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.
Dancer Charles Nur Fernald first came to Las Vegas in 1963 to perform for five weeks in the Kay Starr Show at the Sahara Hotel and again in 1964 working with Donn Arden for three months at the Desert Inn Hotel. Born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1939, Charles moved several times to various places in Arizona and southern California with his parents, Charles Knox Fernald and Marguerite Marie Higgins Fernald, and half-siblings before settling in Hollywood, California, where he remained (except for his short stints in Las Vegas) from 1961 to 1967. In January 1968 Charles came to Las Vegas to perform with Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca at the Flamingo Hotel. After the show closed Charles auditioned for Donn Arden to dance in the Lido de Paris show at the Stardust Hotel, where he remained for sixteen years, 1968 through 1984. He remains the only male dancer who performed with Lido through five different, consecutive productions. In 1969 Charles met his partner, Aquiles Garcia, who was a dancer at the Dunes Hotel. The couple remain in Las Vegas and have been together forty-five years. Charles’s father was very poor and left school after the third grade to go to work and help support his family. He was born in 1889 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the fifth of eleven children. As an eight-year-old he became a “groundhog,” a digger of New York’s underwater tunnels, who helped build the Holland Tunnel. At fifteen he made more money than his father selling newspapers, fresh fruit, and clothing door to door or from the street corner. According to Charles, his father “drank too much, ate too much, smoked too much, and loved too much.” As an only child, Charles’s mother had a very different upbringing from his father, although her family too was very poor. She was born in Detroit in 1902 to a railroad switchman father and mother who not only scrubbed the floors of wealthy Detroiters but also cooked meals for twenty-one boarders at a rooming house. Marguerite’s parents worked hard so they could send their only child to Catholic school and the Detroit Conservatory of Music.
James Frey was born in Eureka, South Dakota, in 1941. His father worked in creamery and his mother was a registered nurse. When Frey was nine, the family, including his twin sister, relocated in Sioux Falls where his dad was plant manager for a dairy. He joined the YMCA in the fourth grade and ended up working for them until around the age of 22. He attended Augustana College in Sioux Falls, graduating with a major in sociology and a minor in history. After graduation, he worked for three years at the YMCA in Sioux Falls as program director.
The corporate records (1920-1990) for Hughes Productions consist of administrative, distribution, financial, and legal records, as well as records from the Motion Picture Association of America and United Artists Corporation and records pertaining to unproduced works.
Administrative records contain correspondence, as well as vault inventories, assets list, and personnel files. Distribution records contain agreements, correspondence, and information pertaining to The Outlaw's ban. Financial records include ledgers, correspondence, invoices, and international profit reports. Legal records include contracts for actors and screenwriters, as well as correspondence, agreements, and affidavits pertaining to loan information and court case proceedings.
Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) records consist primarily of weekly reports from the MPAA detailing film title registration reports either held or withdrawn, as well as memoranda. United Artists Corporation records include contract analyses, settlement statements and ledgers detailing The Outlaw's domestic and international earnings. Unproduced works contain screenplays, synopses, story treatments, right's agreements, and correspondence pertaining to stories sent to Hughes Productions.