Transcript of interview with Mark Hall-Patton by Claytee White and Stefani Evans, August 25, 2016

i AN INTERVIEW WITH MARK HALL-PATTON An Oral History Conducted by Stefani Evans and Claytee D. White The Building Las Vegas Oral History Project Oral History Research Center at UNLV University Libraries University of Nevada Las Vegas ii ©The Building Las Vegas Oral History Project University of Nevada Las Vegas, 2016 Produced by: The Oral History Research Center at UNLV University Libraries Director: Claytee D. White Editor: Stefani Evans, Franklin Howard Transcribers: Kristin Hicks, Frances Smith Interviewers: Stefani Evans, Claytee D. White Project Manager: Stefani Evans iii The recorded interview and transcript have been made possible through the generosity of the UNLV University Libraries. 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 the University for the support given that allowed an idea and 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. The following interview is part of a series of interviews conducted under the auspices of the Building Las Vegas Oral History Project. Claytee D. White Director, Oral History Research Center University Libraries University Nevada, Las Vegas iv PREFACE Mark Hall-Patton, administrator of Clark County Museums and since 2008 a frequent guest on the popular cable television show Pawn Stars, was born in 1954 in San Diego, California. His mother was a registered nurse and his father served in the United States Navy. From early childhood, Mark’s interest in history and museums shaped his path in life. After graduating high school in Santa Ana, California, he earned his Bachelor’s degree in history at nearby University of California, Irvine. Degree in hand, Mark worked for Bowers Museum in Santa Ana and founded the Anaheim Museum in 1984. He moved to Las Vegas, Nevada in 1993 to create the Howard W. Cannon Aviation Museum in McCarran International Airport. By 2008, Mark had become administrator over all Clark County museums. In this interview, he explains the various ways his involvement with the popular Pawn Stars program has turned “the museum guy” into a brand, introduced production companies to the value of filming in Las Vegas, increased Clark County museum visits and donations, and raised popular awareness of the academic fields of history and museum studies. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Interview with Mark Hall-Patton August 25, 2016 in Las Vegas, Nevada Conducted by Stefani Evans and Claytee D. White Preface………………………………………………………………..………………………….iv Mark explains his hyphenated last name; remembers his childhood and his family’s connections to Orange County, California; recalls his early interest in history and museums and the beginning of his career in television; talks about the Aviation Museum; describes his role in the County Centennial celebrations and his role on Pawn Stars; shares promotions, more museum positions, and his growing fields of expertise; discusses his fame from the show; recalls his trip to Ireland; explains how he became a personal brand and discusses appearing on television as a professional historian and a museum professional; recalls graduate school and talks about how publicity has helped the County Museum and other causes…………………………………………..….….1-18 Mark recalls earning his B.A. degree at University of California, Irvine (UCI) and working at Bowers Museum. He explains the process of examining an artifact for Pawn Stars and the history of the Pawn Stars show; talks about building Las Vegas, Nevada, through television shows, the cultural power of the Strip and how it overshadows the rest of the valley, the impact of the show on his career, and how the show has benefited museum attendance in Clark County. Shares the process to determine annual museum attendance and describes the aviation museum in McCarran International Airport. Talks about his future plans and plans for museums in Clark County. Talks about the concept behind Heritage Street and its origins, how he obtained land from Union Pacific Railroad, the evolution of Heritage Street and the Clark County museums. Explains how he examined historic buildings to acquire and restore, acquired and moved a train engine, and began using his own image to advertise the museum…………..……………….19-43 Appendix……………………………………………………………………………………..44-47 1 STEFANI: We are at the Clark County Museum talking with Mark Hall-Patton. Mark, would you begin by pronouncing and spelling your first and last name and spelling them? Yes, I can do this. I'm Mark Hall-Patton. First name, M-A-R-K. Last name, H-A-L-L, hyphen, P-A-T-T-O-N. Before I even ask my first question, I'm going to have to ask you about the hyphenated surname. The hyphen came when Colleen, my wife, and I were married. Her last name was Hall; my last name was Patton. She was the last of her branch of the Halls and wanted to keep the name, and I wanted to have the same last name. And Patton-Hall sounded like a dormitory at the state mental institution in California. So we went with Hall-Patton. I know people will chuckle over that but that actually was part of my consideration. And Hall-Patton has worked. It has been our name for thirty-eight years. Nearly all of my writings are under Hall-Patton; all of her writings are under Hall-Patton. Our kids were Hall-Patton. We just created a new dynasty. Excellent. So speaking of dynasties, let's talk about your early years; where you were born, what your parents did for a living, and where you grew up and where you went to school. I was born in the Naval Hospital in San Diego across the street from Balboa Park in a hallway because Mom was getting ready to have me and they put her in a gurney and ran her into a room, but hit the door seal, and I was born right there in the hallway. So I was the easiest birth she had. I'm the eldest of three. Dad was in the Navy at this point. So we were living there because he was stationed there. This was August eighth, 1954. In 1955, my sister was born on August seventh, and then six months later Dad was transferred back to Great Lakes Naval Training Center to be a company commander there and 2 we moved from San Diego to Waukegan, Illinois and lived there until I was five in 1959, and we left just after my fifth birthday and made our way back to California. We came back to Orange County, California. I'm actually fourth generation Orange County Californian. My great-grandfather settled outside of Orange in 1869 and was the first vintner in central Orange County; his name was Joseph Young. So we had family there. My mother had grown up there. So we came back and stayed with a great-uncle and aunt. Dad had just retired. His monthly income was a hundred and twenty-five dollars a month as a Navy enlisted man, retirement after twenty years in the Navy. He had to come up with something. They bought a house in Santa Ana that they could afford; it was a 1948 two-bedroom tract home. We turned the dining room into a third bedroom. That's where we stayed throughout my early life. I didn't leave there until I got my BA [Bachelors of Arts degree] from UCI [University of California, Irvine]. Santa Ana, California was a fine place to grow up. I went to the Santa Ana School District. My folks, while adamant Catholics, did not want to send us to Catholic school; they wanted us to go through the public schools. Never really talked about why, but that was something that they did for all three of us. It was fine. I mean, the house is still there. We go by and see it every so often. Santa Ana at that point was still...It wasn't small. It was a standard suburban Southern California community, but there was still a lot of Orange County that was rural. I had a great-uncle there who had some of the land that my great-grandfather had had. So there was a sense of historical tie to the area and it's where I became interested in history, was listening to him tell stories and it made history real. It made the fact of people living at another time not seem weird. It was just they were just living then. And he was talking about growing up in Orange County. He was talking about what it was like to run through the back rooms of the 3 Chinatown in Orange, which was four buildings, and what it was like to work on the San Diego and Arizona Eastern Railroad before World War I, and what it was like to be buried alive three times in World War I when he was over in France. You got a sense that all these things that you would read about in books or hear about were actually real things. So I became interested in museums. My folks, because my dad was a warehouseman for a small local school district and my mom was a registered nurse, but she stopped working when I came along and was a mom, we didn't have a lot of money. So we didn't do vacations every year and that, but we did a couple when I was young. Whenever we went on vacation we went to museums. I fell in love with museums. By the time I was eight I started setting up what I considered a museum in my patio and I would just grab old stuff from the house, what I thought was old at the time, and I would create displays and I would drag my sister and brother through them. I didn't charge them. It's something that they still laugh about because they remember the tours with horror, but they laugh about the fact that I am still doing what it was I wanted to do when I was eight years old. And they're not here for you to make them do it with you. No. They laugh about it now because they have more time having to explain, yes, that's my brother that you see on television. When I visit them...My sister was an exec with 3M. When I went back for a museum conference, she had to have me set aside an afternoon so she could have a party so all of her coworkers could come over and meet me. There is just parts of that that's just a little weird, but it is something that has been fun because it gives me a chance to reach out and show people that history is cool; history is fun; history doesn't need to be boring and it shouldn't be. CLAYTEE: So instead of going chronologically, can you go ahead and talk about television, 4 the television show you've been on for a while? Absolutely. And how that started. Yes. Throughout my career I have ended up doing pieces on television, stand ups for evening news shows; that sort of thing. First show I was ever on was the "Mayor Don Show" in Anaheim, California when I founded the Anaheim Museum back in 1984. But I moved over here in 1993 to create the Aviation Museum at McCarran, what is now the Howard W. Cannon Aviation Museum. That was fine. I had done a number of public speaking engagements over the years here. In 2009, we had the County Centennial. I had been very active in the City Centennial in 2005 and then in 2009 we had the County Centennial. And Dorothy Wright and I were basically the two that were putting on most of what was happening as part of the County Centennial. Well, one of the things they wanted to do...Eric Pappa, downtown, wanted to do an interview show, a television show. And so we got together, brainstormed it, came up with how it was going to work, who we would have. We'd have three old-timers and a historian and a moderator asking the questions and sort of leading it. He wanted to get a known person to be the moderator. Well, everybody turned him down. We were coming up—this was January of 2009; the first show was going to be in February. He said, "We need somebody to moderate this." And Dorothy said, "Well, Mark's done that for round tables at the museum." And I said, "Okay, I can do that if you want me to." So I ended up being the moderator on this. Now, I didn't know until three days before the first show that these were going to go out live. This was an hour and a half long live television show going out over Channel 4. It was once a month, but that was still...All I can say is don't ever do live television if you can help it because it's just extraordinarily nerve-racking. 5 So I had just started this show—again, this is February of 2009—and I got a phone call out of the blue. Someone, and I to this day do not know who—I've always wanted to blame Su Kim Chung for it, but I'm not sure it was her—but somebody said to this new production firm called Leftfield Pictures that I could look at a military uniform coat and tell them whether it was real or not. So they called me up and told me about this new reality television show that they were creating with the Gold & Silver Pawn Shop downtown. It was going to be called Pawn Stars and it was going to be this neat stuff that comes into the pawnshop and they were going to buy it or not buy it and they were going to have experts come in and look at stuff and say what it was worth and all this. I'm listening to this guy from New York spew all of this through the phone and I'm going, "Okay, fine; what do you want?" He said, "Can you look at a West Point uniform coat and tell us whether it's real?" And I said, "Yes." He said, "Can you do that on camera?" Well, I had just done an hour and a half long live television show and I was going to be doing that. I said, "Sure, I can do that." He said, "Can you tell us what it's worth?" I said, "No." And they explained to me again how all the experts had to say what it was worth. I said, "Fine, get another expert; I don't care." I thought that the idea of the show was silly. I mean, who's going to watch a show about a pawnshop in Vegas? This is just...what? What do you know? Yes. I'm good with history. I'm bad with prognostication. So they came out. I had not met Rick Harrison before. So you have this whole crew and you have Rick Harrison and you've got the guy who owns this West Point uniform coat, which it turns out had been Lieutenant General Griswold's coat. Lieutenant General Griswold was the highest ranking native Nevadan in World War II. 6 Oh, wow. So that's why the coat was of significance here. But they came in and they took a half an hour to clean off my desk and we filmed at my desk. It wasn't the desk anybody who knows me would have recognized. But they filmed at my desk and we did the piece and I pointed out what was real and where it had been repaired and that sort of thing. He said, "Okay, fine." I had told them all the way through, "I am not going to give a price." That first episode the seller—and I don't remember his name; I've since met him a couple of other times and I'm bad with names—but the seller actually asked on camera, "What do you think it's worth?" And I said, "I don't know. I don't care. That's not my thing. I don't care what it's worth." And Rick without missing a beat—and it says something about his reaction time—said, "I've been trying for years to get a price out of him and he just won't give me one." I thought, you're good. I had never met him before, but you're good. We shot the piece and they shut everything down and I turned to the director and said, "Tell me again what this is going to be." Because I couldn't figure out; it didn't make any sense what we were doing and how this was going to be a show that you wanted to watch. He explained it again. And I'm just like, "Okay, fine, just call me if you need me." Well, since then I have done a hundred and sixty appearances on the show. I have been called more than any other expert. Oftentimes I'm called the Fifth Pawn Star because I do so many appearances on it. It's been something where my role has grown over the years because initially it was basically just militaria and then it kind of grew into aviation because I run the Aviation Museum as well. I need to back up just a moment here. I started out here running the Aviation Museum, creating that in 1993. I became the administrator for all the county's museums in 2008 when my 7 colleague Mark Ryzdznski retired from the County Museum. And the county in its justifiable wisdom, I guess, said that you're doing well with one full-time job; here, very another one, but don't worry we won't give you any more money. It won't affect your taxes. By 2009, I was running this museum, the Searchlight Museum and the Cannon Aviation Museum. So I moved into aviation stuff. Then I moved into whatever came up. I've actually looked at everything from 17th Century Dutch coin scales to Soviet ICBM [Intercontinental Ballistic Missile] launch keys, to Senator Patrick McCarran's office chair—not office chair—his senate floor chair, to uniforms, to a septarian nodule, which is a rock, from Southern Utah because nobody knew what the rock was and so they called me. They've never stumped me on any of these. But when they called me for the rock, it's like, "I'm not a geologist, folks; I am a museum administrator; I'm a historian." But I do have friends who are geologists and I called one of them and said, "I need at least some direction here." He asked me a couple of questions. I described it to him. And he said, "Did it come from Southern Utah?" I said, "Yes." He said, "Look up septarian nodule." I said, "Is that what it is?" He said, "Look it up; check it out." "Okay." Looked it up. Sure enough, it's a septarian nodule. And what is a septarian nodule? It's a concretion that's formed in the Navajo Sandstone formation over in Southern Utah and it's where you have a void in the sandstone. You've had something in there, it was probably organic that rotted away, and so there's a void in there. Over millennia, as water seeps down through the sandstone, it brings certain minerals into these voids and these concretions get built up over geologic time. I've learned this. I didn't know it when I first started looking at it. But that's part of the reason why I've done so many shows is that when they get stumped on a piece, even if I don't do the show, they will call me on it. 8 When I come in—and one of the points about the show, it's reality television. Everybody says reality isn't real. Well, yes, but. The reality of the show is they have no idea what I'm going to say when I come in. They don't know what stories I'm going to tell. They don't know what I've come up with. They may know some of it back in New York, but the guys don't know what I'm going to say. They don't even know whether I'm going to say if it's real or not. And I've come in and had to say, "No, this is a fake. It's a really good fake, but it's a fake." Part of this is that I have always worked with artifacts; that's what you do in museums. I have always had a bent towards history. I've written two books. I have published over four hundred articles, eighty-five monographs, done a lot of different public talks on various subjects. So I've always worked with history and in that milieu as a way of presenting to people. So this just kind of fit what I did anyway. Now, most museum people wouldn't end up here because you don't go into museums to become famous; that's not what people want. I didn't go into museum work to be recognized in a hundred and fifty-one countries in the world. I never thought of that. That's how many countries the show is on and it's translated into thirty-two languages as well. It's amazing. A little side line, Colleen and I went to Ireland last year just for a vacation. She had just turned sixty; I had turned sixty-one. We decided to go overseas again. Took the red-eye over, landed in Shannon, walked up to passport control, and the guy in the window said, "Hello, Mark." And I looked at him and he said, "Oh, the show's on over here. We watch it all the time." Okay, thank you. Good to know. Yes. There was nowhere in Ireland that I wasn't recognized. When we were in Temple Bar in Dublin—because the one thing I wanted to see in Ireland was the Book of Kells, and it is 9 spectacular—but we stayed in Temple Bar. Don't stay in Temple Bar. That's where all the bars are. We didn't realize that. But walking through Temple Bar, the bouncers at the pubs would grab me and drag me in. Lots of free beer? Oh, yes. Yes, I couldn't buy a pint in any pub we went into anywhere in the country. That's wonderful. I am still a museum director; that's what I am. It's weird, but it's wonderful. Yes, it is. It is. And the nice thing is that the reaction is uniformly positive, and we didn't know what that was going to be. We didn't understand—neither the Harrisons nor I nor anybody else involved in the show had any idea the show was going to do what it did in terms of public popularity. What was interesting is—Colleen and I got an understanding of this—within a few months of first show airing—the first shows aired in July of 2009. We filmed in February; they air aired in July. They had bought six shows initially, the History Channel had. As soon as it hit the air, the very first one, people were already talking about it. So History immediately bought another twenty shows, then another forty shows and another sixty. We've filmed through twelve seasons now of the show and they're still working out a new contract with the Harrisons right now. But in all of this, we didn't...I had done that first show and had done one other show. So I had only been on twice on this new show and this was October of 2009. Colleen and I were in California, in Santa Ana. We had gone over to visit my mother, who was still alive at the time. Then we had driven over to Orange to fill up the minivan to get back on the freeway to drive 10 home. So we're sitting there in an ARCO station and a guy came running across the station. Colleen had already gotten in the car; I was getting in. He ran up to me. He said, "I saw the hat; I saw the beard; I saw the license; you're the guy from 'Pawn Stars.'" And I said, "Yes, I am." And he said, "I hate you." And I realized, in over thirty years of museum work, nobody had everybody told me they hated me in an ARCO station. So I looked at him and I said, "Why?" He said, "Why don't you give them a price?" And I looked at him and I said, "Because I don't sell this stuff. I run a museum." And he said, "Well, okay." Then he walked off. Colleen and I looked at each other and she said, "I'm going to have to start making some notes on this." Because my wife's BA and MA [Masters of Arts degree] are in anthropology from UCLA [University of California, Los Angeles] and her Ph.D. is in sociology from UNLV [University of Nevada, Las Vegas]. So studying people, studying cultures, studying reactions comes naturally to her. It just continued to get more interesting, more strange. At this point it has become a second reality. It's just something that you deal with. These days I go down and I do appearances. I do autograph signings. I get paid for that. I get paid for doing keynote talks and that sort of thing. I don't charge if it's within the museum field, but if it's the Vietnam Dog Handlers Association or the National Federation of the Blind or Valley Electric Association or groups like this, yes, I will charge them. And I've spoken to crowds of fifteen hundred people. It's just me; I do history. I mean, you're paying for a history talk? This is amazing. What is nice is the show itself has a demographic that is amazing. It is watched by men and women, young and old. Starting about age four people watch and love the show, kids do, up to your eighties or nineties. I've had more people talk to me because they were in long-term health issues and it was something that they could turn on and watch and enjoy and they talk 11 about how much of a difference it meant for them. There is a part of the show—because we are just playing ourselves; this is not like those reality shows where they walk around and they say, "Okay, you're going to play this part and you're going to play this part." No, the Harrisons own the pawnshop. Chumlee is Corey's buddy from junior high; he's kind of a delightful doofus guy; he's a nice guy. I run the museums here. I'm not exciting; I am just the museum guy. Johnny runs a toy shop. Rebecca sells rare and antiquarian books. We are what we are appearing as on the show. There is a part of the show where if they bring you in and you appear and you're really bad on camera, you don't appear again. There is at least one professor at UNLV—I won't tell you who—who appeared on one of the early episodes, which never aired and there is probably a reason for that. Nice guy. Boring, but nice guy. If you can't appear as yourself and be interesting on camera, they won't have you. But there's no scripting involved; it is what people have to say. So it takes a great deal of time to do it. I have tried to get colleagues of mine in the museum world to take on some of my roles there. Because I don't do it because I need it for my ego. I've got no problem with my ego. I know what I can do. But no one in my field has been willing to go on the show because to do one eight-minute segment, it takes four hours out of my day and I don't get paid for it. This is something that I do to advertise the museum, and the county is happy with that because Leftfield does make a donation to the museum and it offsets my salary. So there's no tax dollars going in; all that sort of thing. But I still have to run three museums. So if I lose a half a day, I get to stay here at night and make it up. It's something where when you film something like that, the actual film time is maybe a half an hour, forty minutes, but it's an hour round-trip just driving. It's a good forty-five minutes waiting for the crew to get its act together and push everybody out of the shop because we film right down at the pawnshop. There is just 12 pieces that...You get used to the fact that as you're working with the media they're not very efficient. What has happened then since Pawn Stars is I have appeared on...I think I'm up to fifteen other shows. I've done a hundred and sixty Pawn Stars. I did eight episodes of American Restoration. I did eight episodes of United Stuff of America, all eight episodes. I did two episodes of Mysteries at the Museum. I did an episode of America, Facts and Fallacies, an episode of Ten Things You Don't Know about American History, and episode on TMZ Sports. I didn't even know TMZ had a sports show. Me either. And when they called me, I said, "You understand I know nothing about sports. If it ain't Babe Ruth or Lou Gehrig, I don't know. And I'll say those names if you're talking about volleyball. I don't know." But they ended up with some bones that they found under a stadium up in Oregon. So they called me up to appear. Okay. So I've done all of those. I did a Scottish children's show that was filming here. I did CSPAN-3 when it was in town a couple of months doing a piece on the history of Las Vegas. It's gotten to the point—well, I did an episode of Hoarders recently. I'm now on This Weekend in Las Vegas. I do a regular piece on the county channel every month on the museum or something related to local history. I've become known as a go-to guy for the media. I just got a call today to do a piece on Railroad Pass, on the casino up there. You become known and in my case—and I'll admit this—there is a part of it where I am very well branded. I never really thought of that. I should point out that I do wear a beard and I have worn a beard since 1976. It has never been off. In thirty-eight years of marriage, Colleen has never seen me as an adult without a beard. And I'd be scared if I took it off. I have worn Amish hats since 1986; that was the first time I was able to get one and that was because I did 13 my graduate work at the University of Delaware. I went from UCI in California, in Orange County, to the University of Delaware in Newark, Delaware, because there were no museum studies programs when I was in school in the West. There were only four in the U.S. at that point and this was one of the pioneer ones. It was under Dr. Edward Alexander. What was interesting with that is I got back there and I would go down to the farm auctions in Dover and there are a lot of Amish that came in there, a lot of Amish in the Delmarva Peninsula area. I thought their hats were cool, but I was a graduate student; I had no money. So years later, my board president, when I was with the museums in San Luis Obispo, had friends among the Amish and he was going back to visit. And I said, "Here is my hat size; get me a hat; I don't care what it costs, just get me a hat." He got me my first one and I've worn them ever since. So that part of the branding is just me. I have worn them since I was here. When I first started with the airport and creating the Aviation Museum, we worked with outside exhibit firms to build the exhibits. I would walk in and I'd have one of my Amish hats on and I became known—I didn't know this, but I later found out from my rep that the folks on the floor, when they were actually building the exhibits, referred to me as "The Reverend" because they figured that it had to have some religious significance. It's like, no, it keeps the sun off my head. I had an experience; I was at a funeral and I had a rabbi walk over to me and start talking to me. And I said, "I'm sorry, Rabbi, I'm not a preacher; it's just a hat." So those kinds of things, they ended up becoming my brand, but it's just me. That's just what I do. Just to explain all of it, the red shirt is because I'm a member of a group called E Clampus Vitus, which is a men's historical fraternity. We wear red shirts as a humorous homage to the red long johns that the miners would have worn. The Clampers are...There's forty-three 14 chapters in the west; seven, eight hundred thousand members. What we do is each chapter has a territory. We're Southern Nevada; we're the Queho Posse. We're the Queho Posse because Queho was the last renegade Indian in Southern Nevada. He was the one that was down in Eldorado canyon. We didn't want to honor him. We wanted to honor the myriad of posses that went after him and never could catch him. So we honor the incompetence of the posses. Excellent. A worthy endeavor. That's right. But that's why the red shirt; it was a nod. Because I thought when I first started wearing that I'd be on a few episodes and it would be kind of a "hi, guys" to friends of mine in the organization. I didn't expect that I would end up with mainly red shirts in my closet and becoming known for that. Now, I will say that if I'm wearing a blue shirt and no hat, I still get stopped. In fact, Colleen and I have been in the grocery store and just talking in one aisle and had somebody walk two aisles over because they recognized my voice. So it has become much more than merely the visual brand. It's something about my speaking style, something about the vocal intonations that people recognize. So how has your fame and recognition, as unexpected as it was, how has it benefitted the museum and grown the museum? It's been wonderful for the museum. The fact is in 2008, as we all remember, we went through a pretty nasty economic downturn. My budget was cut in half. It was throughout the county; it was not just mine. And I eventually lost half of my budget and a half of my staff. We had some major events that we would do every year that we just could not do. So we had a significant drop in attendance. We were down around twenty-two thousand a year; that was what we dropped down to. There was some worry in my mind that they could look at closing the museum or mothballing 15 it for a time and that was something that I was really worried about. The nice thing with this show was people have made up for that. Our attendance went up well over 70 percent. Our annual visitation now is about forty-four or forty-five thousand, which where we're at in the valley is a very good attendance. If you were down on the Strip that would be a different thing. But we're way out on the edge of the valley and you really have to decide to come here, but we've done that. We have become internationally known. We literally have people coming in from all over the world, coming to Las Vegas to go to a pawnshop, a car restoration shop, a machine restoration shop, a county museum, which is not what you expect when you're thinking of Las Vegas. People don't come to Las Vegas to come to the museums. We might wish they did, but that's not it. So the show and my involvement in it in terms of the museum has been superb. That's why I did the first episode. In fact, when