The Champo family, Jacinta and Manuel Champo and their daughter Stella came from Italy to Las Vegas in 1912. They lived in a room at the Union Hotel, which was located at Main and Bridger. In 1917, the Champo family bought a small ranch located about three miles south of what is Henderson today. Manuel grew fruits and vegetables at the ranch and sold them in town door to door. Stella began her education at Las Vegas Grammar School at Fourth and Bridger in 1918 and started babysitting for many of the local women when she was only ten years old. Jacinta’s death in 1927 was hard on both Stella and Manuel. Stella decided not to finish her education. Maude Frazier, who was the principal at the High School, tried to persuade Stella to stay at school. However, Stella had no more interest in school and at eighteen years old she started her career as a waitress. Her first job was at a small Italian restaurant at the Union Hotel where she learned the business. She worked as a waitress and cashier and when P.O. Silvagni opened the Apache Hotel at Second and Fremont she went to work there. Stella continued to work at the Apache until she moved to Los Angeles where she worked as a waitress for eighteen years. Stella had married John Iaconis in 1953 and they moved back to Las Vegas. Both John and Stella went to work at the Sahara Hotel. Stella was a showroom waitress and John was a tailor with his own valet shop in the Sahara Hotel. Stella worked in a showroom at Sahara for three years because it was physically demanding work. Stella went to work at Larry’s where she stayed for twenty years. Stella continued to live in Las Vegas until her death on January 18, 1998 . She was happily retired and always remembered the past and the lessons she learned from her hard work. Stella was a very optimistic and totally self-reliant woman.

For the first 19 years of her life, Mary Martell Shaw called Central America home. Then thanks to misrouted luggage, she met the love of her life Rollin H. Shaw, a civil engineer, at a time in when his atomic energy career was taking off. In October 1943, they married in Costa Rica and for the next two decades traversed the country: Hawaii to California to Panama—wherever a project required Ronnie's engineering skills. Mary supported her husband every step of the way, with every new location. As a traditional homemaker of the era, she became adept at raising their four kids while packing boxes, enrolling them in school and setting up a warm home wherever they landed. The move to Las Vegas in September 1964, however, left her a bit challenged: there was a shortage of adequate housing, a concern for where to send her two daughters and two sons to school, and the feeling that they wouldn't be here long. Years later, Mary and Ronnie would retire to the city where their roots ran deepest, Las Vegas. With great wit, Mary recalls the long absences demanded by Ronnie's work with the Atomic Energy Commission. She also tells stories of the great fun they and their fellow Nevada Test Site employees had at parties, of her learning to paint with watercolors, and the pride she has of all her children's successes based on their education in Las Vegas.

Lee Cagely, an interior designer and professor who designed some of the most iconic hotels in Las Vegas, Nevada, was born in the Panama Canal Zone on January 31, 1951. His father Leo was a civil engineer for the Panama Canal Company and his mother Charlotte worked as a receptionist. After his father left his job in Panama, Lee spent his childhood in Dallas, Texas; Tulsa, Oklahoma; and Des Moines, Iowa. He started to attend Rice University for architecture, but he chose to leave before completing his degree. He returned to college a few years later and graduated from Iowa State University with a degree in interior design in 1975. While his first California jobs were in restaurant design, he quickly moved on to airports and hotels and moved to Las Vegas in 1990 after associating with Marnell Architecture. Cagley is known for his designs in the Rio All-Suite Hotel and Casino, Ceasars Palace Atlantic City, the Mirage, and the Bellagio Resort & Casino. He is currently Chair of the Iowa State University College of Design and is principal designer for Lee Cagely Design. Here, Cagley explains the importance of keeping the various pieces of the infrastructure of a resort—including landscape architecture, architecture, interior design, all kinds of HVAC [heating, ventilation and air conditioning] concerns, housekeeping, food service, maintenance, etc.-invisible in order to maximize the visitor experience. At the same time he illustrates through several examples how resort design does not happen in a vacuum-it is instead part of a complex team that works together to create the whole. He also describes the challenges the Las Vegas resort industry finds in creating the very best visitor experience for a broad range of groups-from Millennials to their Boomer grandparents and all the generations in between.

Twentieth-century visitors to the Las Vegas Sands Hotel experienced the masonry work of Anthony A. Marnell, who removed his family from Riverside, California, to North Las Vegas in 1952 in order to build that structure. When he formed his own masonry company in 1958, he taught his namesake nine-year-old son the skills of a mason and the value of honest work. The younger Marnell learned all he could about construction from his father and completed his education by graduating USC School of Architecture in 1972, serving his apprenticeship, and becoming licensed in 1973. After designing McCarran Airport's A and B Gates, he teamed up with Lud Corrao in 1974 to form Marnell Corrao Associates, the first design-build firm in Southern Nevada. Marnell Corrao built many of Southern Nevada's most iconic hotel-casinos including the California Hotel, Maxim Hotel, and Sam's Town and Steve Wynn and Treasure Island, The Mirage, Bellagio, and New York New York as well as the Rio All-Suite Hotel and Casino and the M Resort Spa Casino. In this interview, the Riverside native speaks to the importance of teaching future generations about the value of work, of earning the sense of accomplishment, and of fueling one's inner spirit. His philosophy built a work environment that encouraged employee longevity from the beginning in 1974 (he is employee number one, and his assistant is employee number two). He talks of the American Institute of Architects (AIA), of entrepreneurial gamesmanship, and of casino greats Bill Boyd, Jay Sarno, Cliff Perlman, Kirk Kerkorian, and Steve Wynn. He describes the evolution of Las Vegas resorts from prioritizing casino games to fine dining to night clubs and entertainment. He credits his own Rio staff tradition of serving Chef's Table to the employees and the Rio's award-winning chef, Jean-Louis Palladin, for beginning the Las Vegas food renaissance in the late 1990s that rebranded Las Vegas as a Mecca for celebrity chefs. The nine-year-old who worked part time in his father's masonry business learned his lessons well, much to the benefit of Southern Nevada's growing skyline, its residents' growing waistlines, and its businesses' growing bottom lines.

Las Vegas tourists who stop to admire the Mirage volcano, the Bellagio conservatory, the Wynn Las Vegas mountain, the Encore gardens, and the iconic Welcome to Las Vegas sign’s surroundings on the Las Vegas Strip likely do not realize that in each case they have sampled a unique landscape environment conceived by Don Brinkerhoff of Lifescapes International, Newport Beach, California. It is for producing work of this caliber that in 2016 the American Gaming Association selected Brinkerhoff to be the first designer inducted into the Gaming Hall of Fame. In this interview, the Los Angeles native and son of a working-class father and an artist/schoolteacher mother, explains how he spent his youth in an owner-built house in the modest suburb of El Monte, where he tended the family truck garden. Despite earning his degree in ornamental horticulture at California Polytechnic (Cal Poly), Don felt unschooled in the arts because the small school did not teach them. To fill that educational gap, Don took his wife and four children to Europe for two years, where he affiliated with the American Academy in Rome and worked for TAC (The Architects' Collaborative) in Greece among other adventures. The family spent another six months in Hawaii, where the children attended school and Don worked with a local landscape architect. The family’s unusual work, school, and travel experience more than completed Don’s arts education and shaped his world view and that of his daughter Julie in countless ways that came to silently benefit the Las Vegas built environment. Upon returning to California in 1968, Brinkerhoff opened his Orange County office, and Lifescapes International became the “go-to” firm to create water features for condominium projects. This work led to his first hotel-casino project at a Sun City golf course condominium project in South Africa, which in turn led to a telephone call from architect Joel Bergman inviting him to become one of three candidate landscape architects to work with Steve Wynn on what would become The Mirage hotel-casino in Las Vegas. Here, Brinkerhoff speaks to his design philosophy as ninety percent problem-solving and ten percent inspiration even as he describes organizing the signature tree for The Mirage, building the Mirage volcano, taking the idea for Bellagio’s conservatory from the DuPont family’s Longwood Gardens, of creating faux banyans in the Mirage atrium, of creating the model for the Las Vegas Strip median, and of building the mountain on Las Vegas Boulevard in front of Wynn Las Vegas to conceal the Cloud at the Fashion Show Mall. While the fortunes of Lifescapes International continue to grow and succeed worldwide, both Don and Julie credit Steve Wynn and their Las Vegas work: “Las Vegas has totally changed our lives.”

Ron Lurie is a product of Las Vegas. Ron Lurie knows Las Vegas. The Los Angeles native arrived in Las Vegas with his parents when he was twelve years old; his father opened Market Town next to White Cross Drug Store. Lurie graduated from Las Vegas High School in 1958 and attended Nevada Southern, where he played baseball and basketball before joining the United States Army Reserves. Returning from training, he began working at a new store, Fantastic Fair. Soon the owner, builder Lloyd Whaley, asked him to manage a new Fantastic Fair. At 24 years of age, he managed the entire Fantastic Fair store, which later became Wonder World. Over time, Lurie would manage three of the four Wonder World stores. In this interview, the former mayor of the City of Las Vegas and former Las Vegas City Council member talks about running for City council because he wanted more parks and ball fields downtown and about his political career, which coincided with the years of explosive growth in the 1970s and 1980s. The current vice president and general manager of Arizona Charlie's also v discusses his careers in the grocery business and in gaming; he speaks to giving back to the community and the changing demography of the area surrounding Arizona Charlie's; he talks of the ways Steve Wynn pioneered an aura of glamour that helped to upgrade Downtown Las Vegas; he recalls the challenges of public safety, regional transportation, flood control, and the Monorail and of civic dreams of a magnetic levitation train that would connect Downtown Las Vegas to Cashman Field. He remembers his parents and his wife; he talks about his children, and he shares vignettes of, among many others, Ernie Becker IV, Bill Briare, Al Levy, Steve Miller, and Bob Stupak. Throughout, Mayor Lurie especially beams when he talks about his family, his friends, his work, Las Vegas, the Boys and Girls Clubs, and baseball. This man loves baseball.