Transcript of interview with Renee Diamond by Barbara Tabach, November 20, 2014

AN INTERVIEW WITH RENEE L. DIAMOND An Oral History Conducted by Barbara Tabach The Southern Nevada Jewish Community Digital Heritage Project Oral History Research Center at UNLV University Libraries University of Nevada Las Vegas ?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, Stefani Evans ii 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 Community Digital Heritage Project. Claytee D. White Director, Oral History Research Center University Libraries University of Nevada Las Vegas iii PREFACE Community activism and social justice rank high in the legacy of Renee Diamond. She often refers to herself as one of the last of the generation without college degrees that could make a difference in the politics of the state. When Renee, her husband Leo Diamond moved their family to Las Vegas from southern California, the energetic advocate Renee quickly plugged into the community. The word "No" was not part of her vocabulary. Among the many Jewish and secular activities the she engaged in were: the editorial board of the Jewish Reporter newspaper; Hadassah; Anti-Defamation League; Red Cross Board; State Museum Board to name a few. She remains a vibrant Democratic Party leader and served one term on the Nevada Assembly in 1989. She was on the front lines as a fierce and active supporter of Welfare Rights, Fair Housing and the Equal Rights Amendment. It is a life that included working alongside illustrious women iv and men of Southern Nevada history. A list that includes: Harriet Trudell, Ruby Duncan, Myrna Williams and Dorothy Eisenberg and many more mentioned here. Meanwhile she raised four children and enjoyed a loving 43-year marriage with Leo (aka "Uncle Leo") whose career included the popular Bingo Palace, Slots-A-Fun and Stations Casinos. During this oral history interview she recalls the Las Vegas that she moved to in 1972 and reflects on what attracted people here, ways to be part of the Jewish life which might even include a bowling league and how involvement in raising social awareness was a worthy investment of ones' time. This is a look at a woman who made a difference. (Above) Renee working with Ruby Duncan on welfare rights in the 1970s (undated photo from Ruby Duncan Collection, UNLV Special Collections). (Previous page) State Assemblywoman Renee Diamond in 1989. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Interview with Renee L. Diamond November 20, 2014 in Las Vegas, Nevada Conducted by Barbara Tabach Preface iv - v Born in Chicago and an only child, Renee talks about how her family came to live in Los Angeles in 1942; ancestral roots in Russia, London and Poland; describes religious aspect of her Jewish ancestry; father's work in engraving and printing 1 - 5 Talks about meeting her second husband Leo Diamond and moving to Las Vegas; describes Leo's Brooklyn roots, youthful hijinks and inspiration to move west to California and his early work experiences there, including building demolition and salvage. Explains in detail how he started Leo's Record Stores and being a vinyl record store in the 1960s and encouraging their grandson's interest in vinyl collecting 6 - 13 Recalls her teenage marriage; becoming a young mother and her job in a family doctor's office and supporting herself as a single mother. Meeting Leo and building a family together; how people called him "Uncle Leo." Details about the move to Las Vegas in 1972 and the shock of shopping differences between LA and Las Vegas 14 - 19 Schools her children attended and her activism regarding education at the time; comparison to California then. Talks about the overall change of Las Vegas in the 1970s; chance meeting with Senator Howard Cannon in store; enjoyment of Lake Mead; then how both she and Leo felt need to be more involved: she in the Democratic Party and Leo with a new work career, including Slots-A-Fun development 20 - 26 In 1980 is appointed by Sen. Cannon to run U.S. Census, population of just under 700 thousand; becomes president of Women's Democratic Club; her interest in feminism and relationship with Harriet Trudell, Myrna Williams and others. Returns to memories of 1972, local political environment, obstacles to registering to vote that year; going to Democratic Convention at Sahara Hotel. Equal Rights Amendment ratification efforts; losing three-to-one; protests and forming a PAC and subsequent anger with legislators and strategies. Speaks of running for office, lack of ERA, New Leadership at UNLV, running Nevada Manufactured Housing, Red Cross Board and starting the Jewish Reporter newspaper for Jewish Federation 27 - 32 vi Talks joining Temple Beth Sholom when first moved to Las Vegas; 1973 involved in developing a second synagogue, Congregation Ner Tamid and their first High Holidays in old convention center with around 200 people attending; talks about her recent help at Temple Sinai with women's Sisterhood and cooperation within the Jewish community; more about challenges of starting a new congregation; how she is involved currently 32 - 37 Tells about being appointed to the State Museum board; appointment to Nevada Commission on Judicial Discipline's first board; ran for state assembly; League of Women Voters; how she came to be on the who's-who list of Nevada political world; involvement with Ruby Duncan and Operation Life. Anecdote from New Leadership scholarship recipient 38 - 41 Her life philosophy of finding that one thing in life that is meaningful to you. Discusses her feelings that only a small group of Jewish people in the early days were involved in political issues or agenda. Mentions ADL, bowling league, B'nai B'rith, Jewish Federation and raising money for Democratic politics; Hadassah, Star Auxiliary. Other observations about past and current Jewish community; 1976 anecdote about ERA fundraising and Bob Coffin 42 - 48 vii Today is November 20th, 2014. This is Barbara Tabach and I'm sitting with Renee Diamond. If you'd spell your name for us that would be great. Certainly. My first name is Renee, R-E-N-E-E, no accent. Middle name is Lee, L-E-E. Last name Diamond, D-I-A-M-O-N-D. Awesome. This is a beautiful day, a beautiful home. This is going to be fun. There are so many different directions that we could jump into the story. So I think what we'll do...maybe you could tell me how you got west. I saw in your bio that you were born in...Chicago? Right. Okay. And how did you end up in California? Let's start there. My dad had a sister in Los Angeles and he went to visit her on the Super Chief coming out of Chicago direct to Los Angeles. He didn't have enough money for a sleeper compartment, so he pretty much sat up with the whole trip there, which is a few-day trip. And he called us from L.A. and he says, "I found God's country; you need to pack up everything," to my mom. I was an only child. "And come to L.A." So in 1942, we moved to L.A. It was just after the World War. So there we still had an icebox with a Union iceman who came. And we lived in a lovely part of L.A. off Melrose and San Vicente, which later on became an arts and very upscale area, but at that time it was the only apartment we could find, a one-bed apartment. So I shared a bedroom at five years old with my parents. Wow. And the building...he found it where all people had moved from Chicago over the last few years. 1 So they made lifelong friends and their children became my lifelong friends, many of them now deceased, sadly. How were your ancestors? Did they come from Eastern Europe? I don't know a lot about them. My father was naturalized in the U.S. He was born when his mother left Russia en route to the United States to her husband; she was pregnant and had him in London. So he was two years old when he got to the United States and was later naturalized. My grandma, when I was a little girl in L.A., I coached her and she became a citizen. She was a wild woman. She was very fun. My mother's family were from Poland. My mother was born in Chicago. So her mother was already here. I like to say she was a widow, but she wasn't; her husband walked out one day and never came back, the second husband. She was a widow once. She had three daughters, my mother being the youngest. And so Chicago was their home. My mom and dad met there in the 1920's. Nobody lived in homes, but we were in a nice area with a three-bedroom apartment. My best girlfriend was a little Catholic girl and I used to go to mass with her. Oh, really? Yes. And my parents were not religious Jews. They were always reform Jews, although my grandmother on my dad's side was orthodox and went to one of those old synagogues in L.A. in the Pico area, which had the upstairs for the women. Very old fashioned. But I was confirmed at Wilshire Boulevard Temple, which was so reform, Rabbi Magnin. It was so reformed. I mean that a lot of people said that he used to come occasionally to the bema without even a tallit on. 2 Oh, wow. Yes, he was pretty out there. That would be pretty casual. Yes. But it was the largest synagogue in L.A. in reform. So did you live in a Jewish neighborhood there? I did. I lived near Farmers Market and just further up Fairfax Avenue. I lived off of Fairfax, what we used to call the Borscht Belt was there. In my high school, Fairfax High School, I think there were about thirty Christians and they had their own club. We were as obnoxiously discriminatory as Christians were to Jews in other places. Really? Yes. L.A. at that time had a Jewish country club. Jews were not allowed to any of the Christian country clubs. Yes, Fairfax High School was almost all Jewish. Los Angeles High School was mixed. Hollywood High was a whole other story. But yes, we lived right near the Borscht Belt and Farmers Market. It was a wonderful upbringing. I went to synagogue on Fairfax. I can't even remember the name of the shul, but it was more conservative than I was used to. With my grandma we went there. But I was raised and confirmed at Wilshire Boulevard, which is still huge and influential. They now have a campus where most of the Jews have moved more towards Santa Monica. My great-niece teaches there. So your grandparents moved out prior to you moving there or after or how did that... ? No. My grandma lived with my dad's youngest sister and her husband and they came later, about four years later. So the family gathered over about a five-year period. I came when I was five. So by the time I was ten they were all here. Then my mother's sister became a widow in Detroit and she and her two daughters came 3 and stayed with us in our two-bedroom house. One bedroom was huge and we made it into like a dorm. It was me and my cousins and my aunt. My parents [Toby Blank Schulman and Samuel Schulman] had my former bedroom, which was just a little, tiny bedroom. So we lived in a two-bedroom, one-bath house. And then they moved out. But one cousin went to UCLA. She was the youngest. And the other one went to work for a mortgage company on Wilshire and Crescent Heights. So they were like big sisters to me. What kind of work was your father in? My father was a steel die engraver for stationery and printing in Chicago. He was also a typographer. So when you set type in the olden days, you set it by hand backwards, piece by piece, letter by letter. Steel engraving, which is now only done by Tiffany, was put?how can I put it??was reduced when lithography came in, those big plates. And then lithography, also there was a way to set type by a pneumatic system. So my dad's original business...they made playing cards, fine stationery. If you wanted to have your name and face on playing cards, you went through your department store in your local area and it was sent to Chicago. In the same building as Rand McNally Books was this printing company that my uncle owned. My dad was a specialist. By the time we got to L.A. that specialty was on its way out. He was hired in L.A. by the Ambassador Hotel, which was a huge hotel built in the mid-Wilshire area in the early 1900's. Movie stars lived there. The Barrymores lived in their cottages. Rudolph Valentino lived there for a time. But he ran the print shop and he made menus with...I forget the process name, but by hand. He had two employees. He taught himself Spanish so he could speak to them, even back in the day. So it was all very nice. As a result, I got to go to the back of a hotel that had world-class standing and I got to go to the Cocoanut Grove where Barbra Streisand sang for the first time in a West Coast nightclub 4 at the Cocoanut Grove. You were there? I was there, yes. Oh, my goodness. I have a picture with Gene Kelly at a movie premier because my dad was friends with the hotel's photographer. So it was a very exciting childhood. But more importantly, it was at a time when L.A. was at its very best. The traffic hadn't taken over. The population wasn't huge. It was safe. I took public buses. We used to walk on a Saturday from my home at Wilshire?pardon me? between Wilshire and Third Street and Fairfax. We used to walk to C.C. Brown's in Hollywood for a hot fudge sundae. And we'd finish our hot fudge sundae and we'd turn around and walk back. Now, we're walk talking about a two-and-a-half-hour walk each direction. Wow, wow. That's a long ways. That was entertainment when you were twelve, thirteen. And no one worried about you? No one worried about you. No one accosted you. We'd go to the La Brea Tar Pits, which are the L.A. County Museum now, but they were a big park with open tar pits at the time. They had some dinosaur bones and replicas, but in the back it was all a park. We'd go for Easter egg hunt and go through those shrubberies. Would you send a child in a public park into shrubberies? No, not today. No. Unless they were running away from somebody. So we watched the town grow up. But then it got so big, which is how we came to Las Vegas. I married and divorced and then married my second husband and he wanted to retire here because he got tired of standing in line for movies and restaurants and traffic. So we came here. 5 And now you're talking about Leo. Leo. Where was Leo from originally? Leo was from Brooklyn, from Bensonhurst. I know Brooklyn is newly gentrified, but it was a slum then, partial old homes and then some manufacturing. Levy's rye bread?you don't have to be Jewish to love Levy's?was there. Three G Suit Company [GGG Clothes], manufacturing fine suits, was there. And then there were these homes, tiny, little homes, unheated homes. Leo reminds me that he who was the baby of ten? Oh, wow. Yes. His mother, when he was about eighteen months old, went to a tubercular sanitarium. She had tuberculosis in upstate New York and never came home. Oh, my goodness. So his sister took care of him till he was a teenager. His second eldest sister got married with Leo. So she and her husband raised him. So they're like Mom and Dad to us. They're gone now. Wow. So that's amazing. Yes. The family had originally come to Brooklyn and they lived in a tenement in the Lower East Side. When we went through the Tenement Museum some years ago, Leo said to me, "This is where my family came from." They thought moving to Brooklyn into a single-family house was a step up, but the truth was that the kitchen had a stove and the upstairs bedrooms, two more floors, had a hole in the floor to let the heat rise up there for the winter. He slept in a bed with two of his brothers, sideways. Wow. So how did he get from New York to California? 6 His dad died and in his area of Brooklyn gambling was a huge thing. They used to strip tenements of copper and sell it. They had an Italian friend. It was an Italian, Irish, Jewish neighborhood. Of course, Leo had this best Italian friend Mike Rocco who was wide and thick and strong. So that when they'd go upstairs to strip the tenements of copper, Leo would stand down below and catch it. And one time Mike yells down, "There's only a refrigerator up here." And Leo yells up, "Throw it down." Mike pushed it to the window and threw it out. But in any case, they used to have gambling games in the streets, in the alleys. And when Leo's father died he turned their front parlor into a gambling place, poker and craps. And then he paid off the beat cops five dollars to look the other way. And so his brother that was in L.A., the bachelor brother Butch?I'm trying to think how many above Leo was Butch; maybe three or four brothers above?got wind of it and he says, "I'm getting him out of there." And he got in a car, drove to Brooklyn, grabbed Leo, threw him in the car and took him to L.A. Is that because he was fearing that he was headed the wrong direction? Headed the wrong direction, yes. So about how old was he at that time? Oh, I don't know. He'd been in the army. Oh. So he was in his twenties, maybe? Then he came back. Yes, mid-twenties. So, yes, he was going to get him away from the wicked path. But he got lucky in that first he lived with his sister, another sister, the oldest sister in California. But then he moved into a boarding house. We don't know what boarding houses are now. But in L.A. at that time where the gentry had moved out of homes down Wilshire Boulevard near Alvarado past Vermont, there were big old homes and families who had them, in order to maintain them, turned over seven, eight, nine bedrooms?and above the garage there 7 were always maid quarters?into boarding houses. They served one meal a day, dinner. And you lived there for fifteen, twenty dollars a week. In Leo's case he lived above the garage, which was always the cheapest, say, five dollars. But while there he met what became lifelong friends and one who became one of the founders of Suicide Prevention Center in L.A., Mickey Heilig, and then another friend Louie Galenson, who worked for the RAND Corporation, who devised the first cable television in the Santa Monica Mountains because nobody could get regular TV up there. Antennas didn't work. And what kind of work was he in? Leo did everything. He decided that he needed to be in the?they were pulling down buildings at that time in downtown L.A. right and left and those buildings were made out of beautiful old brick. And in the 1950's the San Fernando Valley and the housing boom was just going on and everybody wanted a used brick fireplace. So Leo went into the wrecking business and he wrecked buildings. He wrecked the old L.A. post office. He wrecked the Dorman Linen Supply Building to get the brick and then sold used brick all over to builders. So maybe two-thirds of Lakewood and San Fernando Valley, all those homes have his brick in it. So he used some of those tearing apart talents... ? Yes, you had to agree to tear apart the whole building in order to salvage the used brick. So after that played out, because there are a finite number of those sized buildings, he borrowed money from a friend of his sister, fifteen hundred dollars, and he opened a?I don't know if you know what records are, vinyl records. Records? Like old-fashion phonograph records? Phonograph records, yes. I just came from a meeting. We were talking about the history of that. 8 My grandson is collecting them now. If I could tell you how many hundreds and hundreds of albums we gave away when we moved up here that I'm now buying back at Zia on Eastern for my grandson at twenty dollars apiece, I mean it's horrifying. But, yes, so he? So the record business, about what year would you say that was? That would have been in the fifties maybe, '54. So on Beverlywood, there was a new Jewish area. A lot of people who left Boyle Heights, the Jewish community in L.A., really started to move as they became more affluent, became owners of businesses, moved to an area that was called Beverlywood. And it's Robertson between Pico and Venice, let's say, Venice Boulevard. It was hilly and they built these little "tracty-type" houses. There were some nicer ones up on the hill. But Leo's music store was on Robertson next to a deli. Was that the name of it, Leo's Record Store? No. I can't even remember what it was called. It'll come to me. But he was next to a deli. There, too, because he had so little money, if he sold you an album, let's say Harry Belafonte's "Calypso," the next morning before he opened the store, he'd go down to the Capitol Building in Hollywood, the round iconic building on Hollywood and Vine, and he would buy another one copy of "Calypso" by Harry Belafonte and bring it to the store. So every day before work, before the store opened he bought records. And then he opened a second record shop in a new area, which was Gardena. It was called Holly Park because Gardena had card clubs. And in Gardena he opened his second one. And then Marina del Rey started developing; he opened a third one. And then his bachelor brother lived up in Palm Springs, so he opened Butch Diamond Records there in his brother's name and his brother ran that. That's what he retired from to move here. He got tired of it. By that time he had met me. He was a bachelor at thirty-six and I was a divorcee, a 9 mother of two, eleven years younger. And we got married and I had two little girls. We lived in L.A. And then we bought a house in the valley, San Fernando Valley. So his main store in Holly Park...it was a huge commute and then you had to go towards downtown to buy records. In those days you didn't get FedEx or UPS every day. You literally physically went. So he could go down to Capitol Record and buy wholesale. Capitol and others. He bought wholesale and sold retail in his store, a vinyl album that you now in this year pay forty dollars for was eight ninety-nine. What did a typical record store look like then, do you remember? You walked in the door and the walls had shelves on them with albums leaning against them for display. Then you walked over to a bin. When I say a bin, it was maybe the width of an album cover, maybe eighteen inches and then eighteen inches wide, and it would say on the back like on a file card "Frank Sinatra." Why Leo did so well is he had every Frank Sinatra ever made, so whatever was available. But he had one copy of it. So if you came in after I bought "Frank Sinatra at the Sands with Billy May" and you got that copy for eight ninety-nine and I walked in and I asked him for it, he'd say, "Oh, you'll have to come back tomorrow," and you would. And he'd go buy it the next morning, not for stock but for you. So like his record store was famous in its way in that Gardena?I'm trying to think of the other little communities around there? because he had a lot of stock on hand. It isn't like now you punch a little thing on your computer and tomorrow Amazon drops it at your front door. No. You had to work for it. He always said he wanted to retire young. What actually speeded that up was the first of the discount stores opened near him in Gardena. It was called Zody's. You're way too young to remember Zody's. I don't remember Zody's, no. 10 But Zody's sold, like Costco does now, things cheaper so that the album, the Harry Belafonte's "Calypso," which Leo sold for nine ninety-nine or eight ninety-nine was seven ninety-nine there and they had boxes full of them. They were a big corporation. I remember one day I was shopping at a Zody's in the San Fernando Valley and they had a brochure, do you want to go to Hawaii? Three islands, airfare from L.A. and hotels, four hundred and ninety-nine dollars. Now, it was the early sixties. That still sounds cheap. But still that was very cheap. I mean there weren't major first-class hotels; they were a Hawaiian-owned chain, but it was maybe the best trip I ever took to Hawaii and I'm now seventy-seven and I've taken fifty trips to Hawaii. That's still the best, huh? It was charming and it was cheap and it was a getaway from the little kids. Did he have those?we were talking about in this meeting?the booths that people used to play the records? Yes. Did he have that kind of setup? You had to play records for people because there wasn't places for people to hear music. There were disc jockeys on the air, but you really couldn't hear anything except top played things back in those days on the radio. And so you came in and he had two booths, soundproof booths with headphones, and he played you the record. He played it. Yes, yes. And this is the beginning of the rock and roll era and the popularity with new music. 11 Yes, yes. But he had another unique quality. Leo, when he was in the army, he taught tank gunnery in the South as a young man and he made black friends, which wasn't done in the South at that time. And he actually lived in an area, in a boarding house at that time called Tuxedo Junction where the big bands later on?and I can't remember if it was Benny Goodman or Harry James?actually composed a tune called "Tuxedo Junction." Yes, I've heard of that. So he became a big band, black music store, which is very different. In those days in the record business black music was called race music. So the black artists like Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway and others, they were a separate category of bands; they were big bands, but it was still race music. And Leo's record stores all had race music in them. They had a whole section of black artists and, as a scandal, black comedians?Redd Foxx...I'm trying to think of the woman's name. She had a mouth like a toilet. By those standards damn and hell were bad words. I mean I remember going to see Lenny Bruce at the Crescendo in Los Angeles and the police coming in and arresting him on stage. I don't remember what he said, but by today's standards I'd think to myself...it wasn't the "F" word or it wasn't a word we would consider scandalous now. But he was arrested, a comedian. I remember seeing a movie about him. Yes, yes. Well, it was just like that. I mean we were there the night they arrested him at the Crescendo on the Sunset Strip. Those were the days when there was less entertainment. So on a Friday or Saturday night you got dressed up in your taffeta low-cut beautiful dress and you went to clubs, supper clubs, jazz clubs. But my husband always liked black music, so we were always in different parts of town, groups that you don't even know now. So now that I have a grandson seventeen and a half, almost eighteen, I buy him vinyl records at garage sales and things and then 12 tell him the stories. Oh, how wonderful. Yes. I just bought at the Anthem parking lot sale Paul Robeson, the black opera singer, Paul Robeson's "Ballad for Americans;" that whole album. So I didn't want to take a chance and just give it to him and he'd just put it on a shelf. So I Googled Paul Robeson and did all the histories and then I Googled "Ballad for Americans." Paul Robeson did the definitive record, but it wasn't written by him; it was written by another man. I wanted to make sure he knew what he had there. That's wonderful. The parking lot sale before, I bought him Elvis Presley's "Gold" on vinyl records, ten albums for five dollars. Some fool had it in this garage and I bought it for five dollars. So did you buy him a turntable so that he could play these? No. I made him save up and buy the turntable. Oh, so he does have the turntable. Yes, he has a turntable. And it's not a turntable. My husband later besides records had stereo equipment and so on. But Braden, my grandson, bought a Philips, the kind of record player that I had when I was a girl that had a little catch in the front and a little handle that you used to carry to parties with your 45 records. Yes, I do remember. I remember that, too. Well, you're over at the university. You need to go on Eastern and Flamingo right across from Saint Viator's. There's a shopping center where Dina Titus had her first campaign headquarters, not to throw that around. It's a record shop called Zia. If you go in there, you will have memories of your childhood because somewhere in there is something you loved. They have the little plastic disks that fit in the 45's so they'd fit on the spindle. 13 Yes. Yes. I don't love the new technology, but I love the nostalgia of the old. But Leo always created a unique niche wherever he was and he did the same when we came to Las Vegas. So he sounds like a person who saw an opportunity. He could differentiate himself in whatever he was doing and grow. What were you doing? Were you working at that time? No. Well, when I first got married at sixteen and a half to my first husband, in the days where one married your high school boyfriend rather than sleep with him?if you wanted to sleep with him, you took a cut from school and you went to Tijuana and you got married. So me, the only child in my household, had to tell my parents that I was married and then pregnant. Ooh, scandalous. It was a scandal. Was he Jewish? He was Jewish. He lived on the next block. Family owned the gas station at the corner. He had a wonderful mom, a nice brother, a great grandma that lived with them. He was everything that an only child wanted, a real family, not just three people. Anyway, I had a wonderful daughter and two and a half years later had a second daughter. But my sweet high school sweetheart turned into a mean, cranky, ugly man. I took as much as I could. After all, I got married young. I didn't know if I could earn a living. Then my family doctor, who was around the corner as well, asked me if I wanted to come in?and I could bring my daughter; I only had one at that time? and help him out in his office on the typewriter. I had junior high school typing. So you hadn't taken those office courses? Never. I could never have done that. But in those days it was a simpler time in that nobody had insurance. He was a general practitioner. He delivered a woman's baby and she was paying 14 twice a month when her husband got paid. She paid two dollars and fifty cents. So bookkeeping and typing up charts was very simple. It could be hunt and peck; it wouldn't have mattered. So I did that part time, but it wasn't a big money earner. But when I divorced my ex-husband, he put me to work full time. And not only that, in those days if you had had a heart attack and you were under the care of a general practitioner, there was no laboratory you could call when you got home from the hospital to come and take your cardiogram to see if you were okay to go to the doctor's office. And so your doctor did that. But he let me do it so I got the twenty-five dollars. Twenty-five dollars in those days was big money. So you were making house calls? At lunch or after work, yes. It wasn't often. It was a couple times a month. But fifty extra dollars...And my ex-husband was paying child support and alimony. Child support was sixty dollars apiece for each of the girls, a hundred and twenty dollars, and alimony was sixty-five dollars. The girls' child support ended when they turned eighteen. It was a bad time. But Leo jumped in, the thirty-six year old bachelor and became dad to both of them. They never called their biological father Dad again. He quit seeing them before we got married. But he got married and he stopped seeing them. But they always called him Mike and Leo Dad. Very special. Yes. Years late