Myoung-ja Lee Kwon began her life on the grounds of the Kyongbok Palace in Korea. In a country where education is valued, her father's occupation as a university professor meant that the family was highly honored, thus this palatial space allowed them live in a state of prosperity. But war changed these circumstances and in this interview Kwon vividly explains the family's evolution. In 1965, after graduation from Seoul National University she married and a year later, moved to the United State of America where she earned a Master's degree in Library Science in Provo, Utah. Her first professional position was at the University of Nevada Las Vegas as a cataloguer and after many promotions, became interim dean of UNLV Libraries. In 2001, she took the job as Dean of Libraries at California State East Bay Library, retiring in 2008. Currently, she serves as a special lecturer and discussion leader with the Fulbright Senior Specialist Program. During her 2009 visit to Korea, she pr

This ability to greet each day with a challenge has laid the foundation for a long history of success for Elaine McNamara as she has navigated through local beauty pageants, an illustrious real estate career, serving on the Las Vegas-Clark County Library board during their decade of expansion to authorship. Her story of resilience starts when she became ill at approximately seven or eight with erythema nodosum that impeded her ability to walk for five months when she started collecting pictures of movie stars. Her favorite movies were any of Roy Rogers, Abbott and Costello, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. Her family moved to Las Vegas, where she attended Las Vegas High School as well as UNLV majoring in elementary education and minoring in language arts. While she attended high school, she studied modeling in the evenings to help overcome her shyness and to become more outgoing. Becoming more involved with local and state beauty pageants, she met the likes of Phyllis Diller, Natalie Wood,