On March 7, 1980, John Everett interviewed his father, cab driver Dale Everett (born January 29, 1924 in Danville, Illinois) at their family home in Las Vegas, Nevada. This interview covers past local historical data. During the interview, Mr. Everett discusses the weather, wildlife, and hunting. He also shares his views on prostitution and gambling in Las Vegas.
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The Las Vegas Age was not Las Vegas's first newspaper; that distinction belongs to the short-lived Las Vegas Times which started publishing on March 25, 1905. But only two weeks later, on April 7, C.W. Nicklin founded what was the not-yet-a-city's third paper, the Age. Nicklin edited and published the Age from the Overland Hotel each Saturday as a six-page independent weekly, at $2 per year. When the railroad finally arrived, and laid out and auctioned off the town lots, the Age and its two competitors, the Times and the Advance, boomed with the new town amid lively journalistic debate. The Age briefly triumphed when the Times and Advance collapsed, until new competition arrived, and Nicklin left the Age to his partner Charles C. Corkhill to give his attention to his other paper, the Beatty Bullfrog Miner. Corkhill struggled for two years as editor and publisher, as Las Vegas languished in post-boom depression, then persuaded local businessman Charles P. "Pop" Squires to buy the paper, only after repeatedly dropping the price. Thus began the long and fruitful newspaper career of Charles Squires, sole editor and proprietor of the Age for almost forty years. Even after he sold the paper in 1943, he continued as editor until its last owner, Frank Garside of the Review-Journal, suspended publication of the Age on November 30, 1947.
As the Las Vegas Age, under Squires' shrewd editorship, dominated its local competition as the leading local newspaper with the largest circulation, it also became the leading paper in Southern Nevada. When Las Vegas was founded it was a remote railroad establishment far from the seat of Lincoln County, in Pioche where the county's leading newspaper and the paper of legal record was the Lincoln County Record, which had been in business since 1871. With the rapid growth of Las Vegas and the decline of the Pioche mining district, the population of southern Nevada shifted to the south and the divisions between the southern and northern sections of Lincoln County, which covered the whole of southeastern Nevada, became politically heated. When the Age began publication in Las Vegas in 1905, with a larger circulation than the Record in Pioche, the county commissioners decided to award to the Age all county printing and job work. The editor of the Record, not surprisingly, was enraged and commenced a series of personal attacks on the Age and the residents of Las Vegas, likening the Age to a mushroom fungi of uncertain life, possessing a readership of "floaters, the shiftless and reckless class."
Squires became the city's foremost booster and the Age became his trumpet, fighting for the division of Lincoln County that created Clark County, or for the new dam (an original member of Nevada's Colorado River Commission, Squires was in charge of publicity), or promoting as a one-man Chamber of Commerce civic and community organizations and projects or the city's nascent tourism and resort industry. Thus, the Age became the Voice of Las Vegas, as well as the most respected "paper of record" for the city. Other newspapers came and went, some were political adversaries (Squires was a staunch conservative, pro-business Republican), and some became well-established. But the Age remained the essential Las Vegas newspaper, from its fiercely independent editorials, to its boosterism and its comprehensive reporting of the simple everyday doings of this boisterous and dynamic new city.
See full information about this title online through Nevada's participation in the National Digital Newspaper Project. All issues digitized online at: Chronicling America collection from the Library of Congress.
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Sandra Peña’s story begins in East Los Angeles, where she spent her first fifteen years with her parents (both from Michoacán, Mexico), and her younger sister. The father's managerial position at Master Products allowed the family to live rent-free in a company-owned house behind the main factory, because he collected the rents for the company's two other dwellings. In this interview, Peña recalls the family move to Porterville, in California's Central Valley, her return to Los Angeles at nineteen, and her work with Parson’s Dillingham, a contractor for the Metrolink rail system. She draws the link between the Los Angeles and Las Vegas construction communities by describing her husband's move to Las Vegas to find work; a chance Las Vegas encounter with a friend from Chino, California; her ability to gain employment in Las Vegas at Parson’s, a company that had joint ventured with Parson’s Dillingham, and her move from there to Richardson Construction, a local minority-owned company. As Peña says, "It's kind of all intermingled. Even if you go here and you go there, it's like everybody knows everybody." Throughout, Peña weaves her family story into the narrative as she describes her youth, the birth of her son, the illness and death of her father, and her family's participation in her current employment with Richardson. As she remembers the people, places, and events of her life, Peña speaks to the ways one woman of color built on her interstate construction connections and rose in a male-dominated industry.
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A resident of Southern Nevada from the age of three, Susan Watson shares her memories of growing up and living in Las Vegas. After a year in Boulder City, Susan's father bought an old army barrack and converted it to a home in North Las Vegas; Susan remembers playing in the desert with her siblings and attending elementary and middle school before starting at Rancho High. Watching her mother design costumes for Strip performers and beautiful dresses for her own high school dances no doubt helped Susan develop her own sense of taste and style - something that she would put to good use over many years as an interior designer. Before that though, Susan shares her memories of what life was like in the Las Vegas of the 1950s and 1960s: cruising Fremont Street; movie nights; after-school work; favorite teachers; lunches on the lawn; and dance club. All combine to paint a vivid picture of a smaller town and a simpler time in the Las Vegas valley.
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Oral history interview with Fernando Romero conducted by Laurents Bañuelos-Benitez on October 2, 2018 for the Latinx Voices of Southern Nevada Oral History Project. Barbara Tabach also participates in the questioning. Fernando Romero was born in El Paso, Texas in a musical home. His father and brother were avid music players, and his brother left El Paso to play in orchestra in Las Vegas. Despite not being as passionate about music as the rest of his family, music was Romero's ticket to higher education. Romero attended University of Nevada South before it was renamed University of Nevada Las Vegas. Romero has gone on to be deeply involved in the Las Vegas community. He is the current president of Hispanics in Politics. Subjects discussed in this interview include: Hispanics in Politics, Nevada Association of Latin Americans, and education.
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