UNLV Special Collections provides copies of materials to facilitate private study, scholarship, or research. Material not in the public domain may be used according to fair use of copyrighted materials as defined by copyright law. Please cite us.
Please note that UNLV may not own the copyright to these materials and cannot provide permission to publish or distribute materials when UNLV is not the copyright holder. The user is solely responsible for determining the copyright status of materials and obtaining permission to use material from the copyright holder and for determining whether any permissions relating to any other rights are necessary for the intended use, and for obtaining all required permissions beyond that allowed by fair use.
Read more about our reproduction and use policy.
I agree.Part of an interview with Doris, Jerry and Marcy Welt on November 30, 2014. In this clip, the Welts talk about Las Vegas in the early 1970s, the opening of Boulevard Mall, and the community of Jewish families who all knew one another.
Talk about what Vegas was like in those early seventies. What do you all remember? D: It was a much nicer town than it is now. J: Only a hundred and fifty, a hundred and seventy five thousand people. D: And it was a community. It really was. It was a very close community. Now it's... M: It's so spread out. We lived off Tropicana and Pecos and that was the end of town up until the nineties and we were the furthest out at that point. Right? J: First we lived on Flamingo and Mountain View. M: Mountain Vista. J: Mountain Vista. We were excited when they put a 7 Eleven at Sandhill. Otherwise, we were going next to the Boulevard Mall to buy milk and eggs and stuff. D: But before then there was no shopping in Las Vegas. If you wanted clothing of any kind, you went to Sears Catalog and...who else? Montgomery Wards. Or people would go to California to shop. We got so excited when the Boulevard Mall opened up. It was like God had come down and rescued us. M: Where Sunrise Hospital is now that was the end. It was just a square mile in that area like where Valley High School is. J: That was all the new development. M: Yes, all that was brand new. No streets. J: Because Beth Sholom was the only synagogue really, we knew all the Jews, good ones and bad ones, crooked ones and not so crooked ones, but we knew them all. Some of them served on the Temple Beth Sholom Board. And through the pawnshops, we knew a whole bunch of other kinds of people as well. M: You knew the people from industry then. J: Yes, a lot of the casino people, they knew the value. They would come in. Because my grandfather had been here for so long that sort of just carried. He owned part of the Thunderbird for a while and he had a bar on Charleston and because he was active in all those service organizations. So there was sort of an entry there. Aunt Muriel and Uncle Jerry have been here since when? D: I think she's been here fifty years. M: That's Mom's sister Muriel.