Transcript of interview with Robert & Patricia Campbell by Stefani Evans, November 28, 2017 & March 1, 2018

i AN INTERVIEW WITH ROBERT E. CAMPBELL AND PATRICIA K. CAMPBELL 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, 2017 Produced by: The Oral History Research Center at UNLV – University Libraries Director: Claytee D. White Editor: Stefani Evans Transcriber: 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 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 "We could tell which buttons to push. We would talk to the Bass lobbyist law firm in Washington and . . . [we] would time it down to the minute, when we would very much like for Senator Lloyd Bentsen to go down on the senate floor and put his arm around Harry Reid and say, 'Harry, my people need your help.'" In 1976, when Bob Campbell accepted the city manager position in Henderson, Nevada, he and his family had just endured nearly a month of sub-zero temperatures in their native Missouri. Southern Nevada's mild winter coupled with the promise of developing the 8,600 acres that would become Green Valley convinced Bob and his wife, Pat, to make the move. Bob came to Henderson with a degree in public administration and city manager experience in two Missouri towns, but Green Valley offered something akin to "an artist having a blank canvas on which to plan and create." In this interview, Bob talks about the ways his career in public administration blossomed in Southern Nevada. After about five years with the City of Henderson, Campbell joined Mark Fine and American Nevada Corporation to develop Green Valley; five years after that, he moved to Southwest Gas Corporation to work with Bill Laub and later, Kenny Guinn. From about 1989 to 1997, he helped develop Lake Las Vegas. In 1994, Bob and Pat together formed The Campbell Company, a private consulting firm whose clients included Transcontinental Properties' Lake Las Vegas project as well as Henry Chen's Ascaya. v Much of the interview focuses on the Lake Las Vegas project: its original visionary, false starts, and its tumultuous development as an arm of the Bass brothers of Fort Worth, Texas; their developer, Ronald Boeddeker of Transcontinental Properties in Santa Barbara, California, and Boeddeker's appointee, Alton Jones. Along the way Campbell shares the strategies employed by the Wednesday morning group of Henderson boosters who met at Saint Peter's Catholic Church and who succeeded in gaining the necessary local, state, and federal approvals to move the project forward. He reveals the intimidation, physical threats, and sexual harassment suffered by those who questioned the way Jones did business. Overall, though, he explains why he continues to respect the Bass brothers and is still proud of Lake Las Vegas, "proud that we got it on, and proud that it's turned out to be what it is." vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Interview with Robert E. Campbell November 28, 2017 Interview with Patricia K. Campbell and Robert E. Campbell February 27, 2018 in Las Vegas, Nevada Conducted by Stefani Evans Preface…………………………………………………………………………………..…………….…..iv Session 1……………………..……………………………………………...…………………………. 1-29 Childhood on farm near Lake of the Ozarks, Missouri; decision to become a highway patrolman and working with university police while a student at University of Missouri; hired as city manager 1970 Boonville, Missouri, 1972 Excelsior Springs, Missouri, and 1976 Henderson, Nevada. Settling in, work of city manager, Green Valley development, Mark Fine, 1981 to American Nevada Company. Fire stations, rattlesnakes, Hank Greenspun and Israel. Bill Laub, 1986 to Southwest Gas Corporation, Compressed Natural Gas (CNG), Kenny Guinn……………………………………………..….… 1-17 J. Carlton Adair, Lake Mead, and Lake Adair Project; developer Barry Silverton, Ken Beck of Salt Lake City, Utah, and the Bass brothers of Fort Worth, Texas. 1989–1997 Lake Las Vegas; strategizing with Hendersonians Steve Ainsworth, Selma Bartlett, Fr. Caesar Caviglia, Shauna Hughes, Greg Kryzenbeck, Phil Speight, and Bob Swadell. Las Vegas Strip, Theron Goynes, Craig Pulsipher, Paul Christiansen, and Clark County Regional Flood Control District; U.S. Senator Lloyd Bentsen and U.S. Senator Harry Reid, and Nevada legislative session. The Campbell Company 1994–2009, Ascaya, Henry Chen…………………………………………………………………………..………..…. 17-29 Session 2……………………..………………………..……………………………..………...…..…. 29-64 Pat's childhood in and near Hartville, Missouri, and Pierce City, Missouri; graduated University of Missouri in Columbia in 1968 in elementary education; fiftieth wedding anniversary. Lake Las Vegas, Hank Greenspun, Carlton Adair. Developing local, state, and federal strategies to attain Lake Las Vegas approvals. Theron Goynes, Chris Christenson, and Craig Pulsipher of Regional Flood Control District; Paul Christiansen, Clark County Commission vote and celebration, Bass brothers, Ronald Boeddeker, Alton Jones, and George Holman…………….……………………….…………………………. 29-42 Alton Jones, threats, sexual harassment; developer Transcontinental Properties, contractor Washington Group. Campbell memo September 1, 1992; meeting in Santa Barbara with Boeddeker, and firings of Beck, Holman, Bob Whitehour, Bob Weidner. Sexual harassment deposition, Boeddeker, and attorney Cam Ferenbach. Adair vision v. Boeddeker vision in public memory. Lake Las Vegas as asset to City of Henderson and why up to fifteen years behind where it should be. Aftermath for participants. Boeddeker and Lake Las Vegas bankruptcy. Campbell, the mob, Gaming Control Board, and Federal Bureau of Investigation. Las Vegas as home, Selma Bartlett……………………………………. 42-64 vii viii 1 Good afternoon. Today is November 28th, 2017. I'm Stefani Evans. Today I'm with Bob Campbell. Mr. Campbell, may I ask you to please pronounce and spell your first and last name for the recording? First name is Robert, R-O-B-E-R-T. Last name Campbell, C-A-M-P-B-E-L-L. Do you usually use a middle initial? I usually use E. So Robert E. Campbell, and you go by Bob? Bob. Why don't we begin by you telling us about your childhood in—Missouri, is it? Missouri. I grew up down in central Missouri near the Lake of the Ozarks. My family lived on a four-hundred-forty-acre farm. We raised registered Angus cattle and, of course, we had hogs and dairy herd, Grade "A" dairy herd. It was a family farming operation; my great-grandfather had moved into that area in 1890 from Virginia. His son, my grandfather, was alive and my best friend. I was born in 1945 and he passed away in 1959, so for that fourteen years he was my buddy. We'd ride horses together and plant sweet corn and do all the things you do on a farm. That's where I grew up. Kind of an anecdotal thing, I should also add that my father was the high school principal and my mother was a teacher, and so a lot of the farm work got done after school hours, particularly in the winter. I had two older brothers, twins that were nine years older than I was. I was fascinated, I'm not sure why... There was a gentleman in the community, the local Missouri State Highway patrolman and his name was Glen Means. I really was impressed by him. He had on a sharp uniform and he drove a big powerful car and he had silver-gray hair, 2 spit-polished shoes in leather, and I determined that that's the direction I should go. When I graduated from high school in May, I guess, of '63, I said to my father, "Dad, can I borrow your car today?" And he said, "Well, where are you going?" I said, "Well, I'm going to run up to the state capital and meet with the head of the highway patrol and see if I can become a highway patrolman." My father, I'm sure, was laughing to himself, but he handed me the car keys. I drove up to the state capital, no appointment, no planning ahead. I walked up to this big, impressive building on a hill there in Jefferson City, Missouri, the capital, and I went up to the front desk of this big, impressive building and I said, "I'd like to meet with the superintendent." The officer on the desk said, "Well, do you have an appointment?" I said, "No." He said, "Well, what do you want to see him about?" And I said, "Well, I want to talk to him about being a highway patrolman." He said, "I...don't know." He got up and went back in the back room and out came a very nice lady who turned out to be the superintendent's assistant and she said, "Can I help you?" And I said, "Well, yes, I want to talk to the superintendent." And she said, "About what?" I said, "Well, I'd like to become a highway patrolman." And then she said, "Now, you don't have an appointment." And I said, "No." Well, about that time the superintendent himself came shuffling out. I guess I was such an abnormality in the lobby that he came out. He absolutely destroyed my image because he was very overweight, his uniform was wrinkled, he was wearing Jesus sandals instead of the spit-polished shoes, but I quickly overlooked that because he took me by the arm and said, "Come on back to my office." He spent about an hour with me. We talked about things and he said, "Well, now, you grew up on a farm?" And I said, "Yes, I did." And he said, "Well, we like 3 farm boys because we find they have more common sense than city boys." So he said, "You're a good material for the highway patrol." He said, "What are your immediate plans?" I said, "Well, I'm going to come up and go to the University of Missouri in Columbia." So he wrote down a name on a slip of paper and he said, "When you get there, you go in and see this gentleman. He's a former police chief from Kansas City. He's in charge of security and safety at the university. Tell him I sent you." So I did that. I'll wrap this. I don't mean to get into a long story. This is a great story. I ended up meeting this gentleman, a fellow named Bernard Brannon, who was also an FBI instructor at the time. He took me under his wing. He was an older bachelor gentleman, never married. He introduced me to all the officers, told them that I had carte blanche to ride with them any time I wanted to, night or day, and to teach me what they could teach me. So I did that for several months. Then he came to me and said, "We have an opening for night dispatcher. If you'd like to earn a little money, be night dispatcher, go to classes during the day," he said, "We'll put you on." My father, in the meantime, had had a debilitating stroke, so earning some money was a very welcome thought. So I did night dispatching and went to school. When I turned twenty, the chief came to me and he said, "You're only twenty now, but there's an opening in the next highway patrol academy class down at Rolla, Missouri." And he said, "I'll put you in that class if you would like, and when you graduate you'll be twenty-one and you can go on the road." So I said, "Sounds great." So I did that, and I worked with the university police for quite a while. I ended up joining a military police guard unit, which got me into a number of riots in '68. Anyway, it was good 4 training and I enjoyed it. That's kind of my high school-college education arena. I ended up deciding to pursue other things. I was about to finish my degree in public administration, which is what I majored in—I was married at the time. I had gotten to know the dean of the Business and Public Administration College because I had gotten active in the community. He and I flipped pancakes together for Kiwanis. The phone rang one Saturday morning and he said, "Bob, you ever thought about being a city manager?" And I said, "Well, no." He said, "Well, you might give it some thought because you've got an interview at ten this morning that I set up for you with the city council in Boonville, Missouri. This is an old Missouri River city named after Daniel Boone, who spent time in the area. So I went to Boonville that morning at ten o'clock, came back home at noon, looked at my wife and said, "Well, I'm now a city manager and we're moving to Boonville." While my wife, Pat, was a professional herself, she was always agreeable to moving over the years. What year was this? This was 1970. And so that's what got me into city management. Boonville was a good experience. From there I had an opportunity in late 1972 to move to a larger city out by Kansas City called Excelsior Springs, best known for having the old Elms Hotel, where Harry Truman hid out on election night believing he was losing to Tom Dewey. The old police chief was his poker-playing and drinking buddy in Excelsior Springs, a gentleman by the name of Bill Payne. Mr. Payne was up in his nineties when I was there, but we became good friends. The old hotel was closed at the time, but he took me up and showed me the suite where he spent election night with Harry. He said, "We mainly drank bourbon and ate ham and cheese sandwiches and played cards." But he said, "About two a.m. these gentlemen came rushing in and said, 'Harry, we've got to sober you up and get you back to Kansas City to the Muehlebach Hotel.' That's where he 5 [Truman] posed holding the newspaper [with the headline stating] that Dewey had won. So that was the highlight of my experiences in Excelsior Springs, except when we won the "All American City" award. The winter of '76-77 was one of the coldest in the history of Missouri; it didn't get above zero for twenty-two straight days. Our water mains were frozen. My firemen were going crazy. We had been declared a federal disaster area three times in four years due to flooding. It was a miserable winter and I had been promising my wife a trip to Las Vegas. I happened to read in the International City Management Association Newsletter that comes out every month with new openings for city managers that there was someplace called Henderson, Nevada. I got the map out and, by golly, that's pretty close to Las Vegas. I sent in a resume. I had to take it to a different town to mail it so the postmaster wouldn't talk it all over town, word would get out. You had to always watch that in small towns. Oh, you were still in Excelsior Springs. I had failed to tell my wife where all I had sent resumes and she got a call from a nice lady named Dorothy Vondenbrink. My wife called me and said, "This lady said she's city clerk in someplace called Henderson." And I said, "Yes, that's Nevada." She said, "Well, they want you out there next week and they want me to come with you, for an interview." So we got on the plane and came out. Seeing Las Vegas for the first time, I think, is a shock for anyone, particularly if you're from a small town in the Midwest. Dorothy Vondenbrink, the very nice lady who was city clerk, picked us up at the airport. As she was driving us out to Henderson—it was about seven o'clock that night—she said, "Well, Mr. Campbell, the council is waiting. They decided they'd interview you tonight." Well, I wasn't dressed or anything, really. I said, "Oh, really, is that right?" And she said, "Yes, and I'll drop your wife off at the Town 6 House Motel," which is still there in Henderson on Water Street. Town House Motel on Water Street. What time of year was this? This was in the fall. It was fall going into winter. So you left temperatures of...? Yes. That part was a good part, because it was much, much warmer than it had been in a long time in Missouri. Dorothy picked us up in this old, beat-up, white Chevy Nova. I thought I would have a little fun with her and I said, "Well, Dorothy, they don't give the city clerk a very good car, do they?" She said, "Well, Mr. Campbell, this is the city manager's car." And I said, "Oh, okay." At any rate, I met with the city council that night. The next morning I interviewed again while Pat went to the library to do a little research on Henderson. Well, my wife spotted another city manager from the Midwest that we knew who happened to be out here for the interview, too, obviously. Oh, how funny. Long story short, one of the councilmen, Phil Stout, picked us up later that morning and drove us all over Henderson. I had picked up and read a few materials as I left City Hall and I said, "Where is this huge pyramid project?" He said, "Oh, the pyramid project." And I said, "Yes, I saw a big brochure on this huge pyramid that was going to be built here in Henderson." He said, "Oh. That never got built. A lot of things get announced around here, but they never happen." And I said, "Oh, that's interesting." So we were out driving around on all these dirt roads and I said, "Phil, the town seemed to be over that way. What are we doing way out here in the West running on gravel roads?" He said, "Bob, this area is going to be called Green Valley. This is where the future of this city is. 7 It's eighty-four-hundred acres. This is going to be developed; the local newspaper publisher got the land. And it's going to be great for the City." Well, I have to tell you that really attracted me, because the cities in the Midwest are all developed. They're all founded in the 1800s; you know they're developed by now. This one isn't, and to a city manager that's like an artist having a blank canvas on which to plan and create and be creative. That's probably one of the biggest things that attracted me to Henderson, because there was an old part that had been a part of World War II and still was and still had the plants that were spewing the chlorine and the fumes, so that was really a large part of it. Before we left Henderson I had the job offer to move here. Pat and I thought about it and talked. We had two little girls by that time. The girls are about five years apart. We went back and informed the city there that we were moving out West and they were very nice about it. A lot of good people in Excelsior Springs, but this really offered something, we thought. So we spent two weeks telling relatives and friends goodbye. How was the pay compared to what you were getting in Missouri? I was fortunate in that I never changed positions unless I made a minimum of twenty-five percent more than what I was making; that was kind of the benchmark that I had. So we got the moving van lined up and they came and packed us up, and Pat and I and our little girls got in the car to drive out here. By that time reality had set in and I realized that we were leaving everyone we knew, both our families. We had these two little girls. We were moving to a place known as Sin City, in essence. I had a pit in the bottom of my stomach all the way out here. On about the third or fourth day I guess, the morning of the fourth day, probably, we crested Boulder City. We had stopped to eat at that casino right there as you come up the hill, 8 Railroad Pass Casino. The one right at the border? Yes, just this side of Boulder City. But anyway, we went in there to eat and we were eating. There was this older couple at a table next to us who I guessed were probably local folks. As we were wrapping up and getting ready to leave the table, Robyn, our oldest, who I believe was six at the time, said, "Daddy, what are all these machines around here? They've got flashing lights and everything." I said, "Oh, you know, they're kind of like a gum or candy machine." She caught me cold; I didn't have a prepared answer. As I walked by the table of the old couple there, they pulled me over. "Son, you ain't going to be able to tell her that for very long." That was our introduction to the valley. I had no idea we would make this our home for over thirty years, but we have, and it's been good. Where did you live when you first got here? That was one of the problems, because Henderson was undergoing a growth boom at the time and there was no houses available. One of the councilmen introduced me to Hank Chism, of Chism Homes, a well-known builder at the time. He had three model homes in an area called Highland Hills of Henderson. He saw my problem, because legally I had to live in the city limit. He said, "Well, I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll sell you the middle home." We gave him list price—we didn't want anyone to think we got any favors—$46,500; we bought it. The interesting thing was, since it was the middle house of three models, if we didn't keep the front door locked continuously, we had people walking in and saying, "My, this looks lived in." Which, of course, it was. That's what we did about the housing. Henderson was a very progressive town. We got a lot of things done, I think. I thought some of the salaries, particularly in the fire department, were out of whack. Our firefighters were 9 making more than those firefighters in the combat zone of Boston. I did a study and found out if you defined a major fire as fifty thousand dollars' damage, contents and structure, which is a very small fire, and which the majority of our firefighters had never been to a fire. So I proposed something that was being done in a few places then, and that was forming a public safety department where you cross train police and fire and you had a minimum number of people at the fire station to get the equipment to the scene, but the police officers also were trained as firefighters and carried fire-fighting coats and masks and oxygen in the trunk of their police cars. We could put more people on the scene of either a police incident or a fire incident than you could otherwise. The council was willing to back me up on that. We only got as far as naming a single public safety director, which saved some money, but not very much. Obviously, I wasn't too popular among public safety personnel at the time. One of the things that was happening was Green Valley, which at that point was just beginning to get started, we had some houses out there that we had a fifteen-, twenty-minute run time to get a fire truck to, which was not good. We couldn't afford to build a new fire station and put in big trucks and everything. So I went to the council and I said, "Why don't we buy one of their houses, extend the garage, put a quick-attack pumper truck in there, a small one carrying five hundred gallons of water, two firefighters; and if there's a fire that truck can respond immediately and start knocking it down while we have a truck and a full crew coming from downtown Henderson?" The council thought that was a good idea. The Green Valley developers at that time thought it was a good idea. The firefighters assigned to that house thought it was a good idea, because all the neighbor ladies were bringing cakes and pies and anything they could want to their house, to the fire station there. In making those arrangements I got to be acquainted with Mark Fine, who was president 10 of American Nevada with Hank Greenspun. After I had been city manager in Henderson for, I guess, close to five years, Mark Fine came to me and asked if I would like to join their organization. I went home and talked to Pat about it. It was really intriguing because it put me on the inside of what was to become a huge master-planned community. When you leave a city management position and join a development company within your jurisdiction, it raises a lot of eyebrows. People say, "Well, you know, they got something going there." Well, I didn't. But one of my best friends for many, many years in Henderson was a long-time Catholic priest by the name of Father Caesar Caviglia, at St. Peter's [Catholic Church]. He was actually well known all over the state. He was just a wonderful gentleman. I went to Father C and I said, "I think I'm going to take this job, but I know there's going to be people raising their eyebrows. I'm trying to figure out how to handle this." He said, "Don't worry about a thing. I will invite the shakers and the movers of the community down to St. Peter's and I will prepare a dinner and I will introduce you, give you my blessing, and you tell them what you're going to do." I said, "Well, that's wonderful." So he did that; we had the gathering and everything went well. I told him everything seemed to be fine. Afterward Father C and I were joking and I said, "Well, I really appreciate your doing that." He said, "Well, you know that was an ecumenical event." And I said, "Oh, really?" He said, "Yes. That was a case where a Catholic priest held a gathering of the Mormons so that a Presbyterian could explain why he was going to work for the Jews." I like that. So, ecumenical event. That works. 11 It did, and I went to work with Mark. Mark was a good teacher. It was my first real experience in the private sector, so I learned a tremendous amount from him. One of my pleasures was when Mr. Greenspun would come out with a bag of Nature chips of some type and crawl in the car with me and want me to take him all over the eighty-four-hundred acres and tell him what we were working on and what we were planning and what we were doing. What was your title with American Nevada? Senior Vice President and General Manager. I know you've talked to Mark [Fine] and Brad [Nelson] and they are much more the experts at land planning and those type things than I was. A lot of what I did was certainly a liaison with the City, but it was also day-to-day putting out fires. I will tell you a few of those that I found most interesting. When one of our first subdivisions was going up out there, we began to notice we were having a little water pressure problem. We couldn't figure out why, because we had a sixteen-inch water main coming up Sunset Road from Henderson to serve it; at that time that should have been plenty of water. So we got to checking on it. There was this one—developer, I'll call him—who liked to cut corners in Henderson. He was well known for it; the inspectors were on to him all the time. Sure enough, we found out that in the middle of our sixteen-inch line he had done some little project two or three miles down the road and he had cut the sixteen-inch line and inserted a six-inch connection within the middle of it; so, in other words, we were only getting six inches of water through a sixteen-inch main by the time it got to Green Valley. And he was getting...? He took his little bit of water off his six-inch pipe for some mobile home park or something he was doing. That was one of the things we got corrected. We were building the intersection of Sunset Road and Green Valley Parkway. Mark, I 12 remember, was out of town that morning. I don't remember where he was. But we had a bulldozer down in that intersection working on it, getting ready to tie the Sunset Road with the Green Valley Parkway. Well, I'm not sure how, and it shouldn't have happened, but somehow the bulldozer hit the seventeen-inch high-pressure gas main that feeds the valley. When he hit it, it blew the bulldozer clear out of the hole and was shooting gas so far in the air, the whole ground was rumbling within a quarter of a mile at least; they had to reroute McCarran airplane traffic because it was too close to the flight pattern where they were coming in. It was a huge, huge mess. So that was one of the things we dealt with. That's dramatic. Yes, that was dramatic. Another little dramatic anecdote was the first new office building out there. It was underway when I went to work. Mark always used, in my opinion, first-class land planners and architects. We made a lot of trips to Orange County because that was where the action was. For me it was a wonderful learning experience. I got to deal with the top people in the design world. He had had this new office building designed for Green Valley Parkway just off Sunset Road. Now you see reflective glass buildings everywhere, but that was the first reflective glass building in the valley. I think I can safely say that. I don't know of any others that were like that at the time, 1980-81. Where at that intersection was it? It's that one-story building just past where the [Green Valley] library is on the right-hand side after you turn off Sunset Road. If you're going west on Sunset? If you're on Sunset Road and you turn south down Green Valley Parkway into Green Valley; on the right is the library. 13 So you're turning right around the library on to Green Valley Parkway? Correct. So I was going east on Sunset, turn right on Green Valley Parkway; library is on my right. It would be your second building on the right, the one-story reflective glass. That's where our headquarters were that we moved into as soon as it was done, and we wanted to get a really good tenant in it. I had been very involved with St. Rose Dominican Hospital, chairman of their board and all that stuff, and so we prevailed on them to put an operation in that building. It not only served the residents of Green Valley, but there really wasn't any other medical out in that area anywhere at that time. The building was brand-new. We had just gotten moved in. I went into my office fairly early one morning. I was in my office and I heard screams coming from up the hallway. I thought, well, what the heck? So I go up to where St. Rose medical offices were and I opened the door, and the nurses and pretty much everyone was standing on their chairs. I said, "What's the matter?" They said, "Well, look." There were little rattlesnakes everywhere. They were wrapped around the potted plants. They were crawling on the floor. It turned out that in disturbing the area to build the building, we had disturbed a rattlesnake den. I thought, well, this is really a unique problem. What do I do now? I remembered that one of my friends on the Henderson Fire Department, a fellow named Ernie Lomprey, had a dog that was trained to find snakes. Now, why he had one, I don't know. And why I happened to know it, I don't know. But I called Ernie and I said, "Ernie, we've got a problem here; we've got to get these snakes out of the building. Can you find where they're coming from?" So he brought the dog out and, sure enough, about two hundred feet from the building up to the west, there was a den that they had come out of. 14 And the dog found it? The dog found it and we got rid of them. So you never know in land development what you're going to run into, but that was a memorable morning. I would think so. Now, it seems like a farm boy would be the perfect person to find a den of snakes and not be rattled by it. We didn't have that many rattlesnakes back in Missouri. We had copperheads and cottonmouths. But it wouldn't bother you that much? I'm not a big snake fan, so, yes, it bothered me. But Green Valley developed. We had another little interesting thing. We were doing our first condominium development, town homes right across the street and down just a little bit from that. They were very nice town homes. We had scheduled a big open house weekend. We had models furnished and everything. We were having the opening and one of the people who came to look at them pulled me over to the side and he said, "You might want to check out the bedroom in the second unit." Well, it turned out we had a very romantically involved couple who were testing out the bed in that particular model and hadn't bothered to close the door or anything. That was a bit memorable. Did they like it? They seemed to like it. It's always interesting, things that are least expected. There was another incident that bothered me a little more. The south end of those condos were pretty close to what at that time was the Showboat Golf Course. I think the City of Henderson owns it now. But it was close to the golf course, and there was a very large, very, very nice house on the golf course that our condos' property were adjacent to. The gentleman who owned that house, his vi