When Mr. Elmer Hilsinger arrived from the Los Angeles area in 1942, to work as a Refractory Inspector in the Engineering Department at Basic Magnesium Incorporated (BMI), little did he know the town site would grow to be known as Henderson, Nevadain a few short decades. Mr. Hilsinger’s oral history provides a glimpse of the work being done by women at BMI, including women working as chemists, truck drivers, and secretaries. His words attest to the strong work ethic demonstrated by women at the plant during the “war work” period. Through Mr. Hilsinger’s story, we are also provided with an account of what daily life was like for a married couple, including Mr. Hilsinger’s life with his wife who worked as a waitress at Anderson Camp. In addition, Mr. Hilsinger’s oral history touches on the evolution of safety rules within the plant, the transition from the American Federation of Labor Union to the Congress of Industrial Organizations Union, and the role prostitution played during the tim

Alice Ward Boyer arrived in Las Vegas from Oklahoma in 1937. Her brother and former husband came earlier to escape the dustbowl depression and get settled. In the middle of the summer, just at dusk, she emerged from the train at Kingman, Arizona with her two small children to meet her family and drive through the darkness to her new home in Las Vegas. Although she missed the trees of the Plains, she soon became accustomed to her desert home. Her recollections revive the older Las Vegas when community life characterized the small town. At the heart of her story is the Mesquite Club. The non-partisan civic activities of the Mesquite Club are part of a national history of women’s club voluntarism in the nineteenth and twentieth century United States. Founded in 1911, this pioneer Las Vegas women's club played an essential role in the development of the growing town. When few cultural or social services existed, the club raised funds for the first public library, developed parks for the city, and provided services and funding for the aged and youth. The Mesquite Club, along with the Parent Teacher Association, scouts, and church activities formed a network of community relations commonly found in developing towns and cities, but not ususally associated with Las Vegas. Alice Boyer joined the Mesquite club in 1944. She first served as the chair of the Garden Committee, then "went right up through the chairs," and was elected President of the club for 1958-59. (See Table of Offices Held). Speaking about the Mesquite Club founders, Alice Boyer said, “They were very forward-looking women. They knew that the town would grow and they wanted the best for the town.” As one of the second generation of members, she has found the club to be a continuing source of congenial social life and civic community building. Born in rural Oklahoma, she spent her early years on a ranch. Her parents met there shortly after "the run to open Oklahoma" around 1892. They met, married and had twelve children, nine of which survived. Alice came right in the middle. She spent her early years riding horses, wearing “overalls," and spending as much time as possible outside. The family moved into Clinton, Oklahoma for better schools for their children when she was in the fifth grade. Alice graduated from high school just as the Great Depression began and worked briefly at a newspaper before marriage. At the time of the interview, Alice Boyer’s vivaciousness, gracious manner, and sharp memory belied her 82 years. This interview has been produced with the assistance of the Mesquite Club and the History Department of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. It is part of a series on women community builders in Las Vegas. The transcript has been edited only slightly for clarity while the syntax and style of the narrator were retained.

In 1927, a sixteen-year-old girl from Rockford, Illinois moved to New York City to play trumpet with the all-girl bands common from the 1920s through the end of World War II. During this period, which spanned Prohibition, the Great Depression, and World War II, all-girl bands came into their own in America. They were especially popular during the war, when most men were off fighting but people still needed and appreciated music. This was also a time when jazz and swing became wildly popular in this country. All-girl bands were able fill a niche left empty by men at war. Doris Eloise Pressler was born in Jamesville, Illinois on January 17, 1911 to Bertha Hendrich Pressler and Louis Pressler. Almost immediately after her birth, the Pressler family moved to Rockford, Illinois. Bertha was a teacher, a homemaker and mother. Louis did auto body hand-painting and also managed a bar. In addition, he played baritone saxophone and taught his daughter Doris to play trumpet. They both performed with hometown bands, playing churches, dances, and other social events. In 1927 at age sixteen, Doris left school, moved out of the family home, and went to work for Walgreens in downtown Rockford. In her free time she played music. Doris began her professional music career in 1927 as a trumpeter with the Gypsy Sweethearts in Rockford. That same year, she moved to New York, where she played in the only women’s band that ever performed at New York’s historic Roseland Ballroom. During the early 1930s, Doris performed with the Red Dominos, an all-girl band that was part of a variety show produced by E. K. Nadel. However, it was tough for girl musicians during the Depression. Few managers wanted to hire female players when so many men were out of work. Doris persevered, and through the 1940s, she traveled and played with other all-girl bands such as Annette Demon and her French Dolls and the Hollywood Debs. While Doris pursued her music career, a little girl in Wisconsin was learning to play the piano and trombone. Born on April 13, 1917, Ruth Poirier came from a musical family: her father John played drums and French horn, her brother drums and bassoon. John performed with the local Elks Club group, while Ruth and her brother played for their high school band. Ruth’s mother Mary had been a nurse, so when she finished high school Ruth decided to attend nursing school in Chicago. After a year, she returned home to Wisconsin and trained as a beautician. In 1939, Ruth answered a local ad for girl musicians and signed on as a trombonist with an all-girl band. Her first gig lasted only a month, the band dissolved, and she left to tour with Annette Demon and her French Dolls out of Milwaukee. While playing down South, Ruth met a fellow musician who became her lifelong companion, Doris Pressler. In July 1939, Ruth and Doris took off for Southern California. While living in Long Beach, Doris performed with bands at the 660 Club on the Pike, a well-known waterfront amusement park, and at the Waldorf Cellar. She also played a gig at Murphy’s, across from the Showboat in Las Vegas. Girl musicians began getting more jobs because the men were being called into military service. Ruth, a “Rosie the Riveter” during the war years, helped to build Navy fighter planes for Douglas Aircraft in El Segundo, California. After the war ended in 1945 women, whether “Rosie the Riveters” or band members, lost their jobs to the hordes of returning servicemen. Realizing that all-girl bands were “gonna go nowhere at all,” Doris had decided in the early 1940s to return to school and pursue studies in her second love, mathematics. She took classes in math and engineering at the University of Southern California, and then joined the Los Angeles County surveyors’ department as a civil engineer. After two years there, Doris transferred to the road department, where she worked until her retirement in 1974. Ruth returned to work as a beautician, running a shop out of her home. The Greater Los Angeles area contained an active gay and lesbian community both during and after the war. Doris and Ruth enjoyed a social life that included girls’ clubs such as Tess’s and drag clubs like the Flamingo. According to Ruth, these were “sitting-down, drinking places…and visiting. We had one club where they had dancing…. But then they let everybody in.” After the war, everybody just wanted to have fun, and Doris and Ruth enjoyed getting together with all types of friends in clubs and in private homes. During these at-home evenings, Doris and others would play popular music for everyone’s enjoyment. After their retirement to Las Vegas in 1974, Doris and Ruth were active in their local senior center. Doris played with the Las Vegas Senior Band for ten years, and Ruth worked in support of the band and the center. According to Ruth, Doris loved playing with the band, and enjoyed it more because she was retired and could devote herself to her playing. Doris Pressler and Ruth Poirier lived together through six decades of radical social change in America. From the rise of women musicians and workers outside the home, through the return of women to more “traditional” roles after World War II, and finally the revolution in women’s roles from the 1960s to the present, Doris and Ruth experienced it all. And through it all, they maintained a relationship that lasted for 62 years, until Doris’s death. According to Ruth, “I enjoyed my life. I never found anything wrong with . ... I think Doris would say the same."

Born in the coal fields of Strunk, Kentucky, Audrey Aline Messer Wickman first visited the West at twelve years of age. She moved to western Colorado to help in her grandparents’ home for a couple of years. The stay made a lasting impression because she only returned to her birthplace for a short time after that. In Colorado, she graduated from high school, met her future husband, and married in 1925. They came to southern Nevada in 1932 so that Robert Wickman could find work on Hoover Dam. Audrey Wickman joined the Mesquite Club in 1936 and has remained a member to date. She started the Literary Committee as a forum to share book reviews and hear speakers. She served as President of the club for 1947-48 and chose the year’s theme “Know your Neighbor.” In the post-war society, women’s involvement in civic affairs was particularly needed, she told the membership at the opening fall meeting. “The troubles which unsettle the world today are primarily ones which lie within the sphere of women’s business. They are matters of housekeeping, teaching and health. . . . The time has come when we as a nation cannot stay in our own backyards. . . . If we are to be good world citizens, local, state and national, we must first be good home citizens. These responsibilities call for knowledge, an appreciation of other points of view, and attitudes of good will and cooperation.” (Las Vegas Review Journal, 6 October 1947, Mesquite Club microfilm collection.) The duties of the president varied during those years. She recalled that “I was janitor, gardener and President.” During the wintertime, she remembered, “you had to have heat [for Friday’s meeting] and I’d go up on Thursday afternoon and light that old oil burning stove and then pray that it didn’t catch the place on fire all night.” She continued her commitment to club work by serving as state secretary for the Nevada Federation of Women’s Clubs. The friendships and cultural events which came from Mesquite Club and Federation membership proved to be of lasting value for this community builder. This interview has been produced with the assistance of the Mesquite Club and the History Department of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. It is part of a series on women community builders in Las Vegas. The transcript has been edited only slightly for clarity while the syntax and style of the narrator were retained.

Jillian Hrushowy arrived in Las Vegas in 1959 as part of a company hired to appear at the El Rancho Vegas Hotel in a production called La Nouvelle Eve. She has remained here (other than three short-term contracts in Reno, Nevada) until present day. She is now the production manager for Legends in Concert at the Imperial Palace Hotel. She was an only child, born in Rhodesia to English parents and raised in a home with servants and tutors. Her mother exposed her to the arts at an early age. Jillian took dancing lessons from the age of three years until she began dancing professionally. When she was fifteen years old, both parents agreed it was time for her to leave Rhodesia and finish her education in England. Living alone was difficult and lonely, but it afforded her a wealth of opportunities otherwise unavailable. She worked as a dancer in small, local productions while still in high school. When only eighteen, she got a job dancing in La Nouvelle Eve in Paris which eventually came to Las Vegas. This interview focuses on the years from Jillian’s arrival in 1959 until she retired from dancing in 1979. It follows her transitions from dancer, to principal dancer to production manager. [The first twenty minutes of the tape is warped and the text is garbled. The transcriber has lightly edited the transcript.]

On March 2, 1980, Dennis Hunt interviewed his mother, Catherine Hunt (born August 25, 1932 in Palmyra, Missouri) about her life in Southern Nevada. The two discuss Catherine Hunt’s work as a secretary before becoming a housewife. The interview concludes with Catherine Hunt’s thoughts on population growth, women’s rights, and the Equal Rights Amendment.

On October 18, 1974, James M. Greene interviewed news editor, Lorna Kesterson (born December 30th, 1925 in St. George, Utah) in her office in Henderson, Nevada. The two discuss Kesterson’s work in news editing as well as her original reasons for moving to Nevada. They also discuss teenage social life of Boulder city, during the 1940s.