Architect Thomas J. Schoeman was born in 1949 in Brooklyn, New York, and was the first of his four siblings to graduate high school and attend college. Schoeman attended Nassau Community College and then transferred to the University of New Mexico in the early 1970s, from which he graduated in 1974. After spending his first five years out of college working as an architect in New Mexico, Schoeman received a job offer from Jack Miller and Associates (later, JMA Studio) and moved to Las Vegas, Nevada, in 1979. He stayed with JMA for many years, eventually becoming partner, president, and Chief Executive Officer. While at JMA, Schoeman designed, among many other iconic Las Vegas buildings, the original UNLV Dickinson Library, the Nevada Power building, One Queensridge Place, and World Market Center as well as expansions to McCarran International Airport and the Las Vegas Convention Center. Before he retired at age 62, Schoeman negotiated the sale of JMA to Baker International, an engineering and architectural firm, for which he worked for a short time as architectural director of. He also arranged for Baker International to agree to donate many early JMA records to Special Collections at UNLV Libraries. In his retirement he designs multifamily dwellings and other buildings that will help create community and revitalize Downtown Las Vegas.
Included in this oral history are reminiscences of Sonja Saltman's personal non-Jewish heritage in Austria, the importance of her grandmother in her life, and how she recalls becoming part of the Jewish community.
Sonja Saltman is a psychologist and philanthropist in Las Vegas, Nevada. She is executive director and co-founder of the Existential Humanistic Institute, a non-profit organization based in San Francisco, California that offers training in existential-humanistic therapy and theory. In 2003 Sonja and her husband Michael Saltman founded the Saltman Center for Conflict Resolution at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) William S. Boyd School of Law. The Saltman Center is focused on research, teaching, and public service related to "the advanced study of the nature of conflict and how to resolve it." A native of Austria, Sonja Saltman also serves as the Honorary Consul for Austria in Las Vegas. The Saltmans are involved with multiple charitable organizations and initiatives, both locally and abroad. Sonja Saltman has served on the boards of the Anti-Defamation League, Nevada Women's Philanthropy, and the Black Mountain Institute. Projects that the couple has supported include the rebuilding of homes and bridges is Bosnia, and Streetball Hafla, a basketball program to improve relations between Jewish and Arab teenagers in Israel. In 2014 Sonja and Michael Saltman were recognized as Distinguished Nevadans by the Nevada System of Higher Education. Included in this oral history are reminiscences of her personal non-Jewish heritage in Austrian, the importance of her grandmother in her life, and how she recalls becoming part of the Jewish community.
Carolyn and Oscar Goodman discuss their early lives, moving to Las Vegas, their definition of "community" in Las Vegas, early careers, and current Downtown economy in an interview at UNLV's Lied Library in Las Vegas, Nevada.
As Jelindo Tiberti describes his childhood as the youngest of five children growing up on 15th Street, he chronicles a seemingly idyllic time of playing with a large group of neighborhood friends, of doing outdoor chores with his brothers, of spending summers at the family cabin in Utah, of high school dances, and as a high school junior, of meeting Sandee, whom he would marry within two months after they both graduated from the University of Southern California. He talks about his parents: about working for and with his namesake father; about taking his mother to her daily radiation treatments, about cooking his mother's recipes, and about his mother making sure her youngest child earned his college degree before he married. He explains the ubiquity of fencing and shares his experience of taking over Tiberti Fence Company, of retiring and selling the company, and of starting over with Red Star Fence Company. Throughout, Tiberti speaks to living with dyslexia: of attending an after-s