Oral history interview with Simon Lamsal conducted by Jerwin Tiu, Cecilia Winchell, and Stefani Evans on December 16, 2022 for Reflections: the Las Vegas Asian American and Pacific Islander Oral History Project. In this interview, Lamsal describes growing up in Kathmandu, Nepal, and growing up with his grandparents. After graduating in Nepal, Lamsal applied to college in the United States and started in Arkansas studying computer science but later relocated to Las Vegas, Nevada and continuted at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV). Lamsal describes joining CSUN, the National Millenial Community, and investing in his community. Currently, he is in graduate school and an information technology intern at MGM. Thoroughout the interview, Lamsal touches on a number of other topics regarding finding community, cultural foods, and family life.
Oral history interview with Mariteresa Rivera-Rogers conducted by Maribel Estrada Calderón on October 24, 2018 for the Latinx Voices of Southern Nevada Oral History Project. In this interview, Mariteresa discusses her early life in Concepción, Chile. She talks about her experience moving to Las Vegas, Nevada in 1965, the immigration process at the time, and becoming a Spanish language court interpreter. Rivera-Rogers recalls enrolling at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas' (UNLV) Sam Boyd School of Law, and her involvement with the Latino Bar Association. Lastly, Rivera-Rodgers discusses the challenges in translating Spanish language to English.
After serving as a nurse in World War II in Hawaii, Okinawa and Japan, Dorothy returned home to Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. She experienced a particularly bad winter and she set out for California but stopped in Las Vegas to visit the family of her traveling companion, a girlfriend from her home town. The girlfriend returned to Wisconsin and George applied for a nursing license and got it within three days. She never left. Dorothy met her husband while working the night shift at Clark County Hospital. He would come in regularly to assist his patients in the births of their babies. Their occupations and their service in World War II drew them together in a marriage that has lasted over fifty years. From 1949 to this interview in 2003, Dorothy George has seen Las Vegas grow from a town that she loved to a metropolitan area that is no longer as friendly. She reminisces about the Heldorado parades, family picnics at Mount Charleston, watching the cloud formed by the atomic bomb tests, raising six successful children, leading a Girl Scout Troop, and working in organizations to improve the social and civic life of Las Vegas.
First arriving in Las Vegas as an infant, Cheryl Leonard's young life included a brief sojourn in Southern California before returning to Las Vegas in 1954. After attending local elementary and middle schools, she started at Rancho High during the day, and working at the Huntridge theater in the evenings and during the summers. More than just work, though - in this interview, Cheryl recalls school activities from parades to pep club, participating in Helldorado, hanging out with her friends at the Blue Onion and shopping on Fremont Street. After graduation, Cheryl returned to California to attend school before coming back to Las Vegas and taking a job with the Central Telephone Company. This was followed by a brief stint working at the Nevada Test Site before she married in 1964 and concentrated on raising her own daughters in a rapidly growing and changing Las Vegas.
The Edith Giles Barcus Family Papers document the lives and work of three related individuals who lived in Goldfield, Nevada: noted mining engineer Edwin S. Giles who settled in Goldfield in 1907, his daughter Edith Giles who was raised in Goldfield, and Clyde Barcus, also a mining engineer, who came to Goldfield in 1923 and married Edith Giles soon thereafter. The papers date from 1848 to 1979 and document the business and personal lives of two generations of the Giles-Barcus family in Goldfield and Las Vegas, Nevada. The collection includes: property, commercial, financial, and mining records; mining and engineering reports; notes on minerals; correspondence; and photographs of the family, Goldfield, and travel shots of the western United States.