Gertrude (n?e Rightman) Rudiak was born in 1915 in North Dakota to Russian immigrants. She grew up in Wisconsin until 1924. That was the year the family drove to California via the Yellowstone Trail, a dusty, undeveloped road marked by yellow stones. In Los Angeles, her father practiced chiropractic, a holistic approach to well-being for which there was little knowledge at the time. Gertrude earned her music degree at University of California at Berkeley; a decision that did not lead to a career. She then attended a business college and got a job as a social worker in Northern California. In 1941, she met and soon married George Rudiak. It was the advent of World War II. George enlisted in the service and was assigned to Las Vegas Gunnery School (Nellis Air Force Base.) Since he had a law degree from University of California at Berkeley and passed the Nevada Bar exam, he found supplemental employment with local attorneys. Las Vegas became the Rudiaks? permanent home where they raised their five children. In this interview Gertrude recalls the stories of coming to live in Las Vegas of the 1940?s: their phone number was 1-2-3; the neighborhood they lived in longest being Scotch 80s and being part of the secular and Jewish communities.
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On March 7, 1980, John Everett interviewed his father, cab driver Dale Everett (born January 29, 1924 in Danville, Illinois) at their family home in Las Vegas, Nevada. This interview covers past local historical data. During the interview, Mr. Everett discusses the weather, wildlife, and hunting. He also shares his views on prostitution and gambling in Las Vegas.
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Oral history interview with Benilda Long Somes conducted by Vincent Long on November 29, 2021 for Reflections: The Las Vegas Asian American and Pacific Islander Oral History Project. Benilda discusses her life in Magalang, Philippines and her immigration to Saipan, part of the Northern Mariana Islands, as a young woman. She talks about meeting her partner, airman Robert Long, the birth of their son, and Robert's untimely death in an air crash less than a year later. Benilda shares how she and her child immigrated to the United States to be with family and their move to Las Vegas, Nevada in 2009.
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The Junior League of Las Vegas' Records on the Morelli House Preservation Project contains the records of the Junior League of Las Vegas and the organization's efforts to preserve the Morelli House in downtown Las Vegas, Nevada from 1997 to 2017. Records are comprised of various internal and external planning documents, research files, advertising and publicity, correspondence, grant files, and photographs. Also included in this collection are scans of original planning documents and drawings used by Las Vegas, Nevada architect, Hugh E. Taylor, during construction of the Morelli House in the 1950s.
Archival Collection
The Las Vegas Age was not Las Vegas's first newspaper; that distinction belongs to the short-lived Las Vegas Times which started publishing on March 25, 1905. But only two weeks later, on April 7, C.W. Nicklin founded what was the not-yet-a-city's third paper, the Age. Nicklin edited and published the Age from the Overland Hotel each Saturday as a six-page independent weekly, at $2 per year. When the railroad finally arrived, and laid out and auctioned off the town lots, the Age and its two competitors, the Times and the Advance, boomed with the new town amid lively journalistic debate. The Age briefly triumphed when the Times and Advance collapsed, until new competition arrived, and Nicklin left the Age to his partner Charles C. Corkhill to give his attention to his other paper, the Beatty Bullfrog Miner. Corkhill struggled for two years as editor and publisher, as Las Vegas languished in post-boom depression, then persuaded local businessman Charles P. "Pop" Squires to buy the paper, only after repeatedly dropping the price. Thus began the long and fruitful newspaper career of Charles Squires, sole editor and proprietor of the Age for almost forty years. Even after he sold the paper in 1943, he continued as editor until its last owner, Frank Garside of the Review-Journal, suspended publication of the Age on November 30, 1947.
As the Las Vegas Age, under Squires' shrewd editorship, dominated its local competition as the leading local newspaper with the largest circulation, it also became the leading paper in Southern Nevada. When Las Vegas was founded it was a remote railroad establishment far from the seat of Lincoln County, in Pioche where the county's leading newspaper and the paper of legal record was the Lincoln County Record, which had been in business since 1871. With the rapid growth of Las Vegas and the decline of the Pioche mining district, the population of southern Nevada shifted to the south and the divisions between the southern and northern sections of Lincoln County, which covered the whole of southeastern Nevada, became politically heated. When the Age began publication in Las Vegas in 1905, with a larger circulation than the Record in Pioche, the county commissioners decided to award to the Age all county printing and job work. The editor of the Record, not surprisingly, was enraged and commenced a series of personal attacks on the Age and the residents of Las Vegas, likening the Age to a mushroom fungi of uncertain life, possessing a readership of "floaters, the shiftless and reckless class."
Squires became the city's foremost booster and the Age became his trumpet, fighting for the division of Lincoln County that created Clark County, or for the new dam (an original member of Nevada's Colorado River Commission, Squires was in charge of publicity), or promoting as a one-man Chamber of Commerce civic and community organizations and projects or the city's nascent tourism and resort industry. Thus, the Age became the Voice of Las Vegas, as well as the most respected "paper of record" for the city. Other newspapers came and went, some were political adversaries (Squires was a staunch conservative, pro-business Republican), and some became well-established. But the Age remained the essential Las Vegas newspaper, from its fiercely independent editorials, to its boosterism and its comprehensive reporting of the simple everyday doings of this boisterous and dynamic new city.
See full information about this title online through Nevada's participation in the National Digital Newspaper Project. All issues digitized online at: Chronicling America collection from the Library of Congress.
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From the Roosevelt Fitzgerald Professional Papers (MS-01082) -- Unpublished manuscripts file.
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