Interviewed by Monserrath Hernández and Laurents Bañuelos-Benitez. Eric Calvillo was born into a Mexican American household in San Jose, California in 1980. As he recalls, it was there that his fixation with the colors and recurring themes of his family's Mexican roots told hold of his imagination. Today, this is core to his growing art career. Art has not been his sole ambition. Before moving to Las Vegas in 2005, Calvillo attended a San Francisco culinary school. He relocated to Las Vegas to complete his culinary internship at the prestigious Picasso restaurant at the Bellagio. Eventually, he began to pursue a professional art career as a painter of Día de los Muertos motifs and beautifully portray the Mexican tradition of celebrating the lives of the deceased. Through his use of acrylics and oil on canvas, Calvillo conveys the emotion of his culture and then, being a skilled carpenter, crafts his own frames.
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.