Jerome Jerry Jay Vallen was born and grew up in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His father was in the restaurant business and Jerry worked for him throughout his teens and young adulthood. He and his two brothers entertained themselves during their childhood years by going to the library and reading. This was a legacy of the Depression era, when there simply wasn't any money to spare for extraneous expenses. Jerry's first jobs were bellman / assistant manager in a small hotel; auditor, and then property manager at the Pine Tree Point Club. He attended Penn State for a year (working in his dad s restaurant the whole time) and then transferred to the hotel school at Cornell University. After a stint in the armed forces during the Korean War, he returned home and used the GI bill to finish his master's degree. He started on his doctorate, but it would be 20 years before he completed it. After getting married (1950) and starting a family, Jerry and his wife Flossie realized that the restaurant business and family life did not mix well, so he decided to stay in education. Fie spent several summers at the University of Pennsylvania in their graduate school of business and in 1966, interviewed with Jerry Crawford, provost at UNLV. Jerry and his family moved out to Las Vegas in June of 1967, leaving northern New York during a blizzard and arriving four days later in southern Nevada to find tulips blooming. They decided they liked Las Vegas, found a house right away, and settled in to their new life. Jerry taught marketing in the hotel college at the beginning of his career and for several years thereafter. Boyce Phillips took the rooms division and George Bussel taught foods. Their main focus was to attract students, and they worked on making it easier tor students to transfer from out of state. Jerry also thought it was extremely important that the hotel college be independent of university administration control. Dr. Vallen has 5 or 6 books published, including 3 textbooks that he continues to update, and an oral history of the hotel college completed shortly after he retired in 1989. Today he and his wife travel and enjoy twice yearly gatherings with their family.

Left to right: Sgt. Leroy Kelley, Jr., Photojournalist of the Year, and Col. William Strand, Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada. Site Name: Nellis Air Force Base (Nev.)

When Julie Brinkerhoff-Jacobs talks about the landscape architecture firm her parents, Barbara and Don Brinkerhoff, began in their home in 1958, she brightens and leans in. Since joining her parents’ firm in 1982, Julie gradually assumed responsibility for Lifescapes International’s sales, marketing, financial management, and strategic planning and serves as President and Chief Financial Officer. Here, Brinkerhoff-Jacobs talks of her life before joining and outside of Lifescapes: her family; her youth; her charity, HomeAid; her leadership activities; and her personal interests. Her focus, though, is Lifescapes and the Las Vegas people and the iconic projects that not only altered the ways that visitors perceive Southern Nevada but also changed the business of Lifescapes. “Not just in Las Vegas, but around the world people hire us because of what we've done in Las Vegas.” For Julie, one of the greatest joys of working alongside her parents was discovering them as peers—learning to know them as two people who “chose to live an incredibly artistic life together.” Her mother passed in 2014, but Julie and her father continue to work with and learn from each other.

Arrangement note: Series I. Demonstrations, Subseries I.A. Frontier Strike

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.