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,

Oral history interview with Benilda Long Somes conducted by Vincent Long on November 29, 2021 for Reflections: The Las Vegas Asian American and Pacific Islander Oral History Project. Benilda discusses her life in Magalang, Philippines and her immigration to Saipan, part of the Northern Mariana Islands, as a young woman. She talks about meeting her partner, airman Robert Long, the birth of their son, and Robert's untimely death in an air crash less than a year later. Benilda shares how she and her child immigrated to the United States to be with family and their move to Las Vegas, Nevada in 2009.