Interviewed by Nathalie Martinez. Jocelyn Cortez is a Salvadoran-American immigration lawyer. She grew up on the Eastside of Las Vegas and grew up going to school in the Clark County School District and at UNLV before going to Law School at the University of Arizona. She is an engaged community member as an immigration lawyer working alongside the Culinary Union and the Latino Bar Association.
Alice Brown, former UNLV librarian, was born in Cleveland, Ohio. She gives a thorough and fascinating history of her family going back to the 1600s and includes a detailed description of the family home, which may have served as a stop on the antislavery Underground Railroad. Alice attended college in Pennsylvania and earned a library degree at Carnegie. After Pearl Harbor, she enlisted in the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps and served in the U S. and overseas. Upon discharge from the Army, she worked as assistant children's librarian in Cleveland Heights for a time and then followed a friend out to Tacoma, Washington. She worked in the Tacoma Public Library as children's librarian, and also met her husband there. Alice's husband was offered a job in Henderson, Nevada, at the manganese plant. That didn't work out, but he was hired at Titanium right away. Alice describes Henderson as it was in the fifties, and also discusses the state of the libraries in both Henderson and Las Vegas. After the birth of her third child, Alice began working at the University of Nevada Southern Regional Division (now UNLV) part time. This was in 1962, and Alice shares detailed memories of the university campus, library, and faculty and staff from that era. Alice did not slow down after her retirement in 1985. She did volunteer work, traveled, and attended classes at UNLV. Today she volunteers at the Clark County Heritage Museum as a cataloger and at the hospital helping deliver papers and lab work to their various destinations.
Clinton Wright worked as a photographer for the Las Vegas Voice for fifteen years. In his interview, he discusses living and working in Las Vegas, and raising his family.
Flo Mlynarczyk began life in Fort Morgan, Colorado. Her parents divorced and she moved with her mother first to Loveland and eventually to Los Angeles. Her mother started the first Red Cross in Bell Gardens, oversaw the building of their home, and raised money for various charities. Flo remembers when the Japanese were rounded up and interred during WWII. She was in grade school and recalls that one day they all just disappeared. Upon graduation from high school in 1943, Flo moved to Kodiak, Alaska, to live with friends. She recalls total blackouts on the streets of Kodiak due to the war, the Short Snorter Club, and her return to California after a bout of pneumonia. Back in Bell Gardens, Flo worked for a department store, married and divorced in 1945, gave birth to her son Michael in 1946, and ended up in Tonopah, Nevada, with a sister who ran a cafe there. After a second marriage ended, Flo moved to Las Vegas and began working at Phelps Pump and Equipment as a bookkeeper.