Audio clip from interview with Michael S. Mack, May 20, 2015

And tell me a little bit about your family ancestry. How far back can you go? What do you know? I can't go back very far because my father [Louis] came to the United States with two brothers. They came to the United States in the early teens, in 1917. And they came from where? They came from Poland. And their names? Well, my dad came with two brothers and a sister. The oldest brother was Nathan Mack, the middle brother was Harry Mack, and the youngest brother was Louis Mack, my father. They came with a sister by the name of Jeanette, who lived in Los Angeles pretty much her entire life after coming to the United States, although that wasn't the first place that any of them lived. They came on different boats on different dates and arrived in New York, Ellis Island, and were picked up by cousins who lived in Detroit and there was always people there to greet them and help them through the paperwork and such. Turned out that my uncle Nate, when he came over...Their name was Macklowitz in Poland. But when they came over, the person that was doing his application said, "Using that name is going to create a lot of problems for you. Why don't you just shorten it to Mack?" And so he wrote down M A C K and that was it and that was passed onto the rest of them that came over except my aunt who kept her original name, but was soon married five or six years after coming to the United States. So her name was not associated with the Mack family. From Detroit they went west to Albion, Michigan and then to California. All together, all three brothers together? Yeah, they all went together. They arrived in California in the twenties. They had some cousins that lived there already and these cousins were in the supermarket business. They called it a supermarket in those days. It was a big open market and they had an indoor portion of it. That was in Los Angeles, in the San Fernando Valley. They heard about Las Vegas from some friends who said there was a dam going to be built very close to a little town called Las Vegas. They thought they would go take a look to see if there was any opportunities. So they arrived in Boulder City in 1932. The first thing they did was open a shoe store because they had had one of those in Albion, a small town outside of Detroit. So they knew that business and so they opened one on the main highway in downtown Boulder City. And at the same time, someone had come into the store and mentioned to them that they had put out a bid for someone who could remove scrap from the dam after the dam was getting close to completion, in the last couple of years. And so they got a contract to remove scrap and they built a building in Boulder City, a metal building, and that's where they brought their scrap. They had an outside yard. They had trucks to take it to Southern California to the bigger scrap salvage areas there. And when the dam was completed and they were no longer needed, they moved into Las Vegas. Well, they partially lived in Vegas and in Boulder City. Two of the boys lived in Boulder City; one lived in Las Vegas. But they moved into Las Vegas and they established businesses there. Nathan and my dad opened a men's store.