Transcript of interview with Valerie Wiener by Barbara Tabach, January 20, 2015

i AN INTERVIEW WITH VALERIE WIENER 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 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, Amanda Hammar 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 Valerie Wiener is an accomplished state senator, business owner, president and founding member of the Public Service Institute of Nevada and the Valerie Wiener Foundation. She was born October 30, 1948 in Las Vegas, Nevada. Her service as senator for 16 years and her role as a public servant led her to become the first woman assistant majority leader of the state senate in Nevada. She graduated with a bachelor degree of Journalism at the University of Missouri/Columbia within the School of Journalism earning a Masters of Arts in Broadcast Journalism and a Master of Arts in Literature at the University of Illinois in Springfield while attending law school at McGeorge School of Law in Sacramento in the 1970s. Her generosity is also seen through scholarships and activities at the Louis Wiener Jr. Elementary School. In addition, Valerie is a professional speaker, consultant, and internationally published author. She is the recipients of many awards, such as: ?Women of Achievement Award? in Media; ?Healthy Schools Heroes?; ?Public Affairs Champion Award?; ?Legislator of the Year?, and the Nevada Secretary of State?s recipient of the ?Jean Ford Participatory Democracy Award.? She stays active through her commitment to the Nevada Senior Olympics for both Fitness and Weightlifting earning 17 gold medals from 1998 to 2007. In this interview, Wiener discusses her childhood and being raised in Las Vegas in the 1950s as well as the academic path that led her career into politics. She shares memorable insight into the life of her father, Louis Isaac Wiener, Jr., an accomplished attorney and business man who represented the infamous Benjamin ?Bugsy? Siegel during the construction and opening of the Flamingo Hotel and Casino in 1946. Throughout Wiener?s interview, she highlights the traditions of the small, but growing Las Vegas Jewish population in the 1960s. Among the people she recalls most vividly is her grandmother Kitty Wiener. Wiener also discusses her community service work and her life mantra of giving. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Interview with Valerie Wiener January 20, 2015 in Las Vegas, Nevada Conducted by Barbara Tabach Preface??????????????????????????????????..iv Valerie Wiener opens with an introduction of her family members and a story about nicknames and how to honor people by using their preferred name; She talks about her birth in Las Vegas in 1948 and the immigration of her father and grandmother in 1931; She shares insight on the population of Las Vegas during the 1930s; Valerie remembers moving to Arizona after her parents? divorce; She reminisces about her Grandmother Kitty and her father?s birth in 1915????????????????... ????????????????...?.1 ? 3 She annotates the career path of her granddad as a tailor in Pittsburgh during the Great Depression; Shares the adventure of a midnight train ride west with three generations of the Wiener family; Her families arrival in Las Vegas and a description of the old railroad district housing; Talks about her father?s path to becoming the 70th attorney admitted to Clark County bar; Reflects on her Grandmother and Grandfathers trades as dressmaker and tailor in San Francisco; Mentions her Aunt Kit giving piano lessons in Boulder City; Valerie gives her early experiences of faith and growing up around Charleston Boulevard and 15th Street???..?.3? 6 Gives detailed summary of her Grandmother Kitty as the Matriarch of her family; Reflects on her father?s second marriage and her new role as a step daughter; Valerie remembers how the relationships in her life shifted when she attended the University of Missouri/Columbia School of Journalism; Mentions her marriage to Charles Michael Baird after she earned her master?s degree; Living in Columbia, Missouri while working in television and moving to Illinois; Returning to Las Vegas in 1974; Talking about her Grandmother?s quirks and her passing ?????????????????????????????????.?..?....6? 13 Discusses her father?s faith and her personal search for hers; Taking classes at the Temple Beth Sholom and exploring Judaism; Getting her second master?s degree and going to law school at McGeorge School of Law in Sacramento; Struggling with eating disorders and sickness; Overcoming and returning to Las Vegas; Attending Christian Science Church and her Fathers support in relation to Judaism; Following her spiritual path to becoming a Licensed Religious Science Practitioner??????????...?????????????????.14? 18 vi Speaks her interview with Jews in Nevada; Importance of education instilled from her Father; Her father?s support of her writing and her experiences visiting his law office; her contributions to writing and community service; Illustrates different traditional Jewish food eaten when we was growing up; Remembers her brother, Paul and her father?s similar passing????.19? 25 Discusses the small Jewish population in Las Vegas in the 1960s; Her experiences going to her first bar and bat mitzvahs; Her father?s Jewish tradition of philanthropy or tzedakah; Her service as senator for 16 years and her role in public service; first woman assistant majority leader of the state senate; Opening a Public Service Institute of Nevada and the Valerie Wiener Foundation; Retirement and working as a Religious Science Practitioner; Her involvement in the Alzheimer?s Task Force and the Nevada Youth Legislature; Her father?s charitable remainder trust?...26? 34 Writing her first, second and third books Power Communications, Gang-Free: Friendship Choices for Today?s Youth, and The Nesting Syndrome: Grown Children Living at Home; Remembers her father?s passing in February 1996; Her nomination for Women of Achievement in Media; Advise from her father on contribution and accomplishment; Shares details of her work as a positioning strategist; Hyphenating her last name in marriage during the 70s?..35? 39 She shares her father?s financial influence in the community and keeping his commitments no matter what; Her Fathers oral history contributions; She recalls her father?s stories of defending the law and representing Bugsy Siegel; Her meeting with Millicent Siegel Rosen; Her recollection of watching the film ?Bugsy? together with her father and the fallacies the movie illustrated; Her father?s role of the rebuilding of Siegel?s private apartment; Her dad presence at the opening of the Flamingo Hotel and Casino; Her father?s victory in getting the Federal Government to grant building permits for the Flamingo?????.??????.??.40? 46 Valerie speaks of the elementary school named after her father; Her father?s friendship with Jim Rogers; Remembers her beloved cat Democat; Living in Spanish Oaks across from her father; Her approach to success; She concluded by imparting advice from her father on how to embrace life??????????????????????????????..????.47? 51 vii 1 Today is January 20th, 2015. This is Barbara Tabach and I'm with Valerie Wiener in her home in Spanish Oaks. And we were talking about nicknames. Talk about your nicknames. That's cute. As a young person, I was athletic, very active, played a lot of sports with the guys and didn't do as much with the girls because I just loved being out there with the game. And so my nickname, because I was little and Valerie was such a long name and we were kids, they called me Val or my Pal Val, my Gal Val. I went by all of them. And then when I went to law school in Sacramento, 1976 to 1979, I had a classmate whose name was Val. A big man, who had played football at Brigham Young University and still had that physical presence. And I realized that I liked Valerie, which is my, of course, birth name. And so it was probably in 1977 when I decided that I would prefer Valerie, and I did everything I could to orient people in my life to that. However, the people who hold on the longest and the hardest tend to be family. So my half-brother, Doc, called me Val. My biological brother, Paul, called me Val and I could not get him to shake that. My dad called me Val. My mother, however, called me Valerie. Some long-time friends still call me Val and I can most assuredly guarantee that they knew me in high school. I've even said to people, ?I prefer Valerie.? I mean, 1977, when I made that great decision, is a long time ago. I honor people when they have a choice about what name to be called and I very specifically introduce myself as Valerie, or this is Valerie, and they'll say, ?Val, what are you...?? That tells me how much they're listening. So it's a lesson for me to be a better listener. I do pay great attention to how people want to be addressed because it's a way to honor them. And you were saying earlier that with the last name of Wiener that you would be called? Oh, I had other nicknames. Hot Dog, which has carried forward to this day. Senator Joe Neal, 2 one of my closest friends, calls me Hot Dog all the time. In fact, sometimes in Senate committee in the Nevada Legislature he would call me Hot Dog. Senator Mike Schneider would call me Wiener Dog. I was called Frank, short for frankfurter. My mother called me Princess. She was Australian-born and that was very prominent in her personal history. Dad would call me Sweet Pea. And so there are a lot of different names in different references and different relationships of names that I'm called. But Val and Valerie are the ones that I hear most often. So you were born here? I was born in Las Vegas. When I go on the Internet to try to find population?I haven't done hard research in a physical facility?I can't get quite the population for my birth year, but I can get close. I've been told is when I was born here there were about 19,000 people in the area when I was born. When my father [Louis Weiner Jr] and his sister [Kathryn], parents and a grandmother came here in 1931, there were about 3000 people in the area. The construction of Hoover Dam?well, they called it Boulder Dam?was a draw for the family, though we already had family here. The family came in, I believe, the early 1920s for various reasons. That's why my family moved here, because we had family here. It won?t be long until my family's 100th anniversary of residing in Las Vegas. Isn't that amazing? Yes. Seven generations have lived here and, I believe, four of us were born here. Now, they followed on my cousin's side because I don't have kids, but that's still my family from the same grandparents. And that's on your father's side, his lineage? Yes. And because the nature of this project is about the Southern Nevada Jewish community, I 3 want to maybe follow that path of your family history, what you know about it. It's interesting. My parents separated when I was ten and divorced when I was twelve, and I moved with my mother, Tis Ava Knight, and my brother, Paul, for a short time to Scottsdale, Arizona. That?s when I learned my dad was Jewish. I missed my dad so much and moved back to Las Vegas months later. My dad?s mother, Grandma Kitty, had a very, very powerful family presence. Truly, if there were a definition of matriarch by name in the dictionary, it would be Kitty Wiener. As a child, I thought everyone grew up with the mainstay of chopped chicken liver, matzah ball soup, and salmon on bagels. That was the Jewish menu. On the Anglican side, my mom was born in Sydney, Australia?I thought every child studied each night with a little cup of tea and a cookie. As children, we visited my grandmother often. The stories of Grandma...she was probably the anchor in her marriage. My grandfather was very quietly strong. I never knew him. My dad was, of course, named after him. There's not any official I don?t know about any oral history that's been passed through the generations. My grandfather came from, what I believe, a Polish village that was purged by the Russians. I don't know when he came to this country. My dad was born in 1915. So my grandfather could have come in the late 1800s, early 1900s. I only know is what's been passed down: When he came through Ellis Island, he left it all behind. He did not share stories. He did not share history. He did not talk about what preceded that entry into the United States of America. I remember one time my Aunt Kit, my dad's sister, said she remembered, as a child, visiting a family member in New York. She remembered that this woman was in a rocking chair. And this is what my Aunt Kit said, ?I think she was an aunt or something, but I don't know.? And my aunt once said, ?I believe my father was an educated man; I don't know for 4 sure, because he never talked about it, but he had a wonderful vocabulary.? Anyway, when they came here from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1931, leaving everything behind in Pittsburgh?Granddad was a tailor. He had a significant customer base: the Mellons and the Carnegies and all of the big families. However, during the Depression, someone in the Carnegie family did not need to add another suit to the five hundred he already had. So things plummeted and they made a decision to come west. I'm sure they were in debt. At the time, I'm told, my Aunt Kit was engaged; she did not tell her fianc? she was leaving. The last night Dad was in Pittsburgh, he went to a ball game with his very best friend and did not let him know he was leaving. The three-generation family took basically a midnight train and came west with a hundred dollars in their pocket to satisfy the needs of the family. They rented a house down for one month in the railroad section downtown. We were a railroad town?eight hours by train from Salt Lake and eight hours from Los.Angeles. Union Station was located at Main and Fremont. So all those little houses downtown were railroad houses. I never visited that house and it's not there now. But Las Vegas Councilman Bob Coffin told me many, many, many years later that he had bought it and he wanted to know if I wanted to buy it from him. At that time. I couldn?t do so. I think a lawyer bought it, made it an office, and then it was torn down. Soon after my dad arrived in Las Vegas, he met with his uncle, a lawyer, who had been disbarred attorney by Back East. Dad, who was sixteen-and-a-half, told his uncle he was going to be a lawyer. This is all he ever wanted to do. His uncle said, ?You can't be a lawyer here.? My dad said, ?But this is probably the only growth city in the country. People are working here.? The uncle replied, ?No, you can't be a lawyer here or you'll go broke.? My dad just didn't understand what he was saying. The uncle added, ?People don't sign contracts here; they shake 5 hands; they give their word. You'll never make money as a lawyer here.? Well, my dad did become a lawyer. I believe, he was the seventeenth attorney to be admitted to the Clark County bar. When he took the state bar exam, Dad was the only person in Clark County who took it. Today hundreds of people take the exam every time it's given. Once notified by telegram that Dad had passed, my grandfather called Justice Orr on the Supreme Court, and said, ?Well, we got this telegram that Junior passed the bar. What do we do now?? Justice Orr said, ?Take him downtown and get him sworn in. He's got to go to work to do.? I gave that telegram.to Louis Wiener Jr. Elementary School. The telegram says, ?You have been admitted to the practive of law.? They misspelled it. So when I read it, I told my dad that they knew you were going to have an active practice, a practive.? My come back, right? Granddad was a tailor and Grandma was a dressmaker. They had this tailor shop where the Golden Gate is. Looking back to my granddad, everything I reflect is through stories. Granddad was color blind. So he had to have people help him pick material out. He didn't use patterns; he really built the suit on the body. He was a craftsman. Downtown was Block 16, the red-light district. My grandfather made the suits for all the owners of the houses. My grandmother was a premier dressmaker and she clothed the women who worked there. That business kept food on my family's table. My Aunt Kit, Kathryn Waldman, was a significant pianist. Prior to the midnight move to Las Vegas in November 1931, she was preparing to attend Julliard. Again, to keep the Wiener family fed, she would drive the dirt roads to Boulder City once or twice a week to the construction area and teach piano to the children of the middle managers. I didn?t know my granddad, but I've seen pictures of him?a tiny man, very soft-spoken, very gentle. I think he and my grandmother got married on either her sixteenth birthday or 6 eighteenth birthday?whatever the minimum age required. Fortunately, I did grow up with Grandma, the matriarch of this Jewish family. My mother wasn't Jewish. My mother was raised in the Church of England and then later as a Seventh-day Adventist. In the Jewish faith, the faith tradition passes through the mother. My dad never asserted any kind of voice about religion in the family. He let Mom take the lead. So my faith experiences were many, starting with the Mormon Church for my early years. I went to that church with my childhood sweetheart, Danny Potter, who lived down the street. Our block was one city block long and there were about eighty kids, most of who were Catholic or Mormon. What street was that? Earle Street. Initially it was spelled E-A-R-L; the city changed it at some point to E-A-R-L-E. It's in the area of Charleston Boulevard and 15th Street and Fremont Street. I went to Mayfair Grammar School, which later became a diagnostic center for the school district; I think it's a fire station now. We were one classroom per grade, so we all just moved with each other. When I graduated from Las Vegas High School, I sent invitations to all of my elementary schoolteachers, and of the seven I had, kindergarten included, I think five or six of them came. They bought me a little salmon-colored wind-up travel clock, the kind you could fold. I remember when I opened it, there was an outside dial that had different major cities of the world. So this is a time in Las Vegas I could see what time it was in Barcelona or somewhere else. The teachers wrote in the card: ?We know you'll be a world traveler, but never forget where home is.? Oh, how sweet is that? It's like a movie, the kind of support I got. May we chat again about my grandmother? 7 Yes, because I want to hear about her. Yes, the Jewish influence. There's a lot of people that mention her when I mention your name?Oh, Grandma Kitty. Grandma Kitty. Everybody knows Grandma Kitty. It's interesting because I didn't have as much interaction with her while my parents were still married. I mean we'd visit Grandma. We'd have our meals with Grandma. She scared me a little bit because she had a bark and she had a presence. She was very, very powerful. She was a very astute businesswoman at a time when women weren't supposed to be. I think she was the brains behind the business and my grandfather was the talent. She was just so powerful a thinker and a doer. At one time, Grandma wanted to buy property and found a lot that she wanted to buy. I think I remember as a very young child visiting her there, because I remember the fence, going into the yard, and up to the house. Everybody had cautioned her it was just too far out of town, just too far out of town, and it was on what is now Las Vegas Boulevard between Bridger and Fremont Street. Though there's now a pawnshop on that lot; for decades Nevada State Bank owned the land. Too far out of town? Hmmm, okay. And then she wanted to build a house. She was a widow. My granddad died before I was born. She wanted to build a house. Mrs. Laub, the mother of Dr. Richard Laub, who delivered me?one of maybe four doctors in town at the time?was Grandma Kitty?s good friend. She said, ?You're crazy; you're crazy; you'll never pay it off.? Well, indeed she did, instead of paying rent. Grandma said, ?When you pay rent it's like throwing it into a garbage can every month. Nothing grows from that.? And she also said, ?For however long I live in it, I have grown value in it.? Who thought that way back in the 1940s or '50s? Grandma paid for her 8 house long before her death. With Grandma Kitty, the matriarch, there was an understanding that certainly her children and, generally, the grandchildren, too, would call her or visit her every day. Since the town was small, Dad would stop by on the way home from work every day and visit on weekends. Aunt Kit lived around the corner from Grandma and always stopped at Grandma?s fist before going home. We grandkids called Grandma; she never ever called us, ever. It was our responsibility. When my dad and mom got divorced and he married his second wife, Gail, the dynamics in my family shifted substantially. I had been the youngest of two in a very solid, stable family, where the income was enough that we didn't have to do without and I knew my mother loved me. Mom always was in my life. She'd write notes that I'd read if she wasn't home when I came home from school. She might say, ?I ran to the grocery store. I'll be home real soon. I love you, Princess.? In Dad?s second family, I became the oldest of three and I was the stepdaughter. It was a huge shift, and my role in the family shifted. My level of happiness shifted, because I wanted to live with my dad, whatever it looked like. When I went on to the University of Missouri/Columbia School of Journalism, my relationship with Aunt Kit, which was always strong, became an adult relationship. I was an adult child. And my relationship with my grandmother also changed and we grew much closer. So my fear of my grandma disappeared. I remember one time in those early years of Dad?s second marriage when I was still afraid of Grandma, my half-brother got chicken pox or measles. I also had a step-brother. The two boys shared a room and I had a room. Well, because my half-brother had to be isolated, I was shuttled off to stay with Grandma. I was shaking in my boots. 9 I was in junior high school and I was terrified to be with my grandmother. However, when I went into the back bedroom where I was going to stay for several days, on the wall, next to the bed, was a framed paint-by-number of Peter Pan on the deck of the ship in a sword fight. I had painted the picture and has given it to her years before. Seeing it then and there was so huge for me. Another memory: When I was in junior high school, I was a candy striper at Sunrise Hospital. One year the women's auxiliary and candy stripers combined, decided that we wanted to make baby-sized Christmas stockings in which we could send all the newborns home. Step by step we would make each of these stockings. Well, my grandmother, for whatever reason, had joined the women's auxiliary?at least for this project. She became the supervisor of sewing. Women would go over to her house, and they'd either bring their portable sewing machines or work with hers. And, was she a taskmaster. I mean, nobody wanted to go over to my grandma's because she knew...?Nope, nope, this should only take twenty-two minutes to make one.? I mean she just knew. Could she bark out instructions! Well, we completed hundreds of stockings and made a lot of families happy. I remember, in that same time line and into college, as we built a relationship and as I was growing up, Grandma made me a lot of clothes for college. She loved the idea that she was going to make me clothes. I remember one time when my dad wasn't in town, and my mom was in Arizona, and I was preparing to return to the University of Missouri. No one was here to say goodbye. But Grandma was here, and she was adamant that I call her every night on the road so that she knew I was safe. That meant so much to me, because she stepped in. Between Grandma Kitty and Aunt Kit, I had the sense of family that I wasn't getting when I was just the stepdaughter. I had the maternal piece that I wasn't getting because my mother was in Arizona. 10 And both Aunt Kit and Grandma certainly provided love and nurturing. In the physical way of, oh, I'm going to go up there and just get a hug, I always went to Grandma's. Years later, when I attended law school, we grew even closer. That's nice. I got married to Charles Michael Baird two weeks after I earned my first master's degree in broadcast journalism. We lived in Columbia, Missouri, and worked in television as a team. He was my director; I was a producer. We first worked as a team on a half-hour program called ?Postscript,? which was my master?s project. Then after we got married we were the producer-director team on a weekly half-hour contemporary religious program called ?Checkpoint.? Then we moved to Illinois where I worked in television; he worked in television, and I got another master's degree in contemporary literature. In 1974, we came back to Las Vegas. I remember not being a great cook. I loved to bake, but I was just an okay cook. I put meals on the table, but I didn't enjoy it that much. And when you're newly married, you really stretch hamburger. Right. With oats you make it stretch, right? You do a lot of those Hamburger Helper meals. But I remember my grandmother said, ?It's important that you cook a holiday meal.? And in our little apartment I remember Grandmother coming over?it was just the three of us?and I cooked a turkey dinner. She ate it all and complimented me. What I didn't register for a little while was Grandmother eating everything when normally she complained of her hiatal hernia and ate very little. It might have been a control thing, the matriarchal control thing, but often when she was she got more attention. Grandma was so top heavy, yet tiny. She was probably five foot or five foot one and 11 very, very large, and stood just as stiff as a board; she wore this corset her whole life. Well, for years?I don't remember when she didn't?she had a hiatal hernia and had trouble swallowing and just couldn't get food down. I was always talking about her. ?Oh, I'll cook for you, but you know I can't eat.? That kind of a matriarchal martyr. But she ate every bite of that dinner and didn't complain. She didn't get sick or anything. Years later, her doctors suggested, ?Why don't you stop wearing that corset and you might be able to swallow and actually digest food?? After decades of wearing a corset, she was trained in standing very straight. And she got rid of the corset? Yes, she got rid of the corset and could eat again without any problems with her hiatal hernia. While I was in law school in Sacramento, California, my husband was in Las Vegas. During my second year, I came home for Thanksgiving. That was my first trip back. My grandmother was in the hospital and I walked in straight from the airport. It was almost like a director from the movie put this stark image together, because she was in a small private room. And they didn't have a lot of private rooms back then in 1977. There was a lot of equipment and it was all white; everything was white. Ordinarily, my grandmother who had very long hair; wore in a French twist. So, when I saw her sleeping in her hospital bed?she was curled up in a fetal position?I was emotionally frozen. The image of her hair embracing her entire body like a blanket was almost angelic, because everything was so stark white. I lost it. I just lost it. On the Saturday after Thanksgiving I returned to see my grandmother. A nurse was there and standing at the end of the bed, I said, ?Oh, Gram??I called her Gram; most of us did, or Grandma Kitty? ?I'm so glad to see you're doing better.? She was alert. And I said, ?I'll continue to pray for you.? And she looked at me and she said, ?You don't need to do that; I'm 12 just fine. You don't need to do that? in such a loving way. The message was clear and she was so at peace. I think I got the call two days later that she had died. I realized then that she had been ready and wanted me to know it. Some things about Grandma were so predictable. My cousin Bill, my Aunt Kit's middle son, always teased her because for drama, again, on the anniversary of her wedding, which was her birthday, too, and the anniversary of my grandfather's death?so twice a year Grandma would lose her voice. You could count on her losing her voice. Like on cue? On cue. So my cousin would inquire, ?What anniversary is it?? He'd call her Whispering Kitty, I remember one time when my dad, the woman who would become his third wife, Ruth, and I were having dinner over at Gram's. She had cooked brisket and had prepared her famous coleslaw that again, Bill, the cousin, always teased, ?The coleslaw isn?t hot enough; it's not hot enough.? In reality, you needed a fire hose it was so hot with the peppers. However, she'd keep adding more hot peppers. I grew up with hot coleslaw, not knowing it could be milder. It felt like it was searing my tongue. Anyway, so we're there, the three of us, with Grandma. Oh, Grandma also had a hearing challenge. So my grandmother was bringing food to the table. Finally she sat at the head of the table and my dad and Ruth were to her left. I am to her right, within striking distance, and that's a relevant description. While we were eating, Grandma turned to my dad and Ruth and says to them, ?I never interfere in my baby's life??my dad being her baby??in my baby's life.? And, well out of her line of sight and sound, I whispered and rolled my eyes, oh, yes, right. In an instant, my hard of hearing grandmother whacked me in the shoulder. Not hard, but certainly she made her point. Selective listening, I'm telling you. 13 When I came home for Grandma?s funeral, I remember walking into the mortuary. I was absolutely inconsolable. I was hysterical. No one cried as hard as I did. I remember arms touching my shoulder, embracing me. I couldn't handle it because she was so powerful for me. Rather than, oh, Gram, I love you so, and have regrets for what we didn?t have, our love got better through the years. My dad was certainly very close to Gram. He had three marriages: my mom, Tui; Gayle; and Ruth. And he lived for about 17 years with Judy because he promised my grandmother that he would not get married again after the third divorce. Ironically, he also promised her that he'd only marry a Jewish girl, because of the tradition of the religion. Yet, none of his wives were Jewish. Nor were any of his relationships with Jewish women. The woman who became his third wife was very much in his life before my mother. She knew about that promise that he'd only marry a Jewish girl. So she left town. Now, how she reentered his life decades later, I don't know. But they ended up being married for a short period of time. When I was 12, after my parents? divorce, I moved back to Las Vegas to live with Dad. Having recently learned that my dad was Jewish, I didn?t know what to do. I?d gone to lots of churches. I did the Mormon Church. I did the Presbyterian Church for all my elementary years. I did the Lutheran Church in high school. I studied Baha?i. I was constantly looking at faith practices and my dad always honored