Emily McKinley interview, March 1, 1981: transcript

UNLV University Libraries Emily McKinley 1 An Interview with Emily McKinley An Oral History Conducted by Glorialyn Gutierrez 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 Emily McKinley 2 © Ralph Roske Oral History Project on Early Las Vegas University of Nevada, Las Vegas, 2020 UNLV University Libraries Emily McKinley 3 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 Emily McKinley 4 Abstract On March 1st, 1981, Glorialyn Gutierrez interviewed Emily McKinley (b. April 28, 1930 in Las Vegas, Nevada) about her life in the Las Vegas Valley. McKinley begins by speaking about her childhood, her siblings and her extended family. McKinley gives a variety of anecdotes about being raised in Las Vegas, her family’s economic hardships and the house she grew up in. Lastly, McKinley talks about the businesses she owned with her husband, their hardships and her time working multiple jobs. UNLV University Libraries Emily McKinley 5 Informant: Emily McKinley. Date: March 1, 1981. Time: two forty-five p.m. Place: 1211 Purple Sage Avenue, Las Vegas, Nevada. Collector: Gloria Gutierrez, 3017 La Junta Drive, Las Vegas, Nevada. Project: Oral Interview Nevada History. Subject: Observances of a Native Nevadan. Mrs. McKinley, I'd like to thank you for agreeing to this interview. I'm sure it will give us some insight into the way of life and the growth of the area in the last several years. Let's begin with your background. Well, I was born in Las Vegas, Nevada, in a little house that—near Tenth and Stewart Street. It was in the alley behind my aunt's house, which she's Mrs. Gerhein. And on my birth certificate they named me Marry Emilia Mellott. Not the name that I use, Marie Emily. My present last name is McKinley. I live at 1211 Purple Sage, as you've indicated, and I've been here since 1955 in this particular house. My home after birth was at 214 West Boston Avenue, which is near the beginning of our famous Strip. I used to sit out on the porch there and be able to watch them build hotels out on the highway. I have got two sisters and two brothers. My oldest brother Earl is an architect. My sister Pat is married to a contractor, a building contractor. My sister Jackie is married to (unintelligible). They had four children, have lost one. And my brother Butch, or Harold, works for Rentals Electric and he's worked for them for, oh I guess 15 years or better. My father is (unintelligible). He was born in Hugo, Colorado. His father I understand came from Arkansas by a covered wagon to Colorado where they had a cattle ranch. And his—he can remember his mother dying when he was about eight years old. She'd been hit by lightning working out in the fields. Grandfather was—in general, worked with farmland and with cattle. And I believe that my dad was about twenty when he decided to come to Las Vegas. He worked on Hoover Dam, or then called Boulder Dam. Was a carpenter and did different labor UNLV University Libraries Emily McKinley 6 jobs around the city of Las Vegas, also. He helped build the power line that goes from Nellis Air Force Base, or to Nellis Air Force Base, which was then McCarran Airport I believe. That has moved since that time to the opposite side of the city, south side of the city. What else would you like to know? (Unintelligible) The Las Vegas Grammar School all the way through graduate from the eighth grade. Then I went to Las Vegas High School. And I had to quit school in my fourth year because we needed help with the family. And it was quite scarce and we had a little bit of a struggle getting through. But I think my first job was with a Little Orange Julius down at, it used to be located up on Fifth Street near Las Vegas Boulevard, where north and south divided. Then I went to work for Skaggs Drugstore, where I checked people out at—on the register as a cashier, and stocked shelves and this sort of thing. I was—I worked there for about four years before I got married. If you'd like to go back to when I was younger, maybe things I do remember. I can remember that if we wanted to keep cool, we had to—we had one little electric fan that would swing back and forth just to cool the air in the house and it would get very, very hot out here. (Laughs) Also mom used to put towels that she would wet down over the windows. And when a breeze would come up, it would help keep the house a little bit cool. We planted cottonwood trees in order to give us shade, which is another aid. At times we would actually sleep outside to keep—when it was so hot in the summertime. In—oh back when I was a child, we didn't worry about locking our doors to the houses either. There was—nobody would come in and bother you. We were near a railroad track, but there might be a bum come along and want a sandwich. Mom would always fix them something to eat, we never turned anybody down. That was one thing about my mother. I can remember my aunt coming over, maybe once during the week. And the folks would UNLV University Libraries Emily McKinley 7 play cards. I can remember when we used to make ice cream just with a hand grind, grinder. Dad would bring ice home from the ice house. He was also a volunteer fireman. Used to drive the fire engine. There were times when he would be taking us kids to school or picking us up from school and the alarm would go off and he—we’d all run over to the fire to try to help put it out. (Laughs) He and a friend, my dad was a carpenter basically. And when things were really tough and you couldn't get work, I remember him and another friend pulling what they had together in order to build a house to sell it to try to make a little bit of money together so that they could keep on going. And I can remember the old grocery stores where mom and dad used to have to go in to charge the groceries whenever they needed to keep us kids eating something. I can also remember the times when crackers and a cheese gravy was the only meal that we had. I recall also that we did have a garden in the back at one time where we grow corn and all of our vegetables. We had a pen where we kept goats to get milk. We had a pigeon coop and we ate good on squab every once in a while. (Laughs) We raised chickens in that backyard and got our own fresh eggs from there. And I can remember the old outhouse too, with two holes. (Laughs) And we had an old shower house out in the back that was connected to the pigeon area. Dad had a little workshop on one side that he built out of old railroad ties. And we had a big tank on the roof to heat the water. And when you get inside, you'd pull some little string and let water come down on you. You had a little bit of a concrete floor for it to drain off on. That's basically how we bathed in the summertime, either that or get out under the hose. In the wintertime, it was a tub bath in front of a woodfire. We didn't have an air conditioner, which would have been a swamp cooler, for an awful long time that I can remember. UNLV University Libraries Emily McKinley 8 And as far as playing, I think we probably had more fun than a lot of kids. We didn't get into any trouble. (Laughs) Dad would bring a big pile of sand, that he was probably going to use to try to plaster the house with, that we'd all get out in and build our roads through and our mud pies. And in general, just had fun that way. I can remember how hot the sun would get when you were a kid so—and how blistering red we would get before we had enough shade to really give us some comfort. And we would play games like kick the can or there would, there was always kids in the neighborhood. A few, there weren't too many because we were pretty well isolated out there for a while. And we’d come over play hide and seek or, or we’d play hopscotch like kids do, or jump rope. Or (laughs) bingo was a favorite when you wanted something for indoors. And I can always remember the birthday parties. They were probably rather special. Nobody bought a real expensive gift for anybody. It was always some little simple thing or something that they've made. And to us that was as great a thing as you could ever get in the way of a gift and just having the kids over for a cake that mom would make or an ice cream that dad would’ve made. Christmases were something that were really great. We weren't overloaded with gifts like children are now. And I can remember usually we would wind up getting a doll and some clothing if you were one of the girls. The boys would get a little truck and also something to wear because that was more vital than anything else and it was as precious to us as anything could be. And under our tree. We always could go up to Mount Charleston and get our Christmas tree. They permitted cutting out back there then. We always had a bowl of nuts under the tree and all the oranges and all the apples. These were special treats to us. Also, we would hang a stocking and inside the stocking sometimes maybe we would find a quarter and Christmas candy and nuts in there, which—or a candy cane—not a whole lot, but enough to make us very, very happy. UNLV University Libraries Emily McKinley 9 I can remember one year when we were a little bit better off, and I wanted a bicycle and my brother wanted a bicycle. Well, we knew that we couldn't afford this sort of thing (laughs) between the two of us but to us it would have been transportation, more than just a toy to play with. And I can remember getting up where we sleep, maybe two at the top and two at the bottom of the bed. We only had a very, very small house. And I remember getting up. My brother had to sleep in a back porch bedroom. When I got up and went into the living room, I saw this boy's bike and I thought well, at least we got one. And my brother from the other end saw the girl’s bike. (Laughs) So dad had two bikes that he got both of us which is—we used these bikes to get ourselves back and forth to school and to run errands and pick up groceries at the little grocery stores for mom when we could. And at one time, we had a neighbor girl that I used to haul on the back of my bicycle back and forth to school, that got awful tiring. (Laughs) We had to ride approximately two miles to get to school. At times, we would cut across the desert. And as long as we could we would follow the highway, which was now the Strip area. There weren't any buses. We—before we had our bikes, we always walked to school. We'd have to get up very early in the morning and walk. We had our own favorite little paths we always trailed and we had to look out that we didn't run across a rattlesnake or something on the way. (Laughs) It was mostly desert out there then. And anyway, at least we had a little transportation and could help each other out getting back and forth to school and help mom out to get groceries once in a while. My dad started working up at the test site when they, well prior to the time that they were going to set off the atomic bombs. And he wouldn't get in all too often, it was quite a long drive. And the car wasn't all that good, either. I'd like to kind of change back a little bit and tell you about a vacation that we took when UNLV University Libraries Emily McKinley 10 we were kids. The first time that we took the vacation in our lives. (Laughs) And the old car that we had, I can't even remember what year it was. I was approximately, oh about ten years old, I guess, so it’d be about 1940 or as close in there. And we were all us kids in the backseat. I, my brother Harold wasn't born yet. My sister Jackie was the youngest and she was, seems like she was about two years old. And he bundled us all up. And we proceeded to go to Colorado to see his father and—his mother wasn't living, she died when he was young—and I can remember us stopping, along the ways we’d pitch a tent and we had a Coleman stove, where mom would fix dinner for us. And I can remember some of the real pretty spots that we stopped along the way and saw too. One place in Colorado that when we woke up in the morning, there were deer that came up to the fence. And you could almost pet them, they were that tame. And we could see buffalo up on the hill. These were some of the buffalo they were trying to rebuild the herds, so they had ‘em fenced off in a special area. That was one of the (unintelligible) parts that I do remember about this vacation. And I can remember when we’d come in to Hugo, Colorado, it seemed like it was so barren. There were just kind of rolling hills over in there. It was ranch country, mainly. More than foreign country. And when we finally come to where we were going to stay at my Uncle Joe Murray's house, he was out in the field picking corn and this was my first taste of white sweet corn. He was growing this type of corn at the time and he brought some fresh ears in. And so I can remember that they had a two story house and they had a big barn out in the back and pens for their cows. And their grandmother's house was still there too, which was a fascinating thing to go and investigate because it was very, very old and they had (unintelligible) in there and their children took us out to, to look through the house and investigate everything. And I can remember this mean bull that they had. (Laughs) And they were herding this bull and we'd gone UNLV University Libraries Emily McKinley 11 out and walked with them to bring the cows back in the evening. And this bull was following along and it just kinda scared me so I got up on the fence and within a few minutes that bull turned loose and broke through one of the fences and everybody's scattering. (Laughs) They let him go and then pretty soon they went and caught him. But it was something new to me. I hadn't been around anything like that before. On our way back from Colorado, well, in Colorado, actually, my father's friends all had a great big dinner for him, a celebration, and they harvested some of their corn. And oh I can remember the big long tables they set up and all the people that came in from all around. And how they had a pony and they used to let us ride that pony back and forth. We thought that was the greatest thing in the world. And I can remember corrals out there and some of the horses that my grandfather had and my dad was—tried to tell me about, he had a little sister that is buried somewhere out there but he, at the time, he didn't know exactly where. A lot of the landmarks that he remembered were gone at that time. And I remember the—our uncle’s children taking us down to a stream that—called the sandy river which you had to be careful because there was quicksand around there—but they took us down to go swimming, skinny dippin’. (Laughs) And I remember a snake swimming across that water and I never got back in. (Laughs) Well, on the way back, we went to see my mother's folks. She hadn't seen them for quite a long time. And at this time they were living in Albuquerque. I found out that my grandfather had been a railroad man, he had worked on the railroad. And the home that we went to, they’d lived in there for quite a while. They’d had about three bedrooms and a big back porch and a dining room and a living room. It wasn't a fancy home, there was no grass out front or anything like that. They were not rich people, they were poor people also. But they were very happy people. And I do remember my grandmother. I only made one more trip back there when I was UNLV University Libraries Emily McKinley 12 about eleven and that was when my grandmother had died. I was named after her. And she had asked for me so my mother did take me back to see her when she was very ill with pneumonia. I guess (unintelligible) get back to Las Vegas. (Laughs) (Laughs) I'd like to tell you a little bit about my brother Earl, who was the next child after me. He was really a good looking little boy. And dad used to take him frequently downtown with him and occasionally he would take him over and I believe one day he took him for a ride on the fire engine, which he thought was super. He was very handy and always trying to help fix things up around the house. He went to Las Vegas High School as I did and graduated. Well he—it was Fifth Street Grammar School, that’s the grammar school he went to and then he went to Las Vegas High School, he graduated from there. And after that, he went into the Navy, where he spent about two years. And shortly after that, he married a girl by the name of Salma Cooper. He won a scholarship. Well he went to a junior college after he got out of the service, won a scholarship to Frank Lloyd Wright's College, I guess it's a college, where they teach architecture. But he wasn't able to accept it, because they would not permit whites to live on the campus. So he went to the University of California in Berkeley. He got his diploma in architecture. He had to serve approximately three, four years as an apprentice architect and he is now a very successful architect and live in Brea, California. His office is in Anaheim (unintelligible). But I'm very, very proud of him. He did it all on his own, nobody helped him. I can remember a time when he and his wife wrote and asked if we could just send them five dollars for food, they were that tight. She worked, and he worked and together they made a success out of their lives. I'm really very proud of that. UNLV University Libraries Emily McKinley 13 This interview will continue on side two. (Tape one ends) Continuation of interview with Emily McKinley. Okay. The different places that I have lived have all actually been in the city of Las Vegas. I married in January, on the 10th, 1952. I had a little—we had a little apartment near Eighth and Fremont Street. It was our first home, we didn't stay there very long. We needed something that was a little bit bigger for us. And we went out to June and East Charleston Street where somebody had poured foundations. They were going to build a little duplex and we could get a better price on our rent there. At that time I think it was eighty dollars, which was still a lot of money but my husband Gary and I, we figured we could handle that. (Laughs) They raised our rent at the other place. I was working in Skaggs at the time and he was just working in a service station. I think the standard. You just didn't make very much money there. (Laughs) Anyway, we rented this place before they even had the walls up yet, just the foundation closed but it didn't take ‘em very long to put it together. It was made of block and brick and to us it was great when we got in there. We enjoyed that. And that's—we had our first child when we, when we were living there. She was born in December, December 16th, 1952. Her name is Lynn Marie McKinlay. And that's M-C-K-I-N-L-A-Y. It’s a different spelling than the ordinary McKinley. From that apartment, we had managed to save a little bit of money. We bought a piece land that was out near the Ranch House Road. That's about seven miles north of Las Vegas. There was a place called a Ranch House Gun Club out along that road. This piece of land had a well on it and we could get power. It was out there right along the power line. We rented a little twenty-seven foot trailer and moved out there. And I can remember the day that we moved out there we had such a bad windstorm that I got the first sinus headache I had ever had in my life UNLV University Libraries Emily McKinley 14 (laughs) from all this sand and dust. And the first little house we built was an outhouse. (Laughs) (Laughs) This was non-modern. (Laughs) And we figured if we could save enough money living out here, that we could build something ‘cause if we could get one room up, the bank would loan us enough money to possibly build a little bit more onto it but we had to complete one room. Well we, I bet we were out there for, oh a year and we still hadn't progressed very far. (Laughs) I can remember my husband out there trying to dig a septic tank to put in and the ground was so hard, (unintelligible) was so bad in there that he would really be perspiring. Be down in that hole and just workin’ his little heart out (laughs) tryin’ to get it completed. Well, an opportunity came up where somebody wanted some of this land that we had. And we wound up selling half of the land which enabled us to be able to get into this house at 1211 Purple Sage. He had the rights to a—the G.I. Bill of Rights, so we didn't have to have a big down payment. And at this point he was thinking about—he was still working in a service station but he’d done some managing and was able to get a little bit ahead now. He decided he wanted to be a dealer after this, and he went to school for dealing. He worked uptown at the Las Vegas Club and he had worked at the Desert—he worked at the Desert Inn and progressed to the Flamingo for a while and then he went into the Tropicana where he worked for about ten years as a crap dealer. He was an excellent crap dealer. We still had half of our land out there and we got into our house. We didn't have the money to buy a lot of furniture but we managed to get into it, get a bed to sleep in (laughs) and a couch to sit down and his mother got us a carpet to put down on the floor so that we wouldn't have just the bare tile floor to have to walk around on. I think she was more worried about the grandchild than she was about us though. (Laughs) She was very, very good to our UNLV University Libraries Emily McKinley 15 granddaughter—or her granddaughter. And then in 19—oh, we were here for about four years before. No, I take that back. Lynn was about four years old when we had our son, Gary Grant McKinlay. Neither of my children are living with me now, they're both married and pretty much on their own and doing a very good job of it too I might say. My son is now a (unintelligible) operator and operates, does work with heavy equipment. He is currently living in an apartment and trying to save enough to get himself a home but with the price of homes and the down payment, pretty rough. About like how we started out. (Laughs) My daughter Lynn is married to Patrick John McClain. His father (unintelligible) was a miner. He was born and raised in Searchlight, which isn't very far from here. And he is a concrete contractor at the present time. He used to get down in these swimming pool holes and tie steel with his bare hands. The heat didn't bother him a bit, toughest person I ever saw. (Laughs) And a beautiful person for my daughter. We love him very much. He's currently working at the Hilton Hotel. He’s—they're putting in a new decking on their swimming pool and he has started the job there. After we'd been in this house, I would say approximately ten years, my husband went into another field of business. The gambling business is very hard on your blood pressure (laughs) and on your nerves too. It’s a type fast business. He got into the excavating business when he got out of that field, which he didn't know an awful lot about, but he had a friend that did. And we started out in our own business in this way. We had a business called McKinley Excavating. And shortly after that, he also got into a swimming pool business. We built swimming pools under the name of Azure Pools. He had a partner in that. And they did build some beautiful nice pools around the city until he found out his partner was writing checks for things other than what he was supposed to be writing for. (Laughs) Well, we also had a shop UNLV University Libraries Emily McKinley 16 where we sold some pool supplies, which he split from this other party and went into this on his own. And he got a little bit tired of this (unintelligible) business, we wound up having to pay a lot of debts off that this man was supposed to have been paying and hadn’t with our other business. And then my husband got into guardrail business. He was—and also the (unintelligible) fencing business. We were also in a barricade business. We were forced into this barricade business because there was only one person in town that rented barricades who happened to owe my husband some money for swimming pools. My husband had taken over to try to complete flooring after someone else had messed it up and he didn't pay the rest of money so he wouldn't loan us any—wouldn't give us any barricades without us coming out with a tremendous amount of money for them. He was afraid that my husband might deduct it from what he owed us. Well, this is what got us into the barricade business. We didn't fool around. We just went down, got a loan at the bank, went to Phoenix, Arizona, went to a place that they were putting out a new type of barricade. We bought a hundred barricades from him to use on our project. And we couldn't just have all these barricades sitting around so we got licensed to rent them to different people. Well, that was a real battle because our opposition would go out or have people go out, we're reasonably sure of this, and just break up anything they could find that was ours. I can remember what a tough deal that was getting into. And we had heard that a lot of other people had attempted it and because of this sort of thing, didn't succeed at it. But we had enough other coverage to keep us together so that we persisted in and we grew, he eventually had to give in, after we got our foot in the door and got the business going reasonably well. We were naturally taking a lot of his away because of the people didn't seem to like him too well, because of the way they were treated. After we did get this going and we discovered there were a couple of UNLV University Libraries Emily McKinley 17 other people that started getting into the field, and which was fine with us because we didn't really want to be in the barricade business anyways. (Laughs) We wound up finally in the guardrail business. My husband was building guardrail along different freeways. He put in the, the barbed wire fencing that you'll find in Mesquite, if you go—come off of the Mesa, go down into Mesquite all along that area, going down into Mesquite is some of the railing that he put in and the barbed wire fence that he put in there. He used horses and everything else to pull that wire up through some of those areas. It was really rough country (laughs) there. But he got the job done. And then he started doing work in other states like Arizona and in California. He was licensed with these states and got pretty well spread around. But we eventually got out of this one (unintelligible) and the barricade business and some of the other, it was—you can spread yourself just too thin and that was a little bit too much I think. (Laughs) But anyway, when we had, we did have some problems, we had some key people die and we were spread out so far, and our business did fail on us. That's when I finally had to go to work to try and get back on my feet, our feet. My husband separated from me approximately ten years ago. This is when things really started falling apart. His mother had died the year before, which was a great loss to him but he was an only child. And his father is in Washington. He hadn't seen him since he was a child, I don’t know if he (unintelligible) or not. We—I wound up in a position, because I had the two children still in school, I had to work four different jobs just to help keep the roof over our heads and food in their stomachs. My husband I think was on the verge of a nervous breakdown at the time and I don't know why I didn't have one along with him. (Laughs) I think I come from pretty strong stock. Anyway, I had done some secretarial work. I worked for a year for Skaggs, checking UNLV University Libraries Emily McKinley 18 groceries and part time in the cosmetic department. And I still needed more work. I wasn't able to get enough done. I owed Nevada Power Company a hundred and ninety-eight dollars from the business bill, which they promptly put on my bill and I was in trouble. I didn't know how I was gonna pay it and keep from getting my power shut off. (Laughs) So I just went down to the office and told them what had happened to me. The Internal Revenue had attached my wages where I was working at Skaggs, would not give me one dime to feed my children or to keep a roof over their heads and they could care less what happened to me. That is the one thing I would like to see changed in this government. I explained this to Mr. Dave Thornton at Nevada Power Company. I told him if he had a job that I could have part time I would take it and work off my bill. So he told me to come in on Mondays and work in the mail receipts room and refused to take my full salary, would only allow me to give him a little bit at a time on the power bill. And that's how I happened to start working for Nevada Power Company. At this time, I was—had also gone back to my union and I proceeded to work as a grocery checker for Safeway. It was only part time work, but I could make more money at that. It was very, very hard work. But I could make more money at that. It helped me along. I don't know how I did it, but for approximately three years, I worked four jobs. And then, Nevada Power offered me full time work working between the payroll department and the accounts payable department. And about the same time Safeway offered me a full time job. (Laughs) Well I took the Nevada Power job, it wasn't nearly as tough as the one I'd been doing checking groceries. I met a lot of people, I thoroughly enjoyed my job checking groceries. I like people, I really—really enjoy meeting, doing, and doing things and talking with people. But I took the other job because I really needed some rest. My back was about to kill me. (Laughs) It's a heavy, hard job. I alternated between payroll and accounts payable. I learned an awful lot in there. It UNLV University Libraries Emily McKinley 19 really was a big help to me. And approximately five years ago, our receptionist had decided to retire and she was going to move with her husband to California. Well, I was the only one in that office that had had any training in (unintelligible) files and at the receptionist desk. There were others that had had really or in the receptionist area, but nobody had had training for the (unintelligible) files system except me. And that training I had had for approximately an hour a day, for a one month period, two years prior to this. And they asked me if I would like to have this job. Well, first, I turned it down. And then I—the more I got thinking about it, well, why not? I'll give it a try anyway. (Laughs) So when she left, I became the receptionist and the person that take your (unintelligible) files at Nevada Power Company, which I'm currently working at now, and I like it very, very much. Again, let me thank you for the interview. It's been most interesting. This concludes the McKinley interview.