Transcript of interview with Colleen Gregory by Tim Waters, April 6 & 7, 1976

UNLV University Libraries Colleen Gregory i An Interview with Colleen Gregory An Oral History Conducted by Timothy Waters Ralph Roske Oral History Project on Early Las Vegas Special Collections and Archives Oral History Research Center University Libraries University of Nevada, Las Vegas UNLV University Libraries Colleen Gregory ii © Ralph Roske Oral History Project on Early Las Vegas University of Nevada, Las Vegas, 2018 UNLV University Libraries Colleen Gregory iii The Oral History Research Center (OHRC) was formally established by the Board of Regents of the University of Nevada System in September 2003 as an entity of the UNLV University Libraries’ Special Collections Division. The OHRC conducts oral interviews with individuals who are selected for their ability to provide first-hand observations on a variety of historical topics in Las Vegas and Southern Nevada. The OHRC is also home to legacy oral history interviews conducted prior to its establishment including many conducted by UNLV History Professor Ralph Roske and his students. This legacy interview transcript received minimal editing, such as 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. The interviewee/narrator was not involved in the editing process. UNLV University Libraries Colleen Gregory iv Abstract On April 6 and 7, 1976, Tim Waters interviewed Colleen Gregory (born 1928 in Santa Clara, Utah) about her life in Southern Nevada. Gregory first talks about her original move to Las Vegas, her early education, school activities, and her college education. She also talks about the first banks, Helldorado, the atomic testing, and environmental changes. Other topics covered include Howard Hughes, Western-style influences, first properties on the Strip, World War II, racial prejudice, and changes she has noticed during her career in banking. UNLV University Libraries Colleen Gregory 1 This tape is part of the oral history project in Southern Nevada History conducted by the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The subject interviewed is Mrs. Colleen Gregory, 2301 Van Patten. Mrs. Gregory is forty-seven years old, her telephone number is 735-1524. She moved to Las Vegas in 1941. The interview is conducted by Tim Waters on April 6th, 1976. Why did you and your family come here? We moved here because my father obtained employment here, and in 1940 and ’41, employment was pretty hard to come by. We moved here from Southern Utah, from Santa Clara, Utah, a very small farming community, and my father was a farmer, and jobs were very limited. What jobs did your father have after he moved here? My father went to work at the El Rancho Hotel, which, at that time, was the only hotel on the Strip—well, there was no Strip—out on Highway 91, and he stayed there until the Last Frontier opened, which was the second hotel out there. And then he moved as the head gardener and landscaper of the Frontier Hotel and stayed there—I’ve forgotten how many years—until the Tropicana opened, and he went out there and was in charge of the grounds out there until he retired in 1973. What schools did you attend in Southern Nevada, and are they still there? I started school in 1941 at the Fifth Street Grammar School, which is on Las Vegas Boulevard South and is now owned by the county—the long, low buildings that are adjacent to the federal building. And we had the graduation from eighth grade there, and then I went into Las Vegas High School. At that time, I believe there were approximately three grammar schools that went up through maybe the third or fourth grade. There was one on Westside and one in North Las Vegas, and then the Fifth Street Grammar School, which went through the eighth grade. Anyone who got past the third or fourth grade then came to the grammar school on Fifth Street, and we UNLV University Libraries Colleen Gregory 2 all went to school together. There was only the one high school: Las Vegas High School on Seventh, and it’s still there. And it has three floors, and we took all of our studies there, except for P.E., and we had our separate building for any physical activities. And then also they had the shop for the boys. And anytime we had an assembly, since we didn’t have a regular auditorium, we had to walk the two blocks back to the Fifth Street Grammar School auditorium, and there we held any kind of plays or assemblies or anything of that nature. And it was amazing—we had some three hundred-and-some students in high school at that time, and we rarely lost any walking to and from the assemblies. Everybody participated and they went and came back to classes if there was classes afterward. Was discipline more severe than today? I think the discipline was not so severe—well, it may have been severe, but we accepted it. For instance, if you were rowdy in class or unruly, the teacher simply sent you down to the principal’s office, and you went. There was no question of the, you trying to duck out or say you wouldn’t go or sass the teacher—that just was not acceptable. And you went down to the principal’s office and he talked to you and they took disciplinary action. I don’t ever recall of anyone ever getting hit or beat or anything physical, but they could expel you for a day or two. And you were humiliated to have your classmates and your friends know that you had actually been expelled. It seemed like we had a very good rapport with the teachers. The whole classroom—we seemed to get along very well—we had a closeness. Well, the school was small—three hundred-and-some students. And we went from the ninth grade through the twelfth. And so you knew everyone in school; you knew their older brothers and their younger brothers and sisters coming up, you knew their parents because the people in business in the town was small. And if there was really an accident or a tragedy or something of that nature in school, UNLV University Libraries Colleen Gregory 3 everyone was concerned. And by the same token, school elections were very exciting. Everyone participated. You were for a candidate or you were against them. But there was never anything derogatory said about any candidate. It was all really pleasant, and whoever won, you were always very pleased. It was a very nice atmosphere. It was nice to go there—you felt good there. One of my biggest problems in high school was not that fact that I love to talk so much, because I still do that, but that fact that I couldn’t stop laughing, and I had one girlfriend, who was especially close to me, Norma Anderson, and she and I would get in classes together, and we would laugh and the teacher would say, “All right, Colleen, go on out and stand in the hall until you feel like you can come in.” And I’d stand out in the hallway and giggle, and the principal would come by and he’d say, “Oh, Colleen, not again.” And I would just burst out laughing, and the teacher would come to the door and she’d say, “If you’re ready to come back in now, we’d be happy to have you,” and I would either go back in knowing that I was able to sit down and concentrate, or I’d stay out in the hall.” Was there any interscholastic sports competition? Oh, yes. Sports were really great, and our biggest rival was Ely, Nevada, which I assume had about the same size school as we did, but that was the name that we learned in all of our pep songs—BO Ely—and we also played Boulder City and Needles, and some of the smaller schools in California. And the enthusiasm was very contagious in all these games. All the kids turned out for all the games, and there was a lot of cheering, and we had, sometimes we would charter buses to go to out-of-state games, even in California. Do you remember any outstanding teachers? One in particular: Sally Riggs, who was our English teacher, and I think had it not been for her, I would never have gone on to college. She was the most fair teacher I’ve ever known in my life. UNLV University Libraries Colleen Gregory 4 If you were—and like I say, she taught English and English Literature, and when I went to high school, you didn’t have to take but three years of English. Senior English was an option, and if a student was just very poor in English, but tried, she gave them a grade for that effort. Where English was my major and I always got excellent grades in English, but in order to get an “A,” I always had to do something extra. I had to do an extra book report, or I had to—if it was memorization, we did an awful lot of memorization of Shakespeare and some of the other great literary giants. And if it was any memorization, then I had to memorize, like, half as much as someone else, or I wouldn’t get an A. And if you had problems, she was always anxious to stop and talk to you. She taught me that if I was going to read, and I’ve always been avid reader all my life, to read things that were worthwhile—not to waste my time on trash. And that has stayed with me all my life. If I find that something is below my moral standards or if it just doesn’t appeal to me in some way that I’m not going to get anything out of it, then I just don’t waste my time reading it. I pick up something that I’m going to enjoy, and it has some benefit to me. And because she inspired me to do something with my knowledge or my intellect, I decided to go on to college. And I never have had an opportunity to thank her for what she did for me. How about school activities? Well, our school activities were certainly very different from what they are now. And it required participation of almost everyone. And like I say, it was a small school, and nearly everyone was happy to participate. We had pep rallies, and our pep rallies were really interesting, especially when you consider what Las Vegas is like today, because we used to get everybody to go out into the desert. And the desert was over where St. Anne’s School is—that was the end of town, and we used to have big bonfires and pep rallies there—and then afterward, we’d have a snake dance up Fremont Street. And we would just run up and down the street holding hands. And they UNLV University Libraries Colleen Gregory 5 would just stop traffic—the policemen were always most cooperative with the high school. And we would sometimes take a hayrack up Fremont Street, and everybody yelling and hollering and singing the school songs. And they stopped traffic and let us go through—it never seemed to bother them, because we didn’t do anything really destructive or anything that could be misconstrued as harmful to anyone. What did you use to wear to school? Most of the time while I was in high school, it was skirts and blouses and sweaters, and we wore pullover sweaters with a blouse underneath so the collar showed, and it would be a long pointed collar—a full skirt, and it came just below our knees. And bobby socks and saddle oxfords—even the boys wore saddle oxfords. Boys wore saddle oxfords, and they wore corduroys that were so filthy that they could stand alone, and it was really an embarrassment for a boy if his mother washed his corduroys, and he had to come to school in clean corduroys. And the boys also wore sweaters and shirts. Where did you use to go on dates? Well, since, in those days, there weren’t that many boys that had their own automobiles, we had to rely mostly on weekends when they could take their dad’s car, and most of our dates were through high school activities or church activities. The churches in town that sponsored any type of youth activity had nearly all the kids in school going there. The Mormon church had a beautiful formal dance every Christmastime, and it was by invitation only, and they invited just about everybody in high school. And those invitations were really cherished, and the kids would come to this dance from all over in the Las Vegas area. And we had beautiful times at those dances. Other than that, we went to the movies, and oftentimes, we would just walk to and from, or the boy would come get you on the bicycle, and we’d park the bicycle at the movie house. At UNLV University Libraries Colleen Gregory 6 that time, there were only two movie theaters in town anyway. There was the El Portal, which is still where it was then on Fremont Street between Third and Fourth, and then the Palace Theatre, which is across from the courthouse on Second Street—it’s now called the Guild. And it was just the only two movie theaters, so you either went to one of the movies or somebody’s house or to some school activity. Where and when did you go to college? I started college in 1946 at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, when I went two years. Was it an oddity for a girl to attend college then? Not an oddity, but the percentage of girls that went was not great. I went all the way through the eighth grade through about a junior in high school with six girls, and we were very close friends. And then when it came time for our senior year, I was the only one that graduated, and I was the only one that had any college at all. Why did you leave school? Well, I came home for summer vacation, and I started to work for First National Bank. And in those days, they just hired you off the street. You just went in and asked for a job, and they just hired you. So I worked that summer, and I enjoyed it so much that I stayed there for a little over two years until I met my husband. I trained him as a bank teller, and we got married from there, and then I stayed home with my family for ten years, and went back to work with First National Bank of Nevada, and I have been back for, now, fifteen-and-a-half years. How many banks were there in town when you first went to work for one? There were only two banks—not branch banks. We had First National Bank on the alleyway between Fremont Street and Carson Street, and Bank of Nevada on the corner of Second and Fremont where The Mint hotel is now. UNLV University Libraries Colleen Gregory 7 Where have you lived? When we first moved here, we lived out on Umbar Ranch, which is now the corner of Decatur and Arville. But when we came down here in ’41, it was a winding road through the desert, and it just seemed like it took forever to get out there. It was past the county hospital, and the roads were not paved. And boy, when the wind blew, it was really a mess. The Umbar Ranch had about five or seven artesian wells on, as I recall, it had three houses, and a lot of acreage. And it had its own swimming pool, which was really a unique thing. Then we moved from there to West Side, and we lived over there for a year. Then we moved over on South Main Street, and then my folks bought a home in Huntridge, which opened in about 1944, ’45, which was the first tract of homes built in Las Vegas. And that was really out in the desert—they had cleared all sorts of desert to build that tract. And our home now is about a block-and-a-half north of Sahara, and when we moved out here in 1954, it was desert all around this, and my cousin was very upset to think that I would live out in the desert, and I just wish I had bought a little of this desert. The Sahara Avenue was called San Francisco at that time and was just kind of a little dirt trail; it was not passable by cars. And as a matter of fact, neither was St. Lewis because that was not oil; that was a gravel road at that time. Did you get married in Las Vegas? Yes, I was married in Las Vegas at a wedding chapel, and that was in September of 1950, so I’ve been married almost twenty-six years to the same husband. That’s not a record, but it’s better than average. Was a Vegas marriage as popular for out-of-staters then as it is now? UNLV University Libraries Colleen Gregory 8 Well, I think so. People always came to Las Vegas to get married, and of course the desert wasn’t so hot to drive across as it is now, and they would come up overnight and get married and go back the next day. Do you remember any particularly special events? Well, I remember when Bugsy Siegel opened the Flamingo Hotel, and people were very concerned because he was a gambler. And I think that was one of the first times that the mafia was actually brought out in public, so to speak. And I worked out there for a very short time one summer between school and summer vacation. And every time you make an error, they’d say, “Well, you’re going to wind up in the pool in the morning with cement boots on.” And one of the things that I remember very vividly was when the Golden Nugget opened Downtown, and I think that was in probably 1945 or ’46, and it was such a beautiful plush casino for the Downtown area, and so many lights. And the inside was down really different than anything we’d seen Downtown, that everyone was very impressed with that. How much has Helldorado Week changed since you moved here, first noticed it? Well, when I came here, they were having their sixth annual Helldorado, and I think this year it’s the forty-first or forty-second. But that that was an even that the whole town looked forward to and participated in. But then of course, like we’re saying, at that time, there were maybe, we started out with maybe 5,000 people and when we got up to 25- to 50,000, there was still much enthusiasm and a lot of participation because that many people can participate. And everyone dressed in Western clothing, and they would block off a block of Fremont Street between First and Second Street on Fremont, and they had Kangaroo Court. And anyone that came down there that wasn’t wearing a button was thrown in jail and appeared before a judge, and you had to pay a fine for not wearing a button, and he would fine you maybe a dollar or two dollars. And I UNLV University Libraries Colleen Gregory 9 remember when I was in high school, and I had gone down without a button on—I was thrown in jail, and one of the airmen from the airbase bailed me out. And so then I had to go with him for the evening. And I also participated in a burro race down Fremont Street. And we had street dances. And they’d go out on the Strip in these crazy little cars and pick the guests up out of the lobbies and bring them Downtown to be fined. But it was all in such good fun, I don’t think anyone ever really got angry. I suppose if the guest put up any kind of a fuss at the hotels that they wouldn’t bring them in. But the hotels themselves were very casual. It was a come-as-you-are atmosphere. And they really enforced it—they didn’t care if you came in in boots and had—they wanted you to come Western, and most people did. But the thing that I miss most about Helldorado was the Beauty Parade, because all the casinos and all the hotels tried to outdo each other on the floats, and we had some of the most beautiful floats you can imagine. And especially out here in the desert, it seems so unique to see these gorgeous floats, and after the Beauty Parade was over, then they’d put the floats over on Bonanza between North Main Street and Las Vegas Boulevard because, at that time, Bonanza didn’t go any further than Las Vegas Boulevard. And they would park all these floats over there so the townspeople could go around and really check them over. But the casinos then would hire or rent costumes in the (unintelligible) era for all their employees, and everyone wore the little short skirts and the cute little hats—the girls—and the guys wore the Western with the ruffle-y shirts, because those were very uncommon back in the early forties. And even the high school kids always wore Western clothes to school—everybody in town seemed to really be enthusiastic and do something about it. Do you remember anything about the early atomic tests and how you and your friends felt about having them here? UNLV University Libraries Colleen Gregory 10 I certainly do remember the tests, and I remember that we got up early and went out on the Tonopah Highway to watch the blast and to see the mushroom—that familiar sight—and after having seen it on television and in the newspapers, it was awesome. It was spectacular. And I had no qualms about living in an area where they were blasting the atomic bomb because I figured that it was well-controlled, and if it isn’t, well, you’re going to die from one thing or another anyway, and I just never did waste my time worrying about it. Do you remember anything about the trains in the 1940s or ‘50s? Having come from a very small town, the trains were just fascinating to us, and for a Sunday afternoon, we used to go down to the railroad depot and watch the big trains come in. I think my dad used to call them a Mallory because they had huge wheels on the side—huge wheels—and I don’t remember seeing any steam engines come through. I guess that was before my time, but these were all diesel engines. So we go down to the train station, and then we’d sit on the lawn there at the depot after we’d watch—well, we knew the schedules, and we’d wait from one to the other when we’d sit on the lawn and wait. Was there an airport in those days? Yes, we had McCarran Airport out by Nellis Air Force Base, which in those days was called Las Vegas Army Airbase. And then in the latter part of the forties, it moved out to Highway 91, way out past the Strip. As a matter of fact, the airport now is in back of the McCarran Airport that moved on the Strip, because that was before we had the jets, and they had to have the long runways and everything. And that’s Hughes’s airport now, I think—a little private airport. Have you noticed any changes in the environment in Southern Nevada? Tremendously so. It used to be that the sun was shining clear every morning. We didn’t ever see this smog layer that you see in the valley now, or when the wind blew, it didn’t have to blow any UNLV University Libraries Colleen Gregory 11 dirt out—it blew it all in, but it didn’t blow it out. And I’ve noticed that when I first lived here, we had a swamp cooler which was no more than a fan in a burlap-covered box in a window, and you just took the hose out and wet down the burlap, that kept the room cool. You had it only in one room, because in the evenings, after the sun went down, the desert really cooled off. And we just turned off the fan and opened the windows and the door and everybody slept with their windows open. And if you went out in the evening to a movie or to any kind of a social event or just for a ride, you always took a sweater because you never knew whether you might need it after dark, because the desert was cool. I’ve found that since the town has gotten so large and there’s so much irrigation for the lawns and everybody has a pool in their backyard that there is so much more humidity, because it used to be in the summertime, we’d have maybe, oh, two or three days—no more than a week of high humidity. And the humidity used to stay at about six percent, so that even in the summer when it was 114 outside, you could go sit outside in the shade. We used to have a lawn swing under a tree, and I could go sit out in the swing any day, and it never really bothered me because it didn’t seem that hot in the shade. We have always had a problem with floods in the summer, the flash floods, and I remember going down to the El Portal Theatre for a matinee on a Saturday afternoon and coming out and finding the water clear up over the sidewalk, and we just had to stand there in the entrance of the theater and wait until the water subsided, till our parents could come get us. And this, apparently, they haven’t done too much toward correcting that, ‘cause we still have the same problem. Downtown on Las Vegas Boulevard South and Fremont, on the northeast corner, was a public swimming pool called The Mermaid. And when I was in high school, if you took a swimming class, you walked over from Seventh Street to Fifth Street to the swimming pool and took your swimming classes and then walked back to school. But this was a public pool and open to anyone that wanted to go UNLV University Libraries Colleen Gregory 12 there. And it was no rarity to be Downtown shopping and see all your friends over at the pool having a real good time and splashing around. This ends side one of the tape, and you can now slip over to side two. [Audio ends] Do you remember anything about Howard Hughes and his influence in Las Vegas? I remember one of the biggest influences Howard Hughes had on the growth of Las Vegas was the fact that before he purchased a property here in Las Vegas, it was almost impossible to obtain out-of-state financing. The large companies back east were always afraid of gambling and thought we would collapse one of these days. And after Howard Hughes purchased the land and the hotels, it became much easier to obtain large financing out of state because people knew that Howard Hughes wasn’t going to invest his money anywhere where he wasn’t going to make a profit. And it helped the economy tremendously because he purchased land all over in the valley, and he paid cash for it, and of course, when you’ve got that cash in all the accounts, people were able to do all sorts of things with it, make more investments, and it really helped the whole area—the whole state, actually. It was very good; most people, I think, were very pleased that he came in. Was the area more Western in lifestyle in the forties and fifties? Very much so. Of course, you have to realize that it was a smaller community. We were a much friendlier people then, and the come-as-you-are slogan seemed to permeate nearly anything. People could go to any of the hotels on the Strip in very casual clothes. Western clothes were kind of encouraged, because that’s the type of town we wanted in those days. And men going out to the shows were not expected to wear ties or suits—just a shirt and slacks and cowboy boots if they wanted, and a cowboy hat. And social functions also were not really mandatory as far as UNLV University Libraries Colleen Gregory 13 formal dress went. I think in the business world, in banking, and the store clerks used to dress more formally, but then that was to be expected. But in the casinos, nearly all of them dressed Western style. The people were very friendly; everywhere you went, everyone was very friendly, but again, I feel that this was because it was a small town, maybe 50,000 people. Before it really started to boom, you knew so many people in town in all walks of life, and you didn’t’ have all the big apartment buildings, and you knew your neighbors, even though they worked different shifts. It was more of a settled area than the transient element we now have. Were the hotels friendlier in those days? I very definitely think so. It had more of a small town atmosphere, and even as high school students, going out to a hotel for dinner, it was still a big event. But we were never treated as adolescents, and the floor shows were always rated G—anyone could go to them. There was never anything that was said or that was done that was not acceptable for a whole family. And when we went out there, even if there was just two of us on a date or if there were six or eight of us in a group going, we were always treated very cordially, and the waitresses were especially friendly. And we always felt very welcome there. Everyone just seemed to go out of their way to make you feel good. And like I say, the atmosphere was always very warm and friendly and, I guess, like a small town. Do you remember any of the old hotels on the Strip? I can remember three of them quite well: the El Rancho, the Last Frontier, and the Flamingo. Those were the first three that were open in Las Vegas, and of those three, the Last Frontier is the one that stands out most in my memory. And that was created like an Old Western hotel. It had huge stone from this area that was made into a beautiful fireplace right in the middle of the lobby and during Christmas, especially, they would go up to Mt. Charleston and, with a permit, UNLV University Libraries Colleen Gregory 14 cut down a huge tree that would extend up to the second floor balcony. And this would placed next to this gorgeous old fireplace in which a fire was always burning. And the tree was beautifully decorated. The floors had rugs on—they were wooden floors with rugs down—nor carpeting, at least like we see today, wall-to-wall carpeting, they didn’t have that. But they did have rugs with a more of an Indian motif weaved in them. And the railings, the banisters, going up to the second floor were just logs, trees, whatever you call them, poles. And the interior of the lobby of the Last Frontier did resemble something very old and out of the West. They had several of the Texas Longhorns hanging in the lobby, and they had several old wagons, Western wagons, right out in front of the hotel. And because the traffic was so slim in those days, Highway 91 was just a never-ending road into Los Angeles—dips and curves, and it just went on and on. There was very little traffic out on what we now know as the Strip, which was Highway 91. And the Last Frontier had their swimming pool right out by the highway, right out in front of the casino. And they had this railing fence around it, and climbing roses were growing around the fence, and it was beautifully landscaped. But no one ever seemed self-conscious about lying out next to the street around the pool, simply because there was no on to stare or stop or whatever. There just wasn’t that much traffic. And there again, the atmosphere was extremely relaxed. They did have bus boys who came out by the pool and brought food and drinks, but there was never any hustle or bustle—people always felt like they could just sit and enjoy the sun. And the same was true inside the lobby of the hotels. If you wanted to go out and just look around, they had big couches and lounge chairs, and here again, they were usually oversized, because it was supposed to have the Western motif, but you were more than welcome to just go in and sit down and watch people come and go. You didn’t have to worry about making reservations to go to a dinner show in those days, because there just wasn’t that much demand to UNLV University Libraries Colleen Gregory 15 see the shows. And with these three hotels, the shows change every two weeks on alternate Thurdays. And for the price of a sandwich and a cup of coffee or a piece of pie—whatever you wanted—you could go to the late show and we saw every show in town every time they changed. And we saw some of the entertainers who were just starting. Liberace is a good example; I remember very well when he first came here how impressed we were with his artistry, and now he is advanced so far that I don’t even get to see him, but I remember when he started. And there was much more audience participation at the shows. I mean, it wasn’t just clapping. You were very enthusiastic to see something entertaining because, out here in the desert, we didn’t have that much, and there sometime would be stomping and Western yahoos at the end. And it was always very pleasant to go; you just thoroughly enjoyed your evening out. What do you remember about World War II in Nevada? Well, I remember that it brought in an awful lot of people. They opened Las Vegas Army Airfield, which is now a permanent base, Nellis Air Force Base, and this was our gunnery range. And it brought in an awful lot of people and military people, and in turn, they brought their families with them. And so that created quite an era of prosperity for Las Vegas. And also, one of the things that I remmeber vividly is the fact that, to cross Boulder Dam, the dam itself, you were not allowed to just drive through. They had a military patrol or a governmental patrol—I really can’t remmeber because at that time I was twelve years old—but they stopped you about, I would say, five miles this side of the dam itself. And you lined up in a convoy, and there was one guard in the front and one at the end of the convoy, and they took you all the way across the dam clear up over the hill into the Arizona side before you were allowed to continue on your own. There was never any stopping on the dam. If you’d never seen it before, they were sorry, but you could not stop and look over, because that dam at that time supplied the power for this area and UNLV University Libraries Colleen Gregory 16 nearly all of Southern California where they had the military bases and the war plants that were building the planes and ships. So, it was, of course, very important that they kept this from being attacked or sabotaged, and this, of cou