Transcript of interview with Bruce L. Woodbury by Stefani Evans, September 27, 2016

i AN INTERVIEW WITH BRUCE L. WOODBURY An Oral History Conducted by Stefani Evans 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 Transcribers: Kristin Hicks, Frances Smith Interviewers: Stefani Evans and 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 Personal collection of Rose and Bruce Woodbury "Should I be congratulated for the basic minimum that you should expect from any public servant—not taking bribes, being honest?" As Bruce Woodbury reflects on his twenty-eight years as Clark County's longest-serving County commissioner (1981–2009) he recalls serving with about thirty different commissioners. Surprisingly, "only seven of us got major jail sentences." He ruminates how Federal Bureau of Investigation probes Operation Yobo in the early 1980s and G Sting in the early 2000s exposed several Clark County politicians who succumbed to greed. While Woodbury considers honesty in office a given, his values were not held by all of his colleagues. One Operation Yobo recording caught a fellow commissioner responding to the query, "How about Woodbury?" with, "No, you can't touch him with a ten foot pole." Woodbury remembers his "campaign guys really liked that." Apparently the voters did as well, as he consistently won re-election. v The Las Vegas native, who was raised in the John S. Park neighborhood and attended Las Vegas schools, earned his Bachelor's degree at the University of Utah and his Juris Doctorate at Stanford University. He had the good fortune of forming and joining law firms with good friends; he has been with only two firms in his career, joining his current firm in 1984. He speaks of the progressive hearing impairment that eventually kept him out of the courtroom professionally and of the cochlear implants that allowed his brain to learn a new way of hearing. In this interview Woodbury puts his county commission service into historical perspective and into the Building Las Vegas initiative by highlighting his four priorities while in office—transportation, flood control, clean air, and planning and zoning—and the ways he was able to establish infrastructure to mitigate problems in these areas. He points to transportation accomplishments such as the CC-215 Bruce Woodbury Beltway, the Desert Inn Super Arterial, and the Monorail. He pushed the 1985 Flood Control District legislation and served as the District's first chairman. His service on the Environmental Quality Advisory Committee gave him a platform to combat Clark County smog by creating the Clean Air Action Plan. His effort to require a super majority on the commission to overrule the master plan was struck down by the Nevada Supreme Court as unauthorized by state law; however, he became known for his commitment to compatibility with existing neighborhoods and for working with town advisory boards and citizen groups. In 1980, when Clark County commissioner Bob Broadbent resigned to take a position with the Federal Bureau of Reclamation, he created a vacancy to be filled by gubernatorial appointment. Broadbent recommended Woodbury to Governor Robert List, who then appointed the young attorney. Broadbent and List each have their own lists of accomplishments. To their lists we can add Woodbury's 1981 appointment to the Clark County commission—Clark County residents have benefited greatly from Woodbury's twenty-eight years in that position. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Interview with Bruce L. Woodbury September 29, 2016 in Las Vegas, Nevada Conducted by Stefani Evans Preface………………………………………………………………………………..…………..iv Childhood in John S. Park neighborhood, marriage at nineteen, University of Utah, 1966 B.S., magna cum laude; and Stanford University 1969 J.D. One-year clerkship Judge Howard Babcock; 1971 law practice with Jim Rogers, Tom Lea, and Doug Whitney and later Earl Monsey. 1984 joined law firm of boyhood friends and current partners R. Gardner Jolley and William R. Urga. Bob Broadbent, Robert List, Clark County Commission 1981–2009. Transportation, flood control, air quality, and planning and zoning. Environmental Quality Advisory Committee and Clean Air Action Plan. Early 1980s floods, 1985 Flood Control District legislation, and first chairman. 1989 proposed master transportation plan for beltway, improved roads, and transit system; legislature passing tax package on gasoline, sales, hotel/motel rooms, developers, and motor vehicles ………………………………………………………………………………….….…………. 1–10 Maryland Parkway corridor transit; Las Vegas Monorail and Chapter 11 bankruptcy, three convention centers, and McCarran International Airport; logistics, locations for elevated pedestrian crossings; competition and ego; progressive hearing loss, hearing aids, and cochlear implants; CC-215 Bruce Woodbury Beltway and construction, local money, and attractive interchanges. Clark County commission, compatible zoning, and developers Richard Plaster, Robert Lewis, Mark Fine, and land-use attorney Chris Kaempfer; 1988 explosions in Henderson of Pacific Engineering and Production Company of Nevada (PEPCON), Kerr-McGee, and Kidd & Company marshmallow factory ……………………………………………....…………. 10–20 River Mountains Loop Trail System; Boulder City's Hemenway Park and bighorn sheep; master-planned communities; Operation Yobo, Operation G-Sting, and the Clark County Commission; accomplishments on the commission, and fellow commissioners Don Schlesinger, Thalia Dondero. Republican presidential candidate Donald J. Trump; Las Vegas stadium ………. 20–31 vii 1 Good afternoon. I'm Stefani Evans, [it’s July 27, 2016,] and I'm sitting in the conference room at Bruce Woodbury's office. Mr. Woodbury, would you pronounce and spell your first and last names for the tape, please? My name is Bruce Woodbury; B-R-U-C-E, W-O-O-D-B-U-R-Y. Thank you. Why don't we begin by you telling us a little bit about your early life; where you were born and grew up, and tell us about your family? Well, I was born in Las Vegas, 1944. I don't remember 1944, but growing up in the forties and the fifties, it was a pretty small town and it was a very nice small town. We had our problems, of course. My father was Howard Woodbury. When I was born he was a dentist. He went back to professional graduate school and became an oral surgeon a few years after that. He was the only oral surgeon in Southern Nevada until just before he died in 1961, and he was also an anesthesiologist, which they taught in oral surgery school back at the University of Pennsylvania and a residency at one of the big hospitals in Boston when I was a tiny, little boy. My mother was Elma Lund Woodbury. They both grew up in the Southern Utah area and got married young; I think my mother was eighteen, my father was twenty-one. They went to dental school together at USC. My mother went through business college and then became a secretary to help put him through dental school. He was a drummer, played in a dance band during dental school to help pay his way as well. He was a dentist, oral surgeon, he was in all kinds of community activities. But one that he loved was is that he was in the Helldorado marching band and they also played at the Helldorado Rodeo, they'd march in the parades and play at the rodeos. That was fun to tag along with him. 2 So our home was in the Huntridge area. It's also called, I think, the John S. Park Historic area, on Norman Street. Then we moved when I was about six down to the corner of Seventh [Street] and Franklin [Avenue], just down the street from the John S. Park School and the church where I went. The neighborhood was just filled with kids. The parents let us kind of run free, it seemed like at the time, to ride our bikes everywhere and walk everywhere without being too worried about us. I played all kinds of sports at the Huntridge central park there, Circle Park. Anyway, with a few exceptions that every kid has, my memories are pretty fond of my childhood. How many siblings do you have? I have one older brother and two younger sisters. My brother is Frank Woodbury; he's a CPA [Certified Public Accountant] here in Las Vegas. My sister Cindy lives here in Las Vegas also and my sister Pam lives in Park City, Utah. We were pretty close as a family. Did any of you inherit your father's musical talent? I did not. In school I got good grades except I got bad grades in penmanship, art, and music. I can't draw. I enjoy music, but I can't carry a tune. We had a little band in elementary school with the flutophone, these little flutes, and I would just have to pretend because I couldn't follow the music, notes, and all that for some reason. There are certain sides of my brain that don't function. That's true of all of us. So where did you go to school? Well, John S. Park Elementary School, then Las Vegas High School; I graduated in 1962. I went to college at the University of Utah, graduated in 1966. Started out in pre-dental, pre-med, because in addition to my father I had a grandfather and three uncles who were all doctors, and I thought that was what you were supposed to do. But I really didn't like that part of college, the pre-med. So I switched and started liking college. I majored in political science and I had to take 3 a lot of English and philosophy and history. Anyway, I graduated Phi Beta Kappa. I went to Stanford School of Law and tried to decide what I wanted to do. I said, "Well, there's always law school, I guess." I was very shy as a kid—fearful of public speaking, really. In our church the kids had to give talks now and then, and that kind of kept me away from church. So naturally I became a lawyer and a politician, right? I was going to ask. Which shows that you can overcome anything if you put your mind to it. Or if you have to. If you have to. Prepare, prepare, prepare, and then find out that you can do okay; then you get confidence and it kind of grows from there, I think, with almost anything. So you can go back to church now. Yes. That's true. Along the way you got married? Yes, I got married even younger than my parents—or at least I was. I was nineteen and my wife was nineteen. My parents died; my father when I was sixteen, my mother when I was eighteen. Of course, my sisters were even younger. I had been going—in those days we call it going steady—with Rose, since we were sixteen. Then we just decided to get married. Somehow she's still putting up with me after fifty-two years, seven children. We're about to have, I think, our twenty-third grandchild and our first great-grandchild any day now. Congratulations. Thank you. On all of that. 4 Yes, I'm a lucky guy. So after law school...? After law school I took a job as a law clerk for Judge Howard Babcock here in Las Vegas. I had job offers in California, where I was going to law school. We liked the Bay Area, but we just wanted to come home. We were both born here in Las Vegas; our families were here and our friends were here, for the most part. So we decided to come back and I became a law clerk for a year, took the bar exam, went into law practice. We kind of took a risk. We were four young guys started out in a law—Jim Rogers who became the owner of television stations and became chancellor of the university system was our senior partner. I think he was about twenty- seven or twenty-eight years old, and the rest of us were twenty-four, twenty-five years old. So who were the partners? Jim Rogers, Tom Lea, Doug Whitney, and myself. Within a few years Earl Monsey became a partner. It would be fun to have an alumni party from that firm because there were dozens of really good lawyers that came and eventually we went our separate ways. I was with Jim for fourteen years and then he was going into the broadcast industry. I was actually a part owner of that TV station. I sold my interest to him and Lou Wiener. I was going in the political direction a little bit and became a [Clark] County commissioner in 1981. So we decided to go our separate ways. Then I became a partner with two of my boyhood friends, Gardner Jolley and Bill Urga, who also grew up in that same neighborhood. So now it's Jolley, Urga, Woodbury, and Little since 1984. I had always been interested in politics and government, thought I'd maybe someday get involved even though I had that shyness to contend with when I was younger. I remember when I 5 was a little boy, before we had TV, sitting in front of our big radio in 1952—so I would have been maybe seven, going on eight years old—listening to the political conventions and just being fascinated by it. At the age of eight? At that age, yes. I just loved it. I talked to my parents about the candidates and all that. That plus sports. I became a rabid New York Yankees baseball fan and every other sport. The kids at Las Vegas High School were my heroes when I was a little boy, because we didn't have a college here until the mid-to-late fifties. So anyway, sports and politics plus just playing with the kids around town. But I always had that interest. So in 1980, Bob Broadbent was the county commissioner representing what's called District A. Rose and I and the kids we had then, we had just moved to Boulder City in 1978 from Las Vegas, and the district included Boulder City and that's where Bob Broadbent was from. He resigned to take a position in the Bureau of Reclamation, in the new Reagan administration. So there was a vacancy. And the governor, who was then Robert List, had to appoint someone to fill that spot until the next election. I didn't throw my hat in the ring, but a couple of people over the period of a few weeks said, "I understand you want to be the county commissioner." I said, "What are you talking about?" Well, it turns out some of my friends who knew the governor pretty well—Sig Rogich and Joe Brown, I think Mike Sloan—some of which went to high school with me. Anyway, they had put my name up. So finally I found out how my name got out there. So I got the competitive juices flowing. "All right, I'm going for it." So it came down between me and a city councilman in Henderson. I didn't hold any office at that point. The governor for whatever strange reason appointed me. He kind of had a 6 hard time getting rid of me after that. Twenty-eight years. We moved here in 1980, and when you retired from the commission, it was a shock because you had been a commissioner the whole time. Yes, it was like...I guess I resist change. People urged me and kind of helped pave the way for me to run for different offices—Congress, Attorney General, U.S. Senate, whatever—and I always gave it consideration, but I always decided, no, I think I can accomplish a lot right here in local government, and I didn't want to move my family to Carson City or Washington, D.C. So I just stayed, kept running for re-election as a county commissioner. First couple of elections were pretty tough. I spent every day going door to door. But then I was able to win. Then after that they were relatively easy elections. So from the time you went on the commission, how many districts were there at that time? Well, there has always been seven districts. I think there had only been five commissioners a few years before that, but by then there were seven. At every census you would redistrict it for equal population. Well, this district was about half the county in area, all the way down to Laughlin and Searchlight, Boulder City in the south, at that point all of Henderson, East Las Vegas, which is now Whitney, a lot of Sunrise Manor, Sunrise Mountain, and all the way out to Moapa Valley, Mesquite, Bunkerville, all these separate little towns and cities in this vast area, and it was also the fastest growing in population. So it was a challenge. In fact, the first year I was in office, trying to keep up with being commissioner and representing all those areas and people, keeping up with the family, I had decided, I'm not going to run for this; I can't do it; I cannot do this. But with some counseling from some friends and finally a lot of introspection, I can't run away from this; I would regret that for the rest of my life; I've got to at least go for it. The newspapers were saying I was the underdog to be elected. 7 Some people who had already been in office were running, from different offices were going to challenge me. But once I get into a contest I get very competitive and I want to win, and so I went all out. My wife compensated for my absence from the home. I still tried to...When the kids were doing their homework, I was doing mine, but I was also out walking, knocking on doors with friends and other family people, and meeting with political consultants. So we won each time. Now, did the district get progressively smaller geographically as the population filled in? It did a little because—yes—because my district became the biggest in population. So we had to give up areas. We gave up the Whitney/East Las Vegas area. At one point, the last time we did it, I think I lost Sunrise Manor, but I gained over toward the Enterprise, south county, and over towards Spanish Trail and that area. I always had the outlying towns of Laughlin, Searchlight, Moapa Valley, Mesquite and Bunkerville although they divided Moapa Valley and Mesquite, part into my district and part into another district. So two of you got to go out there and knock on doors? Yes, yes, and those doors are pretty far apart out there. There's lots of bottles of water in between. Yes. It was fun. It seems like the eighties and the nineties were the period of amazing growth in this area. So what were some of the challenges that you faced on the commission with that? Yes, it was incredible growth during that entire time I was on the commission. That's when it really started, I think in the eighties, early eighties, maybe even a little before, and never stopped the whole time I was on the commission. The recession started just before I got off the commission, I think; the fall of 2008, I think, was kind of a financial point of implosion in some 8 respects and then it started. But until then it was nothing but growth. I was not one who was always a big fan of uncontrolled growth. It was great financially for a lot of people and created a lot of jobs. It also attracted a lot of people to come from elsewhere for those jobs. We had a very tough time keeping up with the infrastructure. But with planning and zoning we tried to make the developers pay as much as possible in order to offset the growth they were creating. It didn't take too long after I got on the commission that I decided I needed to try to do some things in a major way about some of our infrastructure deficits, particularly in transportation, flood control, air quality, and our planning and zoning system to get a better handle on it. So the first issue I think I took on, I was the chairman of an obscure committee—the rookies, they don't give you the big plumb regional board appointments—so it was called the Environmental Quality Advisory Committee. Nobody had ever heard of it or heard from it. So I started making waves about our air quality. I'd drive up over Railroad Pass from Boulder City and see this awful cloud and smog. Part of it was just our natural terrain, traps, and inversions that showed we weren't doing what we should do to control the emissions from motor vehicles or from industrial sites, sources, power plants, and so on. So I started making waves about that and getting some press and getting pushback from a lot of people. "What? You're suggesting we have smog checks? Oh, my gosh." That was one reason they were predicting I wasn't going to get elected the first time, but we survived that. Eventually there was smog checks. I eventually created what was called the Clean Air Action Plan to get a handle on a lot of the sources of pollution and do it in the way that hopefully was business-friendly and not have the federal government impose solutions on us although there was some of that coming and it did 9 come. I think we've made major improvements there. A lot of my district was ravaged by flooding in the early eighties. So I went to the legislature in 1983 to try to get a flood control district created; it didn't succeed that time. But in '84 there was more flooding all over, election year. I remember being in a house out in Overton, Moapa Valley, helping them to dig mud out of the basement. But anyway, so in the 1985 legislature, this time we were able to get legislation to create a flood control district and the ability to take it to a vote of the people for a funding source, quarter-cent sales tax. I became the first chairman of that Flood Control District and led the campaign to get the public approval. I guess we made hundreds of speeches all over the county and we were successful. That's I think hopefully made a big difference as well. Another big issue was we were really falling behind in transportation. We had a freeway and road system that would accommodate maybe a population of two hundred and fifty thousand people and very little funding to do anything about it. While I was on the Regional Transportation Commission, we did a few stop gap measures with bond issues and things. But I finally said, "This is not going to work." So in 1989—I was the chairman of the county commission at that time, as well as a member of the RTC [Regional Transportation Commission], soon to be the chairman of the RTC—I proposed a master transportation plan and a funding scenario where we needed to raise hundreds of millions of dollars of local money to go along with what we then hoped to be a better share of the state and federal money in which we were not getting. But if we were showing we were doing our part, then they would have to come through. So I got a lot of citizens together—business people, labor, representatives of different industries and citizen advocacy groups—and then got the county and the RTC to work on plans that we could take to the people 10 for a beltway, a vastly improved road system and a transit system. We didn't have any public bus system at the time. There was a private bus company that didn't serve much beyond the Strip and downtown a little bit. It was not easy to get the resort industry to get onboard and the developers to get onboard and all the others, but we proposed an increase in the gasoline tax, a little increase in the sales tax for transit, an increase in the hotel/motel room tax, a developer tax for transportation, a motor vehicle privilege tax; there was like six different sources. People said, "You're crazy; the public won't go for that." But the gridlock was starting and people were feeling it and we mounted a pretty strong campaign and it passed. Then we had to take that mandate to the legislature to get them to approve it because the county just didn't have authority to enact those measures ourselves. So it was an advisory question that we took a mandate to the legislature. If we had done transit as a separate issue, it would not have passed. Most people were not interested in improving the bus system. But we rolled it all together; we wrapped the other transportation funds around it. So it was approved along with the rest of it. We are certainly not out of the woods in terms of needs for transportation improvements, but we've come a long way. Oh, we have. So what do you think of the plans for the Maryland Parkway, the revitalization of it? For like a rapid rail system of some sort? Yes. Yes, I'm in favor of all the above, any transportation options that we can give the public including mass transit. There have been plans to do a light rail system, take it down the Strip, but it's not going to happen until the resorts get onboard and they're not onboard, yet anyway. 11 Maryland Parkway is the other option and that's more likely, I think. We'd have to tie it in, integrate it into the bus system. It's of limited value, but it is of value. I'm on the board now of the [Las Vegas] Monorail Company. So tell us about the Monorail. The Monorail from day one has done a lot of good in terms of giving our visitors and conventioneers another option to get out of vehicles and into mass transit, and it really has helped to relieve the gridlock around Paradise and the convention center during big conventions. It's carried large numbers of people. It's always made an operating profit. It didn't make enough to pay back the initial construction bonds. So a Chapter 11 Bankruptcy was filed and the debt was restructured and now it's able to proceed. There are plans now to take it, from the south point of where it is now at the MGM, south and around to the west side of the Strip to the Mandalay Bay where you'd have a station there, and, hopefully, an interim station at the Sands Expo, which the monorail goes right by there now. So you'd have a link of all the convention centers. Oh, that would be great. The Las Vegas Convention Center, Sands Expo, Mandalay Bay. There's always talk about taking it to [McCarran International] Airport, but that's not part of the present. Do you see that as likely? Yes, I do, unless you've got a light rail system going there and integrate that with the Monorail. But eventually you've got to have one or the other and the Monorail is there; it's on the ground; it works. You'd have to work out the logistics for luggage and all that, but they do that at every airport. But, yes, eventually it will go there, I think. It seems like most major cities now—Los Angeles excepted—San Francisco, Salt Lake City, 12 etc., you can get off your plane, get your luggage, walk through the airport, get on a train, and be at your hotel in half an hour or less. Right. Yes, that's one big thing that people are surprised about when they come here. Where's the rail system? There are all kinds of options from our airport, all kinds of shuttle buses to the hotels and, of course, the taxis and limos. But sometimes people have to wait a long time for a taxi. There's not even a good bus system from the airport to the Strip. No. And Uber pickup [ride hailing service] is quite awkward to reach. Yes. It's a part of the visitor experience that needs to be addressed, for sure. It's the first thing people see when they get off their plane. Yes, I agree. You would think the resorts would be pushing more for it and being more proactive about helping us accomplish things, but they're all kind of, well, we get our customers here by this way and that way. So it hasn't happened. The one reason the Monorail doesn't do even better is that the stations are in the back of the hotels, because the hotels wouldn't allow them to be in the front. Didn't want to mess up their pretty buildings? Yes. So that's a bit of a challenge. But there's a cooperative effort with most of the hotels to let people know it's there and help them get there. Now, how did the decision come about to install the raised crosswalks at Flamingo [Road] and Tropicana [Avenue]? That was part of this money from that initiative that went to the voters back in 1990. The hotel and motel room tax was raised for transportation, and getting the pedestrians out of the street was one big goal. Public Works people at the County working with the hotels and some of us on the commission working with the hotels came up with those proposals that traffic will flow so much 13 better and the pedestrians will be happier if you can get them off the street. So now we have several of these crossings. Each one was a major battle, not to do it, but how to do it, where the public would enter and exit on each side, on each corner. Will it be right in front of my place or in my door, or will it be down the street in my door? I mean, every step of the way was a fight with the hotels, the resorts against each other and lobbying for it. In the end we just had to do endless negotiations and sometimes make some people not too happy with the decision. The Clark County commission may have made people unhappy, but I don't think I ever read a word or have seen a quote disparaging you on the commission. You probably just don't know the right people. I must not. I don't know. I did have my detractors over the years. Everybody does. It was not a lot, though. I'd get a nasty letter here and there. You've got to. You've got to make people unhappy. But it does give you bragging rights. But, yes, I felt pretty good about the reputation that I established. I met a lot of people and I just considered it a tremendous opportunity to have been able to be there. There were all kinds of factions on the commission, people who hated each other. I just always tried to stay out of that and tried to work with all of them. There's only seven of you. You've got to be able to count to four to get anything done and it can't be just the same four every time. It's not that difficult to get along with people, even politicians, with our egos and whatever. So in this project we're interviewing architects, politicians, planners, construction people, infrastructure people, etc., and each field seems to think that they've got a lock on ego. That's involved in every walk of life. Successful people often have an ego of some sort. You like to be, well, I'm humble. Well, you should try to be humble and you should try to be, of course, 14 mainly concerned about what you're doing for others, but there's got to be an element of ego that you want to succeed, I think, to accomplish. I think Mother Teresa had an ego. Sure. Wanting to be the best at something, there's ego in that in wanting to excel. Yes, at least to do your best. Yes, for sure. Certainly in the fields that you enjoyed—sports and politics—definitely. Competition. There's got to be a will to win. So what is your field in law? Well, when I started I did everything—I mean, everything. In fact, a guy who was convicted of first degree murder, I took that to the Nevada Supreme Court and got the conviction reversed and then we got him acquitted on the new trial. I did everything from that to parking tickets to divorces, adoptions, name changes, pregnant girls who were underage, getting court orders to let them get married. There was always a lot of wills, trusts, contracts, personal injury, just litigation of all kinds. But after I got on the county commission I had to scale back; I couldn't do everything. It took up so much time to be a commissioner. So I spent about half my time doing county stuff and half my time doing law firm stuff. And the day had to expand; I had to take work home all the time. So I started concentrating on estate planning and probate and personal injury, although I had to stop going to court very much because I just couldn't fit it in. So I'd have others that would help me do court appearances. Later on, my hearing impairment has kind of kept me out of the courtroom, too, after I got off the commission and had more time. I have cochlear implants. My hearing got to that point where first on one side and then the other, I had surgery to do the cochlear implants. When did you have those done? I think the first one was maybe a dozen years ago; the second one was maybe four or five years 15 after that. The first one was at UCLA Medical Center. The second one was at UMC when they started doing them here. So if your hearing gets bad enough where—and mine was progressive deafness; they think it was probabl