Gordon Smith was born November 25, 1943 in Tropic, Utah. His family moved to Hawthorne, Nevada, in 1947. In 1955 he and his family moved to Las Vegas, Nevada. Smith went to Rancho High School. After high school, he went to barbering college and then was drafted and was a medic in the United States Army taking care of soldiers who had been critically wounded in the Vietnam War. After he got out of the Army, Smith opened a McDonalds and then worked full time as a barber.
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Jerry Engel was born in 1930 in New Jersey and spent most of his early life in Long Beach, New York until the family moved westward to Los Angeles in 1945. Jerry is a retired Certified Public Accountant and loves to talk about the history of Las Vegas that he observed since arriving in 1953. That was the year that he moved to Las Vegas to join his older brothers, Morris and Phil, in their accounting firm. Their major client at the time was Desert Inn.
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Mary Martell Shaw called Central America home for the first 19 years of her life. Because of misrouted luggage, she met her husband, Rollin H. Shaw, a civil engineer, at a time in when his atomic energy career was taking off. In October of 1943, they married in Costa Rica and for the next two decades traveled the country: Hawaii to California to Panama—wherever a project required Ronnie’s engineering skills. Shaw supported her husband every step of the way, with every new location.
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Patsy Huff Rosenberry was born October 03, 1939 in Goergia. She married her husband, Chuck, in the spring of 1972. In the early summer of 1972, the Rosenberrys moved from Hattiesburg, Mississippi to Las Vegas, Nevada. From 1978 to 1999, Rosenberry worked with a growing cardiovascular group.
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Sydney Wickliffe was born July 27, 1944 in Long Beach, California. She came to Nevada in October of 1952. Wickliffe was a retired certified public accountant.
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Gwendolyn K. Walker was born August 11, 1956 in Houston, Texas. She arrived in North Las Vegas, Nevada in 1962 as a five-year-old with her parents, two brothers, and her cousins. The Walker family at first moved to a rented house on D Street, and she attended Kit Carson Elementary School for first grade. Her mother enrolled in nursing school, so she sent Walker back to Delhi, Louisiana, to be raised by her grandmother. In Delhi, she picked cotton with her aunt while she was in the second grade.
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Dorothy Pitzer was born September 9, 1928 in Chicago, Illinois and was raised in small Illinois towns. She met her future husband, Doug, when they went to rival high schools. She began nurses training in Dixon, Illinois, and immediately after her 1950 graduation, Pitzer and Doug married. The couple moved to Las Vegas, Nevada in July 1954, when Doug was transferred to Nellis Air Force Base. Pitzer worked as a nurse at Las Vegas Hospital and Clinic 1954-1957 and later worked for a private obstetrics practice.
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Linda Falba McSweeney was born January 3, 1945 in Miami, Florida. Her family moved to Las Vegas, Nevada in 1950 and lived in the Huntridge area of town. She and her two siblings attended St. Joseph’s Catholic School, St. Anne’s School, and Bishop Gorman High School. They marched in the city’s Helldorado Parades, and she was a Bishop Gorman High School cheerleader. McSweeney was a retired speech pathologist.
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Patricia Ann Ross was born November 16, 1943 and arrived in Las Vegas, Nevada as an infant with her parents and older brothers in 1944. She was raised in the Huntridge area, where she and her brothers attended John S. Park Elementary School and Las Vegas High School. Ross was active in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from her childhood. She married her high school sweetheart, and became a young mother to two children.
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Edward Butera was born April 08, 1949 in San Jose, California. He would spend hours constructing home models from the time he was a five-year-old boy. Butera also loved math and music—specifically the clarinet. 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
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