Vegas; being a teenager in the early 1960s; neighbors with mob mistresses; father worked Caesars when Larry Snow hired many Cubans; pot of beans and rice at Eddie Milan?s home. Talks about what is a ?typical Jewish Mother.?????????.36 ? 40 vii 1 Today is September 9, 2016. I'm sitting with Charlene Herst. Charlene, I'm going to ask you to spell your name for us first. Charlene, C-H-A-R-L-E-N-E. Herst, H-E-R-S-T. And are you asked if you're related to the Hearst family? Always, always. I said, "I don't have their money and we don't spell it the same." They have an "A" in theirs. And that's not the real name, anyway. My father-in-law changed the name shortly after they moved to Vegas. I've been here since 1954. They moved here in '55, and he had his name legally changed in '56 from Herskovitz to Herst. I don't think even Herskovitz was the real name because they're from Romania and even though it sounds like it should, according to my sister-in-law, who is, by the way, also my very best friend in the whole world, it wasn't that; it was Wryder. It was changed on the boat as they were landing in Canada. Now, did you experience a name change on your side of the family? No, no. My family is Russian. [Maiden name is Friedkin.] My father's family, his mother and father, were Russian. He was first generation. They were from the Ukraine. My mother's family was from Alsace, Lorraine, which is now part of France, and their last name was Porte, P-O-R-T-E, which means door in French. They've been here probably since the early 1800s whereas my father's family didn't come until just before the Russian Revolution. So they got out. They got out, yes. How did everybody?or yourself?come to settle in Las Vegas? I have always asked my parents that and my mother would always tell me the truth and my father says, "I have no idea." But the truth is my father was in the grocery business with his father and one of his brothers in San Francisco. When my grandfather died in '53, my father sold the 2 business to my uncle, who ended up selling it and going into other things. Because my parents had been to Las Vegas in about 1949 and my mother really, really liked the desert, liked?well, this is what we were told at that time; later on it was more than just the desert and the climate and all of that?but at the time it was a small town; they could become part of a town. In San Francisco you just couldn't do that. My father was born in San Francisco, but we lived in?I was born in Berkeley. We lived in Oakland and in San Lorenzo before we moved here. And you moved here at what age, then? I was eight. What do you remember about moving to Las Vegas from the Bay Area? Probably the car we drove in because it was so hot once we hit the desert. That was the original. But when we first moved here, we lived in North Las Vegas right across the street from Woodlawn Cemetery. We were renting a house there and it was before Rancho High School was even built. So that was all desert. My father worked for Vegas Village in North Las Vegas when he first came here, because they had an opening and my father was in the grocery business. I don't know if he managed it or he was just working there. I don't remember that. Then two years later we moved into Las Vegas at the very edge of the northern end of Las Vegas, which was Oakey. As children we used to walk through the desert to go swimming in our swimming hole, which was the Sahara Hotel. You would walk? Yes, from Las Vegas Boulevard and Oakey, one street. Just a bunch of kids walking or the whole family? No, just the kids. My brother had swimming lessons there. Clint Eastwood was his swimming 3 instructor. This is before he made it big as Rowdy Yates in "Rawhide." George Burns was always there wearing his swimming cap, white skin-tight swimming cap. Yes, they just treated us like you would treat any other kids that were staying at the hotel. That's great. So those were fun times. But that was the edge of town and we lived there because those were brand-new; they were duplexes. It was a block from Market Town and my father went to work there as the manager. Former Mayor Ron Lurie's father, Art, was the general manager of all the Market Towns as this chain grew, and my father had worked at more than one of them, I think the one in Henderson, old Henderson, but mainly he was at the one at Las Vegas Boulevard and Oakey. So we lived there. So even though I went to a couple of schools in North Las Vegas because when we came?let's see. How did that work out? One school was closed because they were going to make it a junior high school eventually. So I went to two different elementary schools. What were the names of the schools? They were J.D. Smith, which is now a junior high school, and then Jefferson, which is now an opportunity school. Then I went to John S. Park and finished elementary school there after we moved to Las Vegas. Ruby Thomas was our principal. That's great because we did a whole neighborhood oral history project about John S. Park, people who grew up in that area. Oh, did you really? Yes. I did. My brother did. We probably just didn't catch you. 4 No, you didn't. But there were a lot of us to find. It was interesting because up to that point students went there through eighth grade. Just before I was there, it went to eighth grade and then students went to Las Vegas High School starting in ninth grade, which it has gone back to. But the year that I was going into seventh grade that's when John C. Fremont Junior High School opened up. In fact, Doreen, my best friend?we met originally through BBG [B?Nai B?rith Girls.] She says we met in Bluebirds in North Las Vegas, but I don't remember that. She was going to go to Roy Martin Junior High School because Roy Martin opened up the same year as John C. Fremont. John C. Fremont had its 60th anniversary last year. Doreen was on the borderline and she could have chosen Rancho or Las Vegas High School and she wanted to go to Rancho and the rest of her friends said, "No, you're going to Las Vegas High School." Then her father and mother said, "Yes, you're going to go to Las Vegas High School." So she's resented that even though she loved it. Oh, to this day, huh? She loved it, but still talks about Rancho. What was it like to be young kid and Jewish at that time in the fifties? Oh, it was wonderful. We had one temple on Tenth?I think it's Tenth?off of Fremont, right there. It was great. I went to Sunday school there. We had all kinds of activities. It was about as big as your office, a little bit bigger, and there weren't that many Jewish families that we saw all the time because a lot of them didn't come in until the late fifties and sixties, like the Goodmans didn't come until the sixties. Anyway, it was great. But it was even better when the temple was built on Oakey because it was huge. My father-in-law, who, of course, was not my father-in-law then, was one of the builders on it. And his name is? 5 Harry Herst. He worked for Round-Up Real Estate and Builders. They built quite a few things, Faye Peterson and all that group. So he was the contractor for? No, he wasn't a contractor. He was a subcontractor on that. We loved that temple. It's still my favorite. It's still my favorite. That's where I grew up. Of course, we weren't allowed to go to Hebrew school as girls, but we did go to Sunday school and then we went to Hebrew high school and I was confirmed at sixteen and active in BBG. I wounded up being the BBG president. So, yes, that was my world where my Jewish friends?and still are. So who are some of those people? Name some of those people; that core group of your memories. Jacque Dvorak, who is a couple of years older than I am, but she was my neighbor when we moved to Oakey and Rexford Place. Her father had the barbeque in Market Town. They had been living in L.A. before they came to Las Vegas. Jacque was born in Canada. Gosh, she had to be ten or eleven, yes, because she's two years older and I think we moved to Vegas about at the same time, lived down the street. So, yes. Let's see. The Greenspuns, of course. Brian and I went all through school together, graduated high school together. So, yes, we go back a few years. Valerie Wiener, who was Louie Wiener's daughter. Well, Jacque and Valerie are still very, very close friends. And Jacque, does she still live here? She still lives here, yes. When she was first married, she moved to Minneapolis for a short period of time, but other than that she's lived here forever. In fact, her father was with Circus Circus for a long time. He ran the gift shop there and that was his baby. So all the kids would go over there, their friends, family friends and all these kids and get a little something from him 6 and then the grandkids before he retired. How fun. Yes. So there's a lot of stories that kind of intertwine. But, yes, we had the Danny Kolod Youth Center at the temple and we would go there all the time for dances and we had meetings there. It was really a great place to grow up. Let's see. Who else in my group? Gosh, I should have pulled out all that information. I'm thinking of the ones that I see all the time. You can sort of forget over the years. Sure. But then it's like a reunion every time you get together. It is. Well, Annette Kolod, even though her family was Jewish and the Youth Center was named after her brother Danny; she never really went to BBG. But there were a lot of them. The Kronbergs, Jeanne Kronberg. I just loved them. Did you interview Henry? Yes. Where is Henry? [pointing to photos in Barbara?s office] Oh, there he is. Yes, yes, my board of photos. Yes, that's Henry, yes. I loved them so much. Well, he's still alive. I hear wonderful things about Lily Kronberg as well. Oh my God, she was just fabulous. In fact, nobody knew that she was in the Holocaust because she always wore long sleeves even in the summertime, never talked about it. Then one day she decided, you know what? I'm going to be dead someday and nobody's going to know my story. So that's when we first heard about it and how she survived is the amazing thing. Did Henry talk about that at all? What do you remember about her story? She was a seamstress, a tailor. She was so talented. Even as she got older, she was absolutely 7 magnificent. But as a teenager she was just...Oh, beautiful young girl. But she was a seamstress. So the Nazis needed uniforms or dress clothes or whatever. She was saved because she would make those things for them to stay alive. Having a skill helped. Yes, it really did. So, yes, I can just kind of look around to see who else I remember. Iris Torjman, now, her kids are really good friends with my kids and they were all in Hebrew school together. In fact, her son is still one of my son's friends. Of course, Mark Fine, he wasn't involved in those days, not until he married Susan, but the Greenspun family was?well, we were all close to them growing up and especially at the temple. Now, the Strauses, of course, they were not my age, but Neil and Joyce were real close friends. You started to talk earlier before we started recording about recalling the house where she had the art classes in. Yes. I didn't take any of those classes because I am so bad at art, but she did it...I won't tell you why she started in. That's not my business to say why. But she had a little house built, if it wasn't already there. It might have been a little tool shed that she converted into an art studio. She was bored and she needed an outlet. So she started it. She first started with doing batik work, batik on silk and then puffies with batik. I have two of her pieces still to this day hanging in my house, huge; I mean, wall size. Then when my son was born?my son is adopted from Venezuela. My husband had this huge party for him when we came back from Venezuela. He didn't go to Venezuela; he had to work and take care of our three girls. But my sister-in-law and I went. When we brought him back, he was about five weeks old. It took us that long to get through all the paperwork. They didn't think much of women signing anything. I'm not sure they do today, either. Anyway, my 8 husband had this huge party at our house. He even had a pig stuffed with an apple. That wasn't very kosher. Not hardly. Because of my son being Venezuelan, so he's Latino and my husband's best friends were all Cuban. So they arranged to have all that. Oh, the cantor was not happy. Who was the cantor at the time? It was Cantor Kinnory, who I adored, but he was furious. Then there was the rabbi there that walked out on it. Anyway, Joyce (Straus) made all these clothes and blankets and sheets herself for my son, all in batik yellows and browns. I still have all of those. Oh, how nice. Even to this day and he's thirty-eight years old, yes. So it was a very close Jewish community. Oh, Dennis Kanter, whose parents owned the Lullaby Shop, which was the babies and toddlers store down on Charleston. So he was my husband's best friend. Of course, I knew my husband, but he was so much older; he was four years older. Now, is he from Las Vegas, as well? Yes. He was born in Ogden, Utah, he and his sister, Doreen, was and is my best friend. They were born in Ogden. Their story is an interesting story, how they came in. Their parents had their babies as they traveled across Canada and they had family, an uncle who lived in Utah. As it turns out when they dropped down into the Ogden area from Canada, the uncle was in jail in Montana. Anyway, eventually they moved down to Vegas. They moved here in '50?no?they moved here originally in '53. Then they went back to Utah because they had a furniture store up there and they were getting ready to sell it. So he went back for a year and a half and then came back to Las Vegas in '55. That happened to a lot of people over the years. Is this really what I 9 want? The town was fifty thousand people in town. It was small. It was very, very small. Your neighbors worked in the casino business. So the kids all got together and would play in the street, baseball or whatever, like any small town. Then eventually you did go to UNLV. I started out at the University of Arizona, but kept coming home whenever I could to visit a boyfriend. We would meet here. He went to college in California. We would meet back here in Las Vegas because his family was here. In fact, his father was the superintendent of the schools at that time here. Then he went and became a college president in California. Anyway, my father said, "You come home one more time, you're done." Of course, I was eighteen years old. So I ended up having to come back and then I went to UNLV. Then I got married, not to my boyfriend, but to my best friend's brother and, yes, proceeded to have babies. Then I didn't go back to school and finish until my son, who is the youngest, was a junior in high school. Oh, wow. I was lucky enough to be a stay-at-home mom for years. What kind of business was your husband in? Casino business. He worked at Caesars from...Let's see. They just celebrated their fiftieth. So it would have been forty-nine years ago he started. It was a year old when he started there. He started in baccarat. In fact, he didn't go with the hotel when they first opened because he was learning baccarat at the Aladdin. So a year later he went to work there and he was there until 1983. Then he went to work in Aruba. Then he got involved in drugs and all that over there. It was sad. But you don't need to hear all that stuff in my life. No, that's all right. But life has its hiccups for sure. 10 It does. So I became a single mother of four children in '86. I had to go to work. But it was all the volunteer work that I did here whether it was with my kids or with American Cancer Society. I was on the Temple Beth Sholom Board of Directors and that's how I got my first job. I went to a board meeting one day and I said?this is before I...You know how you sense things are coming? So I sensed things were coming. I said, "I'm looking for a part-time job." Gene Greenberg?and I don't know if you know Gene?he was the general sales manager at Channel 3. So when I said I was looking for a part-time job, he said, "I think we might have one." He started telling me about it after the meeting and he arranged for me to meet with the news director. I met with him a couple of days later and I started the following day. Then when my whole world collapsed?see, I started in December and?no. I started in October. December, my whole world collapsed. And in January they put me on full-time. And what was your job? What were you doing? I was the community affairs director. I started out as what they called a Call 3 Coordinator. Junior League had started the project, like they do; this was consumer-related. People would call with a consumer problem. My staff, a volunteer staff?at that time a lot of them were from Junior League and then expanded to seniors and all of that after that?we would have lists of places for them to contact with whatever their problem was. Then the news department would do stories on some of them, which was always nice. But it was good for the TV station and it was good for the consumer. I did that for quite a while even after I became the community affairs director. So I was doing both. Then we turned that over to somebody else at the station. It eventually ended because the questions that people were calling about changed from consumer oriented to social service oriented. Why do you think that was happening? 11 Just things change over the years. Especially in the eighties, we hit a mild recession, compared to what we've just had. So people were struggling. So we did get all the information that people needed. But because of that whole switch over, I started a group called Community Projects Board and we had about forty nonprofits come together once a month. Some of the nonprofits never even knew the others existed and many were dealing with the same issues. It wound up being like a social services board and met once a month in the studio. A lot of times there was a camera going. We would just listen to the conversation and see what the issues are that people are asking about and who can handle some of those issues. The news department, of course, could get stories and solutions from them. So the news department is sort of just eavesdropping on this conversation. Yes, yes. But you weren't televising it or anything like that. They were. They started doing segments about each of these nonprofits whether it was American Lung Association or Clark County Social Services or Catholic Community Service, Lutheran Social Services for instance. It didn't make any difference if they were religious based or not. You had to be nonprofits, of course. We even started delving into substance abuse and healthcare issues. So it was a lot of really interesting information. What was your degree in? Communication studies major and political science minor. So you were perfect for that. I was absolutely?oh, no, I didn't have my degree at that time. Oh, you didn't. 12 No. This was in the eighties. I didn't get my degree until '95. It's one of the reasons I got my degree in what I did because I had originally been a political science major and then a theater major. So I was struggling with what I wanted to do when I grew up. Theater was really my passion, not acting, but all the backstage stuff. So doing all this work at the TV station fulfilled that kind of backstage need. I tell you, I made so many contacts because of it. I mean, it was amazing. The fact that some of these people didn't even know the other agencies existed to me was the biggest kudo for me that I could bring them together. A lot of them are still together. Did the station feel that it was providing a good community service? Yes. Yes, absolutely. And the fact that they could get some stories out of it. And some of the stories were really newsworthy, not your fluff pieces, really newsworthy stories. One of the agencies was the Clark County Health District; they had an AIDS coordinator. That was right in the beginning of the eighties. In fact, he just retired, Rick Reich, just retired. He'd been there forever. I think he was the first director they ever had. So they did a lot of stories about AIDS. We had a health reporter in those days and that was something that she really wanted to do. Then a good friend of my mother and father?s?their youngest son was gay, but we didn't know it at that time, not that any of us would have cared, but we just didn't know it. He ended up dying of AIDS and he worked for one of the federal senators at the time. The station wanted?that was news they wanted to do. They wanted to attend the funeral and I said, "Absolutely not. You have to respect the parents." I literally stopped them at the cemetery. I thought, oh, I'll be in such trouble. When I went back to the station, of course, the news director knew what I did because all the reporters were just furious with me. But it wasn't just my camera. I was keeping the other cameras away, too, from the other stations. He called me in his office. I thought, oh, shit, I'm 13 fired, right? He said, "That was a great thing you did and I back you up." That's very courageous, yes. They were family friends. They never admitted their son was gay. At that time in history, what a stigma. It really was a stigma. So where did all that lead you? I was recruited by Sierra Health Services in ?97. I had been at the station almost thirteen years. I was recruited by Sierra Health Services to work in their public relations department by Jenny Devaux-Oaks, I had worked with over the years. She had come to some of my community projects board meetings. She liked what I was doing and they were sponsors of a lot of our big projects that Channel 3 did. One was Baby Your Baby, which was a prenatal education and outreach program, which originally had come from Utah. Vanguard Communications, out of Salt Lake City, contacted our general manager and when I returned from a conference, he said, "Charlene, what do you think about this? Read this." I was leaving again to go somewhere else. So I read the whole portfolio literally of what Baby Your Baby is. When I came back I said, "We have to do this." What was it? What was Baby Your Baby? It was getting women in early for prenatal care even if they didn't have a funding source, which means we had to go get sponsors. So Sunrise Hospital became a sponsor as well as Sierra Health Services. Then the State became a sponsor. The State set up a hot line. It was an incredible program, incredible program. Were you personally responsible for getting these sponsors? Yes?no, I worked with the sales department. Sales had to do that, but I worked with them. I 14 went to every single meeting where they were recruiting, brought them into the station, wined and dined them, so to speak. So I talked about the project. So it was very, very exciting. I had never worked with the State before. So that was exciting to me that the State was interested in a private partnership especially with a TV station. The State had never done that before, ever. So that was very exciting for the time. That was end of 1989, beginning of...We really worked on it through all of 1990 and '91, and I think it was just after the Fourth of July in '92 that everything was in place and we could on air with it. What was the reaction? Did you get feedback from the community? It was fabulous. In fact, Sunrise Hospital said, "We need to get UMC involved with this because these are really, really destitute women and UMC is the County Hospital." They didn't want anything to do with it until it became successful and then they came knocking on our door. Too late. Too late. You had your shot. You had your shot. You blew it. But UMC has been doing that over the years. That's not the first time that that has happened with anything. Sunrise Hospital still does it. Now that Sierra Health Services is part of United Health, I don't know what they have other than for their own insurees. But Sunrise still does it. Anne Lynch was the big push on that one and she has since retired. Anyway, that was a great success. The State still has a prenatal hotline and referral system. The other thing that we did...Now, we were really cutting edge. Jim Rogers, who was the owner of Channel 3, banned smoking in the building, and then one of our anchors was a big-time smoker. So she was smoking out by the back door and Jim banned smoking on the Channel 3 campus; smokers had to go to their cars or off campus. Oh, so he really pushed it out. He pushed it. So we said, "Wait a minute, why don't we start a non-smoking campaign?" We 15 came up with names and we were working with...Well, it was Mothers Against Drunk Driving at the time, but it was Sandy Heverly, who is now Stop DUI, she had talked about smoking needs to?because I think her husband had a couple of heart attacks. To this day, Sandy is a true advocate. So we would go to Sandy?s meetings, and to my Community Project Board, and we'd bring these subjects up. So we started a campaign called Smoking Stinks. We did a lot of public service announcements, but Sierra Health Services was one of our sponsors on that as well. They set up smoking cessation classes. Then there were others around town, some of them drug and alcohol rehab centers also started smoking cessation classes, such as Westcare. Because of Baby Your Baby and Smoking Stinks, I