Transcript of interview with John Erb by Susan Korzennik, February 23, 1980

UNLV University Libraries John E. Erb i An Interview with John E. Erb An Oral History Conducted by Susan Korzennik 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 John E. Erb ii © Ralph Roske Oral History Project on Early Las Vegas University of Nevada, Las Vegas, 2018 UNLV University Libraries John E. Erb iii 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 John E. Erb iv Abstract On February 23, 1980, Susan Korzennik interviewed construction worker John Erb (born on July 16th, 1932 in Denver, Colorado) in his home in Las Vegas, Nevada. This interview covers John’s construction work in the Las Vegas area in addition to family life in Nevada and local social, religious, and community activities. He also discusses being a member of the Elks Club and the Clark County Gentlemen’s Club. UNLV University Libraries John E. Erb 1 Mr. Erb at 4028 East Owens, Saturday, February 23rd, at 11:07. Mr. Erb, how long have you lived in Las Vegas? I’ve lived in Las Vegas twenty-one years. Where did you live previously to moving here? I was, I lived in Colorado. I lived in a little town west of Colorado Springs, called Florissant, Colorado, all through my childhood. Then in ‘54, why, we moved into Wyoming. And we lived in Wyoming for a period of time. Mm-hmm. Then we—from Wyoming we came to Las Vegas. And why did you settle in Las Vegas? The reason why is because, for the type of work that I was doing in construction you couldn’t work anywhere for the money and for the length of time you could work throughout the year. In Wyoming you could only work five or six or seven to eight months but here in Las Vegas you could work twelve months out of the year and you have the top pay scale here. Mm-hmm. What did you do before you came here? What was your occupation? When we were in Wyoming we managed a uranium exploration camp for AE Humphreys out of Denver, Colorado. The wife was the camp cook and I was the camp manager. In the managing end of it, I had to take a moving camp from location to location and set it up. When I’d say set up the camp, I mean that was putting in all the plumbing system, the electrical system, maintain the generators. We had a camp that was bought from Loveland, Colorado. It was manufactured by the ABC Trailer House Company. We had ten trailers, they were forty-two foot long, and one fifty foot trailer. The fifty foot trailer was converted into a complete dining trailer that would seat thirty people at one time. Then you had one trailer that was a complete kitchen trailer. It had two UNLV University Libraries John E. Erb 2 big stoves. It had a water heater, a dishwasher, in all, it had three refrigerators in it; refrigerators with freezers. Then we had our living trailer, which was a standard ABC one bed room living trailer. Then the other trailers were converted into a sleeping quarters. They had four beds in ‘em. Two in the middle, two in the back. It had a big bathroom, and a living area, dining room, not dining, a couch and chair area upfront. Then we had one trailer that was an office trailer that had (unintelligible) linen, and desk, and things like that in it. And it was my job to oversee, to set ‘em up, to move ‘em, to do all the plumbing, electrical and everything else. The wife then did all the cooking and I helped her with the cooking and the cleaning. Mm-hmm. And I hear that you’ve been a geologist in your day? Well, I wouldn’t say that I was a geologist. I have done quite a bit of it. In Florissant, Colorado, where I was born, or where I was raised, the area is quite famous. You go back into your geology books and it’s called the Florissant Lake Basin. At one time it was a lake surrounded by seven volcanoes. And in this lake, when it was—at that particular time when it was a farm there, they had all different kinds of trees growing in there, and different kinds of fish and everything, which was at that time. Then with the different eruptions and the upheavals of the earth it—the volcanoes erupted and everything, the lake drained out and through the time, you had your fossils form. I can remember as a boy laying alongside the road, east of town, and splitting layers of the shale and finding fossil fish laying in there. Some of them would be up to size eight and ten inches that was caught in the volcanic ash that had settled down and form and shale. South of town is what they call the Petrified Forest; they have a giant sequoia tree there that is eighty feet in diameter. You can see it, actually where it grew. It is right in the location to where it grew. That makes it so much different than the Petrified Forest in Arizona. The Petrified Forest in Arizona was washed in and deposited there, as the (unintelligible). The forest that I grew up in, UNLV University Libraries John E. Erb 3 in Colorado was grown there and you could actually see the stumps and the roots and where trees fell over. We were able to find the Jack Pine, which was at that time, maybe, but the only place the Jack Pine is grown today is in Norway. The elevation there is eighty-five hundred feet. Well, at that particular time there was poplar and ash, and all of your trees that you find growing on the East Coast now, that are not really native to that high in elevation. Then north of town, in the Crystal Peak region, I did a lot of digging there and hunting for crystals. They were the amazonite and smoky quartz crystals. They are quite unique because there’s only two places in the world where they are found. That’s in Euro Mountains in Russia and the Crystal Peak Region there. When I say the two places they are found, they are found separately in many parts of the world but together on the same matrix for the same base, these are the only two places where they’re found. I did a lot of digging with that from a Dr. Paul R. Stewart, a geologist from Waynesburg College, Waynesburg, Pennsylvania, who also was a (unintelligible) of the college. He would come out there in the summer time and go over and I would chauffeur him around and drive him around when I got bold enough to drive. Then I went to—as time progressed and as I got older, I went back to school and studied geology back there for three years. Then came back to Florissant and went into the uranium exploration business and then from there, after, to Las Vegas. Ah, I hear that you were also working down in Arizona, with the Mohave Indians. When we first came to Arizona or when we first came here to Nevada, the company that I was working with was Well Stewart Construction Company. We had a three year job down on the Navajo Indian Reservation in Northern Arizona. We built the roads from Tuba City to Kayenta. In the process of building the roads, I became quite familiar with a lot of the Indians and became very, very good friends with them. In one hill, as we were cutting through the hill, the excavation UNLV University Libraries John E. Erb 4 took us through an old Indian site. The museum of Northern Arizona came out and we did a lot of excavation and found pottery and (unintelligible) and areas to where people actually lived. When we were doing this excavation and digging, they hired Navajo neighbors to do it. In Navajo, the word chindi means ghost. So I had known several of these Navajos and they were busy digging down in the ditch and everything and I ran up behind them and started yelling, “Chindi! Chindi! Chindi!” and they just threw up their shovels and left the excavation area because they thought there was a body down there and they were scared to death. And as a result it took a couple days to coax them to come back and tell ‘em there wasn’t one there. We also moved from there out to Highway 66 and built road through the little town of Navajo. While we were at Navajo, I had the privilege of finding several Indian pots and some in bones and things like that, of the Indians. The reason why I did it was because they were in a construction site and rather seeing them destroyed and everything like I took ‘em for my collection. And after you worked in Arizona what construction did you do in Nevada, or the Las Vegas area? Okay. Let’s back up here a little bit, when I first came in to Las Vegas in ’59, I came in to Las Vegas, you might say riding the rails. I, the wife and my two girls were in Wyoming—in Rawlins, Wyoming, where they were (unintelligible) left me, youngest girl and wife and (unintelligible) they were still in the hospital when I left. Carol had just given birth to (Unintelligible) and so I left there when (Unintelligible) was just a couple days old, they came to Las Vegas. I got off the train in Las Vegas at six o’clock in the morning on May the 18th of ’59. At that time, where the Union Plaza is today, the Union train station was standing there and it was—my first impression of Las Vegas, when I stepped out of the train station was, “My lands!” All these people running around with no clothes on, on Sunday morning. I couldn’t UNLV University Libraries John E. Erb 5 believe. And one of the things that still sticks into my mind was a little old lady probably about seventy-five years old, real wrinkled walking across the street in a pair of shorts smoking a long cigarette, and that was my first initiation into Las Vegas, since that time I’ve seen the city grow. I’ve been fortunate to have been involved in quite a bit of the growth of it. We’d go back to ’64, when the atomic test site out of Mercury was going very strong. The road going from Las Vegas that was called the Widow Maker. The reason why is was called the Widow Maker is because there was so many dips and ups and downs and narrow road, it was a two-lane road. Today it’s a four lane road. The accident rate today is very minor compared to what it was then. There was at least two or three people killed a week at that particular time, some terrible accidents. But we, working with Well Stewart, we built the road into what it is today. That was one of the first things that I did. Another thing was that when I—in ’62, when we came into town, we, I ran a loader in construction and I would park the loader behind a housing track out on Arville between Charleston and Sahara on Arville. There was no buildings, no streets, nothing from Arville West, the only streets that there were, were their main streets, such as Decatur, Jones, and Rainbow. If I go out to Rainbow and just out there on the desert and scrap up the dirt and load trucks that was hauled into housing tracks around town. Then I went and worked all over town in building housing tracks, roads, I was involved in the changing of the College Avenue in North Vegas to what it is called today, Lake Mead. At one time it was just a two-way street; now it’s a four lane street. I was involved in that. Eastern Avenue from Desert Inn clear out to Sunset was a one-way, was a two-way street—was two lanes. Many places it is today, before ever it’s four lane, we widened it and made it what it is today. In ’64, we, Well Stewart got a job out on, out at the Lake Mead, from the Park Service. We out to where the marina is today, the big dike, as you’re facing the lake from the marina, the big dike, over on the right hand side, we were building that. We put UNLV University Libraries John E. Erb 6 a dike between Saddle Island and the other island there with the dirt. And dammed the lake off—and had big pumps to pump the water out of it. Then, we excavated the area and made the harbor a deeper area. We also did the same thing over at Vegas Wash. It, where today, it’s filled with water, so you don’t see it. But we went over there and made another harbor, another deep area, that whereas the lake ever gets down low again, as low as it was at that time, they will be able to have a place to launch their boats and everything like that. And then, why, we went into—this strike hit us in ’65. I went into ’66 into a grocery store. I managed the Stop and Go grocery store from ’66 to ’69, over on the corner of Carol and the Salt Lake highway, right next to a Wendy’s drive-in. We saw North Las Vegas grow at that particular time there was many things that grew there. The freeway was coming through and I saw north Nellis Air Base expand and although I never had anything to do with Nellis, I used to take care of and sold groceries to a lot of the airmen. In ’69, I gave up the Stop and Go store and my first job then I went into driving truck for the construction company that was doing the tunnel work out on Saddle Island. They had a job with the government tunneling underneath and putting the main water system in from Saddle Island into a pumping station and pump it up through the mountains in to Henderson. (Unintelligible) coming across from the Vegas Wash up along the road there by Nevada Rock and Sand and followed across Hollywood and then up to the big tank on East Lake Mead going over to Sunrise. I worked under, I worked on that tunnel and would drive back a truck, an old diesel scissor bed truck, back down the tunnel and raise it up to where the men could work off the platform drilling and putting safety bolts in and everything. When we were down there on the bottom we were a hundred feet below the level of the water of the dam. And it was continually wet and everything. Then I left that job and went to driving for Wells Cargo. I drove Wells Cargo end dump and belly dump for Wells Cargo for a while. Then I went to hauling freight for UNLV University Libraries John E. Erb 7 a while. I hauled freight. Then I went to work for, oh my mind is blank right now, who it was—Lay Lift Woods Construction Company. We did the leg of the freeway from Lamb Boulevard, where it comes across, down to Cheyenne. About a mile south of Cheyenne. I ran a six forty-one water truck there, it was a fourteen thousand gallon water tank and I ran that on that run, building all that leg of the freeway. Then I went to work for Frainer Trucking Company. I worked for Frainer Trucking Company from ’70 through first part of ’75. I—in working for Frainer Trucking Company one of the things that we did that I think was interesting, you remember in ’59, I came into town at the Union Plaza. Okay, then in ’71, we tore the Union, tore the Union Train Station and Depot down. And they built what is today Union Plaza. Part of the docks and the freight part of the train station, Frainer Trucking Company took it and moved it up to their yard and it’s up there. They’re using it as a warehouse. We took and tore the old bus station down and did all the work there, the ground work there. I would haul, when I went to work for Frainer I was still working on the pipeline and I would drive truck on the pipeline hauling gravel to backfilled the big water line from seven o’clock until four o’clock in the afternoon. Then from there I would go over to the Union Plaza and haul the waste material and all the refuge and the dirt from the mud from where they would drill the pilings and pile it up and haul that mud out and dump it, sometimes until one, two o’clock in the morning, and then go back driving truck, be on the job on the pipeline at seven. When we weren’t doing that then I would haul material for some of the cinderblock plants. We also worked with Frainer Trucking in hauling silica sand from Overton out to the Nevada Test Site where they would use the silica sand in the stemming of the holes. Being as it was so fine and we take that silica sand and make your window glass out of it. They would, when it’s put underneath extreme pressure, that sand would seal the hole and the pipe, so that there wouldn’t be any venting in the—when they set off bombs. I worked off UNLV University Libraries John E. Erb 8 and on out of the Nevada Test Site for several years, for all the time I was with Frainer, off and on, we would be out there building roads and working out there. One of the other aspects was, with Frainer—we built a lot of the freeway here in town. You take the ridge on Bonanza, the freeway on Bonanza, I worked on all of that freeway from Bonanza, that ridge north until it connected to, on Cheyenne with the other leg that I did with Lay Lift Wood. I ran water truck all through there. We also did a lot of work out at Rogers Springs; working out there at Rogers Springs, to, in building the road out at Rogers Springs and down through there. I’ve hauled a lot of chat from Apex in to different places. Railroad was on strike when here we hauled line rock from Apex to (Unintelligible), Arizona, for the sugar, we’d find. The university, when I first came here, out at the university, there was virtually nothing. I then through the years where the Ham Hall is today, I worked on building that pad. The groundwork on there. The gymnasium complex, the sports complex out there, I worked on it, running the water truck and hauling the gravel and everything into that. We, were still with Frainer Trucking. We did quite a bit of work that way. We—when I quite Frainer through the heart surgery they came down here and on East Owens I saw the channel being built here. While working with Frainer Construction Company, one of the last things I did with Frainer was work on the extension of the Fremont Hotel. We went down there where Trailer Farms is, Trailer Vicks is, down through there I believe, the extension of it. And had to go in and dig the basement. Tear part of it down, haul all that stuff out and then haul the dirt work out of the Fremont Hotel. That was prime, that was the very, very last, that I have done in construction with them. After that, why, then I had had a—open heart surgery, where I couldn’t do anymore construction. But we will continue and talk some more about the other builds later. At this point turn to side two and Mr. Erb will continue with the tape. UNLV University Libraries John E. Erb 9 (Tape one ends) We’ll go back here and do a little reminiscing on the Downtown area, when I first came, when we first came into town. When we first came to town, you get down there now and across from the EL Cortez Hotel is a telephone company. Well, at that time that was the Sears and Roebuck building. Also Downtown was J. C. Penney’s, which is down there now, and the Fremont or the F. W. Woolworths, that’s down. But that was the main part of the town. When you wanted anything, why, you’d go down there, and buy it. One of the first stores that we ever shopped at was the old Vegas Village, down on the corner there on Main and Las Vegas Boulevard North, where it is now. When we first came to town and we lived in a trailer park out off of the Salt Lake Highway, it was called the Desert Springs Trailer Park. Across the street from it, which at the present time is an empty building, that was the old Rancho Market. It’s where all the construction people went that lived in that area and bought their groceries. It was a small grocery store own by Orville and Wendell Toble, which since then it has become quite a grocery store, Smith (Unintelligible) had it, just closed it a couple of years ago. Orville has now the Rancho Market in the Downtown area, off of Fifth Street. Also in the Downtown area, there wasn’t the Four Queens, the Golden Nugget wasn’t the size that it is now. It was only half the size but through the years, they’ve just been incorporating and bought out one of the little casinos, hole in the wall type thing in there like the Pioneer Club, and then it went on and it just gradually expanded, expanded, expanded. One of the problems that they had in building the Fremont Hotel up and the Mint Hotel, The Union Plaza, one of the problems remaining there, and all of the hotels is the underground water. There’s quite a bit of underground water here and they would have to run pumps. Matter of fact, out of the Judy Bayley Theatre out at the university, they have a submerged pump down there, and they got a drain kit where the water runs continually in and UNLV University Libraries John E. Erb 10 they have to pump that water out. So you see there’s quite a bit of underground water. They would have to run pumps all the time to pump out hole to where they could pour concrete in it. Many of the hotels sit—in the Downtown area, sits on a body of water. The whole Las Vegas Valley is underneath quite a bit of water. The Mount Charleston range, the geologist say, that fits underneath a lot of water. There’s an area up on Mount Charleston where when they drilled the well up there they drilled down something like seventy-five to ninety feet, of a flowing stream of water. If you happen to go in that well house, if you’re very quiet you could hear the roar of the water. As I understand it, it’s, there’s a underground river that runs from the norther coast of Alaska clear down through your—clear down through the United States, clear down into the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of California. And we happen to be sitting in that. Years ago, when I first came to Las Vegas, a man by the name of Lee Hardy told me that out on West Charleston, that used to be the Hughes site property out there, it’s known as the Hughes site. Howard Hughes came here in the fifties and bought a lot of that property out there. And so they called it the Hughes site property. Well there was a man out there drilling with a cable crew outfit (unintelligible) and when they broke through a hard layer of rock, the force of the water took the cable tools and stripped them and broke it off of the drum and tore the tower and everything down on the drill there; just with the force of the underground water. So I don’t—I myself don’t believe all this hogwash that there isn’t water in the desert. I think there is. It’s just finding the way to use the natural resources. The—another interesting thing that I think, is the International Hotel. When it was, it’s now known as the Hilton Hotel. But at the time that they built it, one Nevada rock of sand, Ready Mix Construction Company, had the contract for the concrete. Well, they had to break the contract because of the fact that the water that was there, the underground water, they had such a problem in getting the concrete to set up into the holes, they didn’t have UNLV University Libraries John E. Erb 11 any idea how to do it and they thought they could do it the old standard way of just dumping the truck up and just pouring in there. Well, they couldn’t do it and they about lost their shirts. They, Stocks Concrete took the contract then and had an outfit coming out of California and they pumped the concrete into the bottom of the holes and forced the water to the top. And as a result then, why, it could go ahead and work out right. The, so you see there’s a lot of groundwater here in Las Vegas and into the Las Vegas Valley. The Hilton first started out and since then they’ve had two different building programs onto it to get it up to the size that it is now. Another interested thing was the Landmark Hotel. It wasn’t there yet. The Landmark, the Hilton, the MGM, the Barbary Coast, the Caesars Palace, none of those were here when we first came into Las Vegas. It was nothing but— Mm-hmm. A lot of the areas would soon just be a desert. Behind the Thunderbird, that Joe Wells owned, I think you can still see part of an old racetrack out there. He was a great lover of horses and Joe had a horse racetrack out there behind the Thunderbird. But it is also called now, the Silverbird. So you see how it was changed there. Mm. The area west of town, clear out off of Spring Mountain and Rainbow, and then over to Tropicana Avenue where those houses are now. The Spring Mountain houses and all out through there. The Stardust Hotel had a racetrack out there for a number of years and when it was flooded out every year and they spent millions of dollars in keeping it up, the upkeep of it. So they had to just—had to quit it because of the floods. Years ago when I belonged to the Rock Club, the Clark County Gym Society, Dr. Freire, from the university came and spoke. UNLV University Libraries John E. Erb 12 Mm-hmm. He said, the city fathers came to him wanting to know, what was one of the greatest natural disasters that could happen to Las Vegas Valley, and they were hoping that if it’d be a tornado or hurricane or earthquake or anything like that they could cope with something like that. But it wasn’t that it was water. It was flood. ‘Cause the—so many of the builders here have forgotten the old saying, “Where water runs once it will run again.” To where they were damming up and building the homes on it boulder, washes, to where they don’t have any of the problems. That’s what, one of the problems was of ’75, with the flood at Caesars Palace. When the flood came down at Caesars Palace in ’75, it washed the fronts of the cars up against the bridge and caused untold damage on automobiles, loss of property. There was several lives lost in that flood. It caused improper draining to happen. Ah, the Caesars Palace, when it first, in ’66, in ’64, ’65, ’66, when it was being built, it was just very, very small, and since then, they’ve had at least three different building programs to take it up to what it is today. The Flamingo right across the street when we first came here was just not much bigger than the Mint Hotel is Downtown now. And so, it has just steadily grown bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger—where I can’t understand it because I can’t understand the gaming industry but it’s good for the country. If it wasn’t for the growth of the hotels and everything, Las Vegas wouldn’t be where it is today. I, even though, I personally don’t agree with the gaming industry and I don’t have anything to do with it. It’s quite an area and if it wasn’t for it, it wouldn’t be anything. The gaming industry was built for those people of the night (unintelligible) we have some of the finest—I’ve seen through the years I’ve been different changing it, (unintelligible) come after you, you could go out there and go to one of the hotels and eat for—a dinner show and everything for five, six dollars. Now UNLV University Libraries John E. Erb 13 if you want to go see a eight dollar, nine dollar, for one of the top billings, now if you want to go see it, it’d cost you thirty-five to forty dollars, as everybody knows. John, what contact have you had with the Indians in the Las Vegas area? I haven’t had as much contact with the Indians in the Las Vegas area as I had in Wyoming and that in Arizona. When we lived in Wyoming before I came out here, we worked in the uranium exploration field and the—around land there, there was the Shoshone and the Arapaho Indians. The—one of the things that sticks out in my mind of the difference between the Indians, the government, when, would pay the royalty off of the uranium from the land and the oil, instead of putting it in to a common treasurer, like the Navajos do, they would give the individual families so much money from the youngest child, even if he was two days old, he would receive so much money. And they would, quarterly they would have as much as fifteen, twenty thousand dollars, governing the size of the family. In ’56, I was in Riverton, Wyoming, and a (unintelligible) and I was in the process of buying a Chevrolet station wagon. The salesman that was writing up the order, this big Indian buck came in and went, come over to the salesman there at the desk and said, “I want.” And he pointed to that Chevrolet station wagon that we were buying, and I had signed for it and everything, and the salesman turned to me and he says, “I’m sorry, you can’t have that station wagon. This man, this Indian here just laid out the cold hard cash for the station wagon.” So I had to wait two weeks for the delivery on a station wagon. Their money went to like I say, to an individual. Now let’s go on to the Navajo Indian, the money that they received from the royalties on their oil and the uranium and the coal, instead of going to the individual it went to a central treasure, to the headquarters at Window Rock, Arizona. From there then, rather than squandering it on the individual, they would build a school, they would build the different cultural centers, while we were on through the city, we saw the cultural center built and they had UNLV University Libraries John E. Erb 14 many fine things come there to, for the Indians. They had—we saw a, one of the top ballet teams from France come over there and perform there at that cultural center. It was quite funny because here you’d see all the white people or the Melangonnas as they called a white person, sitting on chairs, and right next to you, may be a whole family of Indians sitting on the floor. We also saw Roger Williams, the famous pianist, come there and see him play. We saw some Scottish highlanders come and play at the cultural center. And Window Rock, the cultural center over at Window Rock, we met Mahalia Jackson, she came out and performed and sang her gospel music. We met her personally there. The—I believe that it was very definitely much better for the Indians to do that than give it to the individual ones because of the fact that they, in Wyoming they just squandered it. They drank it all up. This way the Indians were getting something from it, some cultural means from it. I believe it was a better deal. The Paiute Indians, I don’t, I haven’t had much to do with them. But here’s an interesting story that I found interesting out at the Valley of Fire. There was a Paiute Indian, he was a renegade and back in the Valley of Fire is what you call the Mouse Plan. And this Indian lived in that area because he could subside on the rabbits, the snakes, the different varmints of the area but they also, it was a big basin of where they caught a lot of water. And it took them several years to get this Indian out of there and finally he, they didn’t hear from him or anything and they went back into the town and heard he had died. More than likely from the rabbits they caught. What are some of the personal activities and memberships you’re involved in, in Las Vegas? One of the first things that I ever became involved in, in a club or activity was when I belonged to the Clark County Gentlemen’s Club. We had, it was a rock club where we would go out and hunt the rocks from the different areas. One of the fascinating things there is in this area is UNLV University Libraries John E. Erb 15 behind the city of Henderson, back up in there, is an area where you can go and dig amethyst, which is a purple layered rock. Instead of being in the crystal form of amethyst crystals it was more or less in the layered rock and you could take it and cut it and polish it. Around the lake is various things there, goads around the lake. Out behind Hemingway Harbor and back up through the Canyon there, you could go up and find hollow rocks. Yes. That had the crystal structure in it. On farther out, off of the Valley of Fire, we would go out there and dig opalesque, it is another rock that is layered that has a form of opal in it, looked like opal. Also, up in the Delamar Flat area, around Alamo and Caliente, there’s what we call the Apache tears, we went up there and found a lot of Apache tears. It’s a very interesting area there. I also belonged to the Elks Club in Boulder City at one time. While we was there I was program chairman. I took care of all the programs and planned all the dinners and put on the different functions and dances and things like that. Since then I got away from it in ’66 when I became too busy in the store to participate. I had been a member of several churches here. I was a member of Gateway Catholic Church for a while and now I’m presently