Transcript of interview with John Wanderer by Barbara Tabach, May 9, 2016 and May 18, 2016

AN INTERVIEW WITH JOHN WANDERER 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 Community Digital 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 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 John Paul Wanderer is a retired Las Vegas, Nevada attorney. The son of groundbreaking female attorney Emilie Wanderer, he moved to Las Vegas from New York with his mother and two brothers in 1946. He attended the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and earned a Bachelor of Science degree, then graduated from Arizona State University School of Law in 1974. That same year, Wanderer joined his mother?s practice, and the two established their own practice in Las Vegas, Wanderer & Wanderer. Wanderer closed his firm in 2014 after forty years of practice. In this interview, Wanderer talks about his first career in auto mechanics and car racing, which developed out of a childhood passion, and eventually took him to Charlotte, North Carolina working for Holman and Moody. He then discusses the decision to move back to Las Vegas with wife, Dorothy (Dottie), to pursue his legal career. Wanderer reflects at length about his mother?s trailblazing legal career, and working with her as legal partners. In addition, Wanderer discusses politics, including his observations from the 2016 Democratic State Convention and running for Democratic Party National Committeeman. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Interview with John Wanderer on May 9 and May 18, 2016 by Barbara Tabach in Las Vegas, Nevada Preface?????????????????????????????????..?..iv SESSION I Talks about moving to Las Vegas with mother and brothers; mother becoming first female practicing attorney in city; settling into home in Huntridge area, near an artesian well and lake. Mentions mother defending Billy Moses, then becoming counsel for the local NAACP chapter. Discusses own interest in and path to becoming lawyer; mother running for office as a judge. Remarks about mother?s house built next to Wilbur Clark?s on Desert Inn Country Club...?1-12 Reflects on getting into auto mechanics and race cars as a teenager; drag racing around town. Talks about moving to Chicago as high school senior; continuing his passion for racing cars; graduating high school, attending University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and then dropping out and then working on race car for Pabst Brewery family. Elaborates on subsequent career working on race cars, eventually working for Holman and Moody in North Carolina???13-23 Chats about his Jewish heritage; family history; reconnecting with paternal side of family in New York; mother?s siblings and influencing her to pursue legal career. Recounts number of mother?s legal cases, including precedent setting ones. Returns to discussing career in auto sector, working different positions for Holman and Moody, working closely with Ford Motor Company, until the business changed focus from race cars to trucks, and resigned??...?.24-34 Talks about moving back to Las Vegas and graduating from UNLV; attending law school in Arizona; summer internship in Washington, D.C.; returning to Las Vegas and goes into partnership with mother???????????????????????????35-38 SESSION II Talks about wife, Dottie, and her involvement in the Las Vegas community; children?s education at Hebrew Academy, then The Meadows School; involvement with Democratic Party, including vi a detailed description of the 2016 Democratic Party State Convention and its complications, controversy, between Clinton and Sanders supporters??????????????.....39-50 Shares more details about legal career, working as law partners with mother; mother?s dedication to helping people with her services; growing his firm after mother?s retirement. Discusses his mother?s gift to UNLV?s Boyd School of Law; his children and their interests, upbringing and education????????????????????????????????...51-71 Discusses more about mother?s trailblazing legal career; running for judgeships; representing NAACP; living in Chicago as young professional; moving to San Diego later in life. Mentions firm?s commercial collection work; involvement with Commercial Law League????...72-81 Reflects upon party politics, locally and nationally; running for Democratic Party National Committeeman. Talks about closing law firm??????????????????.82-89 Index........................................................................................................................................90-91 1 Session I Today is May 9, 2016. This is Barbara Tabach. I am sitting with John Wanderer in his home in Las Vegas, Nevada, as part of the Southern Nevada Jewish Heritage project. John, spell your name for us first. J-O-H-N. Middle name is Paul, P-A-U-L, but I just use the initial P. And the last name is Wanderer, W-A-N-D-E-R-E-R. There's so many different starting points here with your story, but your mother's story is probably the one that comes up in Las Vegas history because of her groundbreaking legal career. Obviously, she had some influence over you; you became an attorney as well. What do you remember about moving to Las Vegas? Tell us a little bit about family heritage, the foundation and relocating here. My mother, my two brothers and myself came to Las Vegas in the summer of 1946. My mother drove across country in her 1938 Ford. We came from Yonkers, New York. My mother was an attorney; my father was a practicing physician. My middle brother, Phillip Wanderer, was an asthmatic and was terribly ill in New York. The doctors told my mother that she needed to get him out of that climate and get him to a dry climate. So my mother abandoned her legal practice in New York; put my two brothers and myself and some belongings in her car and drove west. It was in the summer, so she took the northern route and we ended up in Yellowstone Park in the middle of the night. The story was related to me that?because I don't exactly remember it personally; I was six years old?that it was stormy and bad weather when she pulled into the Yellowstone Lodge and went inside. They didn't have any rooms available, but she refused to leave and sat down with us in the lobby of the lodge. At that point management went and found some cots for us to sleep on. So we spent the night there. When 2 we left there, apparently, we came down through Utah. I remember that my brother Phillip and I?I don't remember whether it was myself or which of my brothers?but we were apparently fighting in the front seat of the car and it caused my mother to drive off the road and damage the engine in the car. We ended up in a little town, in Moab, Utah, I believe. We spent a few days there while the mechanics rebuilt the engine on the car. Apparently, it knocked the oil pan off the car and the engine burnt up, but that was all taken care of. Then we found our way into Las Vegas. We were actually headed to Phoenix, Arizona; it?s where my mother intended to go. We got to Las Vegas. We stayed at the little motel on the southeast corner of Gass and Las Vegas Boulevard, and I can't remember the name of it. I don't think it's still there. But my brother got severely ill again and was in the hospital here in Las Vegas. At that point, the doctor, Dr. [Harry] Fightlin, who became the family doctor and was a member of the Jewish community, told my mother not to go to Phoenix because there was a lot of humidity there because of all the irrigation. With that, she decided to stay in Las Vegas and make a living, study for the bar exam, take the bar here and practice law, which is what she did. She was admitted in 1947. That was a milestone for women lawyers, correct? It was. There were no women practicing law in Las Vegas. There were fifteen lawyers, as I understand it, or fourteen, and she would have been the fifteenth or whatever. I was told at one point in time that there was another woman who passed the bar here that lived here with her husband, but it's my understanding that she never actually practiced law here, never had an office. I think we left off with the fact that my brother was in the hospital and we decided not to go to Phoenix?my mother decided. We stayed in the motel for a while. I guess my brother got out of 3 hospital. My mother ultimately ended up buying a home in the Huntridge subdivision; the address was 1325 Franklin Avenue. I recently met a young man; he's a teacher here in Clark County who bought that home. I found the deed to the home in my mother's papers and I presented him with the deed where my mother had bought that home originally. Oh, how wonderful that is. Wow. That's six blocks from where I live now, so I haven't gotten very far. But she looked for work here as an attorney. She was admitted to practice in New York in 1932. She would tell me that she would go into law offices seeking a job as a law clerk and all they were interested in was in how fast she could type. And that was here? That was here in Las Vegas because there were no women practicing attorneys here. It was a small town at that time, too, right? I understand there was roughly 22,000 people in the city and surrounding area because the city is not very large. So we moved into the house on Franklin Avenue. The street ended. And where the street ended was cattails and marsh because the water table was very high. The cattle would be grazing in the desert and they would come onto the lawn at night and they would graze on the lawn. So this is a far cry from Yonkers, New York, right? Far cry from Yonkers, New York, where we lived in a nice big brick three-story home with a nice yard and gardens, and here she moved to Las Vegas in the middle of the desert with no furniture. I remember we had orange crates. Crates used to be wooden in those days and we had orange crates and that's what we sat on; that was the furniture. Eventually, the furniture got moved out here; all 4 her ornate, somewhat antique furniture was moved out. She even moved the firewood out here. When they sent the furniture, they sent the firewood that was in the house. It was all oak firewood. We didn't have a fireplace in the house, but the wood came out here with it. We lived next door to the Bennett family. One of the daughters, I believe, still occupies the house next door, one of the daughters. I met her about two years ago. They all stood out there and watched all this eastern furniture being moved in. I was told that they were snickering, laughing at this furniture because it's not anything that they had ever seen. Some of that furniture I still have. What a unique image that is?to imagine a single woman with three boys. You were the youngest at six and your older brothers are...three and six years older than you? Nine and thirteen. And your father, you said he was a practicing physician? Yes. He remained in New York? He remained in New York, yes. He was a gynecologist and I think he was head of surgery at Saint Joseph's Hospital in Yonkers. Did he explore the idea of moving to Las Vegas? Nothing more than what I remember my mother telling me or my overhearing the comments that he wouldn't be welcome here as a Jewish doctor. So whether that's why he never came or whether my mother and father were estranged, anyway I would have no way of knowing. So that's where we lived. We had a big picket fence and the neighbors next door raised chickens. We had a Doberman Pinscher dog that found its way into our backyard courtesy of?I think a policeman gave it to my mother. The dog was named Jinx and Jinx would go over the picket fence into the neighbor's chicken coop. We knew that because there would be chicken 5 feathers all over our backyard. It was interesting. The water table in the Las Vegas Valley was very high and that's why we had the marsh land and cattails growing right there at the end of the street, basically on the eastern edge of our property. I would play in the backyard as a six-year-old kid and you could dig down a foot and you had water. It's hard to imagine. Water was all over. In fact, where this house is on 15th Street here, it used to be an artesian lake that as a kid we would come over and sometimes swim in the lake. I remember one time, I think the last time I ever came near the lake was when they might call him a hermit or whatever who kind of lived on the edge of the lake, fired a shotgun at us or some kind of gun. I never came back to the lake. The lake was capped off; the artesian well was capped off. The Mowbray family, which was John Mowbray Sr., who was an attorney and ultimately Supreme Court justice in Nevada, owned all the property including the lake. They owned it all, the Mowbrays or his wife's family owned all that property and they are the ones who deeded that property to the Catholic Church. St. Anne's? At St. Anne's on the corner of Maryland and St. Louis, Maryland Parkway and St. Louis. John told me that they wanted to build houses around the artesian lake, but the City of Las Vegas would not give them a permit to do that. So they just capped off the artesian well and apparently filled in the lake and they built all these homes around here. Does this neighborhood have a specific name? It does. Well, the subdivision is called Margaret Estates. The property here had CC and Rs on it; even though it was not a condominium development. There were deed restrictions that were 6 embodied in the written CC and Rs, which controlled how close your building could be to the property line and it had other requirements that were set forth in there by the Mowbrays when they developed the area. This was pretty much a forerunner to developments you see around the area now, all the condominium developments. There's a lot of treasures in here as far as architecture. There are. Yes. It's just really beautiful. So your mother, how did she finally get a job? She took a bar review course, but they didn't give it here in Las Vegas. So she had to go to San Francisco to study for the bar exam. That's what she did. Prior to that, did she actually ever work for anybody here? I'm not sure. I have no recollection of whether she actually worked for one of the law firms. She might have worked for the Morse?I think it was the Morse and Graves firm. That's a very old firm that existed here in the 1940s. She might have actually worked for them even as a secretary. I don't know. But she ultimately went to San Francisco, took the bar review course and then came back here and took the exam and was admitted to practice. She opened her office in 1947 on Third Street. So was she the sole practitioner? She was a sole practitioner. I worked in her office just doing filing and other menial tasks. It was a pretty nice office. She had nice, beautiful French furniture in there and cork floors. I think the address was 118 North Third Street if I'm not mistaken. The building is still there. I forget who occupies the building right now, but it's still there. It was a very nice office. We've got pictures of it around. Did your brothers also hang out there? 7 I never remember my brothers working in the office. I'm the only one who worked there. The big practice for everybody in those days was divorce law. Nevada was one of the only places in the country where you could readily get a divorce. I was working at the office with my mother. It was a nice office, beautiful office, I think it put to shame most of the other offices in town. I hadn't been in all of them, but it certainly was decorated beautifully. So she dealt mostly in divorce law, you said? Well, yes. That's what Nevada was known for and that's where most of the lawyers really made their living. There was no real industry here. The gaming industry wasn't anything to speak of in 1947. You had the El Rancho, you had the Last Frontier Hotel, then you had the Flamingo that was under construction and you had some gambling casinos downtown?the Golden Nugget and probably one or two others, oh, the Las Vegas Club?not the Las Vegas?it was called the Sal Sagev, Hotel Sal Sagev, which is Las Vegas spelled backwards. That's the southeast corner of Fremont and Main Street. That was here. That's now owned by the...Steven's people, I believe, who own The D. They have bought it and it's no longer known as the Sal Sagev. I forgot what it's called. There's a new name to it. I can't remember it. [Became Golden Gate in 1955.] So that's the practice she had. She did other things. She represented a fellow by the name of Billy Moses. Billy Moses was a black man who had shot his mother-in-law and killed his wife or vice versa; I can't remember which without looking back through all the newspaper articles. But Billy Moses needed somebody to defend him. And the story goes that he told the Court that God had told him he needed a woman lawyer and there was my mother. So my mother undertook representation of Billy Moses. Billy Moses became an object of a lot of betting in town as to whether or not he would get the gas chamber or electric chair; I guess they used the electric chair in those days. My mother, she challenged the make-up of the jury because it didn't have any black 8 people on it. Ultimately, the trial was held and Billy was found guilty. Everybody knew he was guilty. But he did not get death. He was sentenced to life in prison. I can't tell if it was with parole or without because I don't recall. Then Billy sort of stayed in our life and is in our life today as we speak because Billy learned how to do leather tooling. He produced a number of things?a briefcase, wastebasket, guest book, little coasters, drink coasters?all in beautiful leather tooling. If you want to turn this off, I'll show you a piece of it. So the leather work [sample shown by narrator] might have been his way of compensating her. Yes. It's really intricate. It's really beautiful. That's all sixty-five-year-old work when you think about it. It's 1950 or even '49; I'm not sure. So lawyers sometimes have to barter their pay. Well, in those days?because my mother would tell me that in New York my father got paid by people bartering. They would trade the medical services for whatever services, whatever business they had. So it was apparently quite common. I guess back in the 1800s it was extremely common. But as a result of her defense of Billy Moses, my mother became counsel for the NAACP here in Las Vegas in the early 1950s. When you look back at that step in her career, how do you think that influenced you? Well, I think when I changed my career from being involved with the race cars and wanting something to do because of the things that had happened in the racing industry when Ford Motor Company basically paid me, I think I looked upon being a lawyer very favorably because of the things that I had seen from my mother. When I was a teenager here in town, my mother defended 9 me in court. Well, that sounds like a story. Yes. Let me finish one thought here and get to the next. Right. I'll make a note of that one. So, yes, 1968, '69 when I decided to change directions. I think the experience with my mother and what I knew about the practice of law interested me very much, and so that's why I turned in that direction to set my sights on the law. I went through four years of college and three years of law school in five years on a compressed schedule. So, yes, when I was a teenager there was a judge here in town, Judge Richards and he was a city court judge. Apparently, there must have been some infraction. I had to go down there. I guess he acted as a juvenile court judge at that time, too. "Where is your mother?" "She's at work." Judge Richards just on the spot took my driver's license away. What kind of high jinks did you get into? Well, I don't think it was anything very serious. I don't remember what it was. I told my mother and my mother said, "He can't do that; there's something called due process of law here; he can't do that." So she got my license returned to me. I don't know if she threatened or what she told Judge Richards, if she was going to take him to the district court over it, whatever, but I got my driver's license back. And I still to this day don't have any idea what it was I did. Oh, really? It clearly couldn't have been anything very severe. Judge Richards, the experience that I had with Judge Richards came to light when I was reading?the Clark County Bar Association magazine. They had an article in there about an attorney who recently died, an attorney by the name of David Polly. And the guy who was writing the article was basically also writing similar things about 10 Judge Richards that other attorneys had experienced. I'm older than them. But in later years they had experienced the same issues with Judge Richards, and David Polly went down there and saved their skin. But I think that might be what triggered my mother to run for office as a judge, which she ran on three separate occasions. She ran for the position of city judge, and it was probably against Judge Richards; I don't recall. I do recall her running and I do recall helping her because she had posters made up, and I think one or two of them I still have probably. She would drive around town and I would nail those posters up on the power poles. I remember when she went as a candidate over to the Westside. Las Vegas was a highly segregated town and all the black people lived on the Westside, like Bonanza, west of the railroad tracks. Probably because she was counsel for the NAACP. So we attended church services over there. I don't know if that was just because of her position in the NAACP or because she was running for office. But she ran for city judge. She did not get elected. I believe and I could be mistaken, but I believe that she was actually the first woman to run for a judicial office in the state of Nevada. I would wonder that she wouldn't have been, yes. That had to be 1949, 1950. She was ambitious. She was. She was. She ran again for justice of the peace some years later, and I don't remember the time frame for that. Then to complete this thought, when she came back here in 1966, '67 from Chicago via Los Angeles because she left Chicago?she remarried in '58. That marriage didn't work out too well. She left Chicago, moved to Los Angeles and she lived there for a couple of years. And then she came back here to Las Vegas; I think it was around 1967, maybe '66, '67. Then she ran for district 11 court judge against a fellow by the name of Judge Wendell. At that time that position was a juvenile judge. There were no separate departments like we have now with the courthouse, which is over on Bonanza where all the family court juvenile judges are. One of the district court judges was just designated as a juvenile court judge. My mother had a lot of experience with juveniles, not just because she had three kids, but because her practice in New York was involved with representing juveniles in court. So she particularly ran for that office and she lost the election. I think she only lost it by four hundred votes or something. Soon after she lost the election, she said, and I don't know if it's true, Judge Wendell lobbied to get them to do away with the juvenile court designation, so then he just became a district court judge on the same par with everybody else. So that was her...And she lost all those elections. Miriam Shearing, I believe, was the first woman, I believe, to subsequently get elected as judge in this state. So back to the fifties, we lived in Huntridge and we went to Las Vegas' John S. Park School. John S. Park School, which is a nice-looking school now, but in 1947 it was nothing but a bunch of Quonset huts. Oh, really? Yes. The building that's there now was not there then. It was very nice. I remember that part of my childhood as being very enjoyable. I'm curious. Your education, you went to high school at Las Vegas High School until your senior year? Yes. I went to three years of Las Vegas High School?freshman, sophomore and junior years?completed that and then that's when my mother got remarried in 1958. And so we all moved to Chicago and I completed my senior year in Chicago at Lake View High School. 12 What was it like to go from Vegas to Chicago? You must have some teenage memory of that. Was it different? Vegas has such a reputation of being such a unique city throughout its history. I became immersed in?well, before we left Las Vegas, I sort of became interested in cars and things mechanical whether it was bikes or lawnmowers of all things. In 1952: I'll tell you this story and then I'll go back to Chicago. In 1952, my mother, she had built a room onto the house in Huntridge because it wasn't big for us. She added a lot of stuff to it. The fact of the matter is wherever we lived for the rest of her life, she built on to everything we ever lived in. Sometimes it worked out and sometimes...Later in life I had to go and rescue the deal because it didn't get done too well. She bought a house on the Desert Inn Country Club on Desert Inn Road. In fact, it was the house right next door to Wilbur Clark. That house and Wilbur Clark's house was under construction at the time. And so I used to go over there and inspect everything. I was just interested in things, the construction of everything and anything. So I would go over there and marvel at all the things that were being done and the cabinets they were?[pause]. So Wilbur Clark's house was being built next door and it was just amazing to me. I remember going over there and they were building in his bedroom some sort of big built-in cabinet on the floor. I asked the construction people what that was. He said, "That is where his television is going to go. It's made so that it comes up out of this cabinet at the foot of the bed." Wow. So that was always interesting to me. Because this is what year? This would have been in 1952, '51 or '52. 13 You don't imagine that... No. The house that she bought was a brand-new house. When it was bought it had central air-conditioning in it. It was interesting because in '51-52? We were in the some of the preservation homes yesterday on that tour and we walked in one and it obviously had central air-conditioning. The question got around to was, did homes built in the early 1950s have central air-conditioning or was this something that was added? Of course, I knew homes were built that way because we lived in one. The house on Huntridge, it was just a swamp cooler. And when it got really hot out there, you wet the sheet and you went outside and slept on the porch. My mother built this big screened-in back porch onto the back of the house because that's where you could go out there and sleep and be comfortable because swamp coolers didn't always do too good of a job. Kind of amazing, isn't it? Yes. So back to the car thing, which leads to Chicago: My mother came home one day with, I think, it was a 1939 Chevrolet that she bought at a sheriff's sale for twenty-five dollars and she gave it to my brother and me. So we played. That was the start of our interest in cars. Then we got started in altering engines and things because we had the lawnmower and we decided the lawnmower needed a little more pep to it. So we modified the engine on the lawnmower. Then the neighbors there, they had a young boy; there might have been more than one there, and their name was Camino. I think it was Camino. They worked in the casino. But anyway, we used to race the lawnmowers on the concrete driveways. Were these push lawnmowers? Yes. They weren't riding, but they were the self-propelled lawnmowers. So I remember doing that. I remember we ran the thing and one day the top of the cylinder, the head of the engine is what 14 they call it, the cylinder head, it literally blew off the engine. I think that was the end of our hopping up, souping up the lawnmower. But then when we lived in Huntridge, my mother had a '48 Buick Roadmaster convertible that she bought. I liked that car, nice car. Then we got a 1950 Buick. We got the '50 Buick because we drove across country and we were in Texas someplace and the Roadmaster engine had a problem with it or something. We were at the dealership, so she just bought a new car. She bought a '50 Buick and then we had that car. Then I don't know why we got rid of the '50 Buick, but then she ended up with a '52 Oldsmobile and that's when my brother, brother Phillip?he would have been sixteen years old. I guess he had a driver's license. Because the '52 Oldsmobile ended up in Los Angeles at a speed shop that modified engines. He proceeded to have the engine hopped up in the '52 Oldsmobile. It was pretty fast. Then that engine blew up because it had some defective part in it. Then my brother got a '50 Oldsmobile and that was his first car; besides the '38 Chevrolet, it was the '50 Oldsmobile and that we proceeded to have a souped-up engine put in it. That car actually looked like a stock automobile, is what we would call a sleeper; you couldn't tell from the outside there was anything modified in it, but it was and it was pretty fast. We used to drag race around Las Vegas and guys would come down from California with their souped-up cars and they would think there were a bunch of bumpkins around here in Las Vegas, and so they used to go out...There was a drag strip out there behind the Stardust Hotel. They would go out there and they would drag race. We would frequently win because the car was very fast. And then sometimes the sheriff in the city?it wasn't the sheriff; it was actually the city police department?they had two different police departments?I believe the city had these what you call Dodge 500 police cars. We sometimes would drag race with them, too. 15 Oh, really? Yes. And they encouraged this? Yes. They were just young guys. They had these factory fast cars. Then sometimes besides the nighttime drag racing, you'd go out there and they had organized daytime drag racing out at the strip behind the Stardust. Everybody had these fast cars, hopped up cars from Las Vegas High School. They had all forms and fashions of hot rods and that was the day hot rodding was starting and everybody would cruise. You'd cruise down Las Vegas Boulevard and you'd go down Fremont Street with your hot rod, whatever version of it it was, and down Main Street and you would cruise through Sill's Drive-In, which I believe was at Charleston and Las Vegas Boulevard. Then if you went all the way down to where Las Vegas Boulevard and Main Street came that was another drive-in; that was the Roundup. Everybody would make this circuit. That was your loop then, huh? That was the loop. I didn't drive. I didn't have a car. But you were a passenger? Yes. I always hung out with my brother and the older kids from high school. So I would frequently be with him, not all the time. Then my first car I got was a 1941 Ford convertible that I bought from an attorney friend of my mother's who lived in Palm Springs and that was my first car, a nice car. I'd drive it all over the valley and everything. I decided I needed to soup up the engine in this car. So in the carport at the house on Desert Inn Road next door to Wilbur Clark, here I've got my '41 Ford and I'm taking the engine out and I've go