Geoconda Arguello Kline is the first female Secretary Treasurer of the Culinary Union Local 226. She got there the hard way. Beginning as a maid, then union organizer, director, ten years as President, and then the in 2012, she attained the highest office in the local. Arguello Kline left Nicaragua in 1979 as a political refugee and settled in Miami. The wages there did not allow her to take care of her family so she moved to Las Vegas following family members who had taken union jobs upon their arrival. She joined as well and worked as a guest room attendant for eight years. After becoming an organizer, she organized and walked picket lines whenever necessary. She is adamant that striking is the last thing that workers want to do. Her longest strike and the longest one Culinary Union history was the Frontier. The strike lasted for six years, four months, and ten days. Geoconda feels honored to be a member of the Culinary Union Local 226. ”It is a testament to our diverse and incredible members that has put me her. We undoubtedly have challenges ahead, but I’m confident that we will overcome by working as a union.” I’m sure that this quote by her in 2012 holds true today.

James “Jim” Bonaventure worked from thirteen years of age, entering the hotel casino industry at sixteen. The weekend buffet at the Hacienda was not his cup of tea but he hit his stride at his second job, the Horseshoe, and stayed there for seven and half years. But it was the work at the Union Hall that he loved. He stayed there for over thirty years developing the grievance department into today’s state-of-the-art entity that negotiates between employees and employers. Bonaventure served on the front lines of major disputes including strikes. In the beginning, the Las Vegas Police Department sided with hotel casino owners but over the years as personnel changed, they became more egalitarian in the treatment of strikers. The 1984 strike was one of the most contentious and up to that time, the largest in the history of the union. More than 17,000 workers walked off their jobs to protest conditions at 32 Hotel Resorts. Arrests were plentiful. As soon as the leadership reached the picket line, they were immediately handcuffed. The bitterness did not end when the 9-month strike concluded. Bonaventure remembers Bally’s putting up $100,000 to fight grievances. Still, the union won 85% of the cases. Then several downtown casinos reared their collective heads. The Golden Gate Hotel and Casino, Las Vegas Club, and the Plaza Hotel Casino were dubbed the Downtown Three. Strained relationships turned into a lawsuit where the Culinary Union was paid $40,000. Then in 1989 Fitzgerald’s Hotel Casino’s actions called for a picket line. Bonaventure and other leaders agreed on a Noise Night. Union member brought pot and pans and banged on them. The night ended with a lawsuit filed by police officers claiming hearing loss. From the bottom of his heart, Bonaventure is a Union Man. It has been his life’s work. He is most proud of and humbled by his work as a trustee of the Culinary Academy of Las Vegas. Anyone can train there for most positions in the hotel industry and be hired into the industry upon graduation. And it’s the place when U.S. citizenship classes are given to all those ready to apply. During this 2014 interview Jim Bonaventure was thinking about retirement or at least slowing down. I would not be surprised if he’s still at his Culinary Workers Union Local 226 desk handling more grievances than anyone else in his department.

Alan Feldman fell in love with Las Vegas because of the Siegfried & Roy show at the Frontier. After the opening illusion, Crystal Chamber, “I don’t remember breathing.” Feldman grew up in a home with a creative father who was a self-trained musicologist and expert on Paul Robeson. His mother worked as a bookkeeper so Alan was encouraged to be grounded and to soar. As a theater major at UCLA, he was encouraged to hone his Public Relations skills. That expertise brought him to Las Vegas and to Steve Wynn and to work toward a changing relationship with the Culinary Workers Union Local 226. His work here has been life changing; management and labor did not have to fight at the end of each contract. He speaks of the changed understanding in this way: “…we also wanted to make a better product, and in making a better product we needed the employees to step up. Because if you are going to put five million dollars into a restaurant in 1990 where prior to that the most anyone had ever spent was a million, if you were going to tell the world come to Las Vegas because the experience is better, then the experience needed to be better. Maybe this is the part of Steve that he does deserve credit for, although, again, I think it's more—no, he's not alone now and folks like Jim Murren have absolutely taken up this same kind of notion. The building doesn't deliver your bags. The building doesn't hand you the meal. The building doesn't take your order. So great, you've got a volcano and you've got fountains and you've got stunning architecture. Fantastic. But if you don't have a smile on your face when you're welcoming someone to the hotel, it sucks and the rest of it doesn't matter.”

Rosemary Christian, David Peinado, Dale Pryor, Virginia Velasquez, and Greg Venezia are among the elite of Las Vegas bartenders. The bars that they work and have worked span from one end of the Strip to the other; the original Aladdin, The Silver Slipper, O’Sheas, the Monte Carlo, Slots ‘A’ Fun, the Luxor, Caesars Palace, and the Rio. Their stories take us from family ownership to corporate. Families allowed all casino bars to be set up in an identical fashion, each type of glass and each liquor bottle was set in the same location all over town. A bartender could walk into a new location and start work without a moment’s hesitation. Corporate thinking changed that need for an outside bartender to work in random places. When women began in this lucrative field, tension occurred but lessened as men recognized that women could lug beer kegs with the best of them and they could easily calm down a drunkard using her womanly touch. The thread throughout this roundtable discussion sews together the exceptional lives of these five bartenders with their membership in UNITE HERE Bartenders Union Local 165. In conjunction with the Culinary Workers Union Local 226, insurance, wages, job satisfaction, uniforms, giving back to the Las Vegas community, and many other benefits occur, seemingly, without effort. “We are skilled craftsmen.” “We have security working for the union and health benefits and a pension. So it's something that's long term. It's longevity working for a union. You know you always have someone backing you.”

As International Counsel to UNITE HERE, Culinary Workers Union Local 226, Richard McCracken is a true union man whose law firm represents labor. He is an independent thinker who prefers direct action rather than the strategies and negotiations of the National Labor Relations Board. This interview covers union activity in several locations throughout the country but concentrates on Nevada with stories about Las Vegas and Reno labor connections that are profound. Once which organizing in Reno after the murder of two organizers, Richard was given a spiked drink. An older, more seasoned organizer instructed him to eat a cigarette forcing him to cough up everything in his system. Very early in his career, Richard learned that direct action was better and the strategies and techniques of the National Labor Relations Board. The Culinary Workers Union’s fight with the Showboat was one of unusual direct action. The union interfered directly in a matter of with the casino’s shareholders. Union work takes courage. McCracken admires that courage in D. Taylor, Hattie Canty, Jim Arnold, and many other local union leaders. His life is also an example of that same courage, determination, and legal savvy.

Nevadans Dixie Morrison and Neil A. Brundy met in 1959 at a rodeo in St. George, Utah. Born in St. George, Utah, Dixie was raised in Meadow Valley Wash, in Lincoln County, Nevada, on an 800-acre ranch, where she milked cows, barrel-raced, and attend high school via correspondence. Neil lived in Caliente until he was four, when his parents bought ten acres near Rancho Road (US 95) and moved to Las Vegas. Neil attended Fifth Street School, Las Vegas High School, and graduated from Rancho High School’s first graduating class in 1957. The couple married in 1964 in the Little Church of the Flowers and proudly parented six sons. In this interview, the Brundys describe life in rural Nevada and in Las Vegas in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s; work on the railroads; barrel-racing; and rodeos. As members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, they also talk about their family history work. Their memories evoke the streetscapes of pre- and postwar Las Vegas, its outskirts and downtown; race- and class-based tensions in the schools; the glamour of Las Vegas casinos when they were owned and operated by the mob; and the country music stars who performed downtown. Now residents of Southern Utah, Dixie and Neil come to Las Vegas to hear hardcore rock. Their three youngest sons formed the hardcore rock band, Folsom. When Folsom plays locally the proud parents attend a performance and enjoy family time with their band member sons and the sons and their families who live locally.

Nancy Craft (née Pracejus) was born on August 30, 1937 in North Weymouth, Massachusetts. Her mother, Grace Franklin (née Farquhar) was a nursery school specialist and her father, Herbert Pracejus, was an engineer. She lived in Massachusetts for the first eight years of her life until her father’s health caused them to move to Las Vegas, Nevada on July 26, 1946. She attended John S. Park Elementary School and Las Vegas High School. In 1953, Craft successfully auditioned for the Rhytmettes and performed with the dance troupe until she graduated in 1955. After high school, she married her first husband and worked in a number of different offices. She married Norman Craft, a coach and athletic director for the Clark County School District, on May 31, 1964. Craft worked for Green Valley High School for a number of years before taking some time to raise her children. She chose to return to work in 1990 as a library aide. She retired in 2001.