Dr. Tom Wright was born and grew up in Illinois. His father finished his PhD in Chicago and then taught at Illinois College in Jacksonville. His mother suffered from arthritis and was told to seek a warmer climate, so John Wright packed up his family and moved to Las Vegas. Tom was 14, ready for high school, and his two brothers were elementary school age. Tom attended Las Vegas High School, which was close to the Crestwood community where the family had purchased their first home. He remembers that UNLV had no buildings when his dad first started teaching there. Instead, he conducted class in high school classrooms and church Sunday school rooms. Dr. Wright started off at a community college as a Geology Major, but a class with Bud Poland convinced him that history was his passion. He transferred to Pomona to continue his bachelor's degree. He spent his junior year in Peru on a study-abroad program, and that experience made him a Latin Americanist. The information he gath

Transcript of interviews with Edythe Katz-Yarchever by Claytee White over the course of several sessions in 2000, 2003 and 2005. In the interviews, Katz-Yarchever discusses her life in Las Vegas, owning theaters with her husband, Lloyd Katz, and the strides they made in civil rights. She talks about her service in Civil Defense and the National Guard, and moving to various places, then working in California and meeting her husband, Lloyd. The Katzes became involved in the community in various ways with Operation Independence and Holocaust education. About a decade after Lloyd's death, Edythe married Judge Gilbert Yarchever.

Edythe Katz-Yarvhever was born in Boston, a second generation American whose grandparents left Russia the century before. Edythe completed finishing school at the start of World War II and worked various jobs at home before joining the Civil Defense, and later, the National Guard. She moved to Maryland and got a job as a secretary at Edgewood Arsenal, then transferred to Cushing General Hospital to assist a Marine Corps neurologist, who was also a Jewish refugee. Towards the end of the war, she is transferred to an Army hospital in Hawaii, and thus began the rest of her life on the West Coast. When the war ended, Edythe sailed to California and worked various jobs in Los Angeles: in the secretarial pool at MGM Studios, for a casting agency and for a hotel magazine. Edythe met Lloyd Katz in San Francisco, and the two were married after a short courtship. The couple lived in San Francisco before moving to Las Vegas in 1951, where they took over the management of the Huntridge, Palace and Fremont theaters, then leased by Edythe's parents. The Katzes took a stand to desegregate their theaters, allowing black customers to sit with white patrons. Edythe and Lloyd became active in the city's Civil Rights Movement, including work with Operation Independence and the NAACP. Edythe started organizations like Volunteers for Education and Junior Art League, and directed an interfaith, interracial preschool. Lloyd would frequently open up their theaters to organizations to hold fundraisers, free-of-charge. Edythe was extremely active in the local Jewish community, including opening the city's first Jewish gift shop, serving as sisterhood president at her synagogue and starting the Jewish Reporter. She later founded a library for Holocaust education as well as assisted the school district's development of curriculum and teacher training relating to the Holocaust. Lloyd Katz passed away in 1986, and in 1995, Edythe married Gilbert Yarchever. Edythe and Lloyd's community service work was honored with the naming of their school, the Edythe and Lloyd Katz Elementary School, where Edythe still remains active.