Oral history interview with Nicole Charlton conducted by Barbara Tabach on May 23, 2018 for the Remembering 1 October Oral History Project. In this interview, Charlton discusses her early life in Carlin, Nevada and relocating to Las Vegas, Nevada in 1990. Charlton is the Executive Secretary to the Clark County Coroner John Fudenberg and was among the first from the Coroner's office on the scene of the Route 91 shooting in Las Vegas.

Rachel Gibson was the granddaughter of Nevada pioneers. Her maternal grandparents, George Rammelkamp and Anna Dougherty, were among the earliest white residents of northern Nevada, settling first in Dayton and later Yerington. Her mother, Clara Angelina, and her two aunts, Elizabeth and Georgie, graduated from the University of Nevada at the turn of the century. Clara taught in Yerington for a number of years before marrying Chase Masterson, a dentist. Rachel was born in 1913 in Yerington. The eldest of three children, she continued the tradition of women’s learning and education that began with her mother’s generation. Her 1930 class was the first to graduate from Las Vegas High School, and soon after Rachel moved to California to attend college. Although her father had counseled her to study law, Rachel chose the field of economics. She received her Bachelor’s degree from the University of California at Berkeley, and worked in San Francisco for one year before returning to complete

Engineer Edward "Ed" Butera spent hours constructing models from the time he was a five-year-old boy in San Jose, California. Besides his interest in building and design, the young Butera also loved math and music—specifically the clarinet, at which he excelled, and which he still enjoys. After earning his Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering at San Jose State University he was hired by Ralph Joeckel as a consulting engineer for Trane, a heating and air conditioning company. Joeckel became a mentor and "second dad" to Butera after the company sent him to Las Vegas in 1972, and the two remain close to this day. In this interview, Butera shares how he engineered and designed power, water, sanitation, utilities, and heating and cooling systems on many Clark County high schools, hospitals, and data centers while considering such factors as the building's shape and its affect on the way wind forces act on its glass, windows, and doors. He talks of his casino work that began with the Stardust soon after he arrived in Las Vegas, and before his client list grew to include Tony Marnell, Steve Wynn, and MGM. Besides the hotels, he shares his experiences engineering the infrastructure for the Bellagio fountains, The Mirage volcano, Treasure Island's pirate show.

Mark Hall-Patton, administrator of Clark County Museums and since 2008 a frequent guest on the popular cable television show Pawn Stars, was born in 1954 in San Diego, California. His mother was a registered nurse and his father served in the United States Navy. From early childhood, Mark’s interest in history and museums shaped his path in life. After graduating high school in Santa Ana, California, he earned his Bachelor’s degree in history at nearby University of California, Irvine. Degree in hand, Mark worked for Bowers Museum in Santa Ana and founded the Anaheim Museum in 1984. He moved to Las Vegas, Nevada in 1993 to create the Howard W. Cannon Aviation Museum in McCarran International Airport. By 2008, Mark had become administrator over all Clark County museums. In this interview, he explains the various ways his involvement with the popular Pawn Stars program has turned “the museum guy” into a brand, introduced production companies to the value of filming in Las Vegas, increased Clark County museum visits and donations, and raised popular awareness of the academic fields of history and museum studies.

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.”

Minnesotan Don Laughlin landed far from the land of (more than) 10,000 lakes. His office 90 miles south of Las Vegas in the eponymous town of Laughlin commands an unimpeded view of a very different landscape from that of his youth. Here, where the Colorado River flows south through one of its narrowest channels, Laughlin arrived in about 1966 and purchased what would become the Riverside Resort Hotel and Casino. The endeavor was so successful that the then-settlement of 10 to 15 people at that tiny spot on the river grew to be an unincorporated town housing more than 7,000 people in 2010. Today, Laughlin the man continues to promote and support Laughlin the town via flood control projects and infrastructure development. In this interview, Laughlin sits amid the antique slot machines in his office and enjoys the view as he recalls his childhood on the family farm in southern Minnesota, and talks about leaving the farm in the late 1940s for nearby Owatonna to do watchmaking and watch repairing while simultaneously running a slot machine and pinball parlor. After visiting Las Vegas on vacation, he arrived permanently in 1952 and bartended at the Thunderbird Hotel until he bought his own bar and restaurant in Downtown Las Vegas, which he named Laughlin’s Made Right Café. After selling the café, he bought the 101 Club in North Las Vegas. He began searching for a casino for a casino to buy, seeking only those located on the border of a state that did not allow gambling. When he found the small hotel/casino on the Colorado River he purchased it. He talks of building an airstrip across the street and making daily trips to Las Vegas to buy groceries, beer, and toilet paper-essentially, everything one would need to run a hotel, restaurant, and casino-sometimes making three trips in one day. He continues to own and manage his hotel/casino at the age of 85, and he is in his office every day, all day, seven days a week. He gave up flying last year because he claims he’s too old to pilot his own aircraft. So is especially advantageous that the town that bears his name can now supply almost everything that he and the Riverside Resort Hotel and Casino need.

Brothers Steve and Bart Jones live and breathe Las Vegas history. Their grandparents, Burley and Arlie Jones, arrived in Las Vegas in the nineteen-teens; their father, Herb Jones; his sister, Florence Lee Jones Cahlan, and their uncle, Cliff Jones, helped form the legal, journalistic, and water policy framework that sustains Southern Nevada today. The Jones brothers build on that foundation through their custom home-building company, Merlin Construction. In this interview, they talk about living and growing up in Las Vegas, of attending John S. Park Elementary School, of hunting in the desert, of their family's commitment to cultural and racial diversity, and of accompanying their grandfather to his business at the Ranch Market in the Westside. They share their early work experiences lifeguarding and later, dealing, at local casinos as well as second-hand memories of the Kefauver trials through the tales told by their father and uncle. Steve describes mentor Audie Coker; he explains