Folder from the Roosevelt Fitzgerald Professional Papers (MS-01082) -- Personal and professional papers file.

Oral history interview with Helen Yu conducted by Andrew Yu on December 1, 2021 for Reflections: The Las Vegas Asian American and Pacific Islander Oral History Project. Helen Yu discusses her upbringing in Seoul, South Korea, her grandfather's immigration to the United States in the late 1970s, and her family's decision to follow him to Portland, Oregon in 1984. She shares her family's history and their experiences during the Korean War, including what life was like both in North and South Korea at that time. Helen Yu discusses her undergraduate education at the University of Oregon studying graphic design and her graduate education at Ewha Womans University College of Art and Design in South Korea. She shares her thoughts having both a Korean American and Asian American identity, her marriage and two wedding ceremonies to her Korean husband, and her family's move to Las Vegas, Nevada in 2001. Helen Yu concludes with a discussion of her event planning work which led to her current role as the Operations Manager at the Emerald at Queensridge in Las Vegas.

With so much emphasis put on the growth of Las Vegas and Henderson over the past thirty years, we often forget about the development of the others cities in the Valley. Expansive growth in Southern Nevada in the mid-twentieth century shows the region being one of the last bastions of agricultural existence, and Tim Hafen has been a major player in the development of the city of Pahrump. Born in St. George, Utah, and raised in Mesquite, Nevada, he graduated from Virgin Valley High School and attended Dixie College. Before the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) was called as such, his father introduced him to the working of the land through dairy and hay farming, where a young Tim decided he would never milk a cow again. His rejection of cow milking didn’t deter him from following the influence of his father after he married his wife, Eleanor, in 1951 and moved to Pahrump to become a cotton farmer. At that time, there were only 150 people in the area with a third of the population being from the Paiute tribe. Once the city was incorporated in 1964, he founded the Pahrump Valley Utility Company to get electricity to the area along with Amargosa Valley. Top crops at the time included cotton, alfalfa as well as wheat that were picked by Mexican farm laborers used under a yearlong contract with the Bracero program. vi In this interview, Hafen shares how he began his career in politics from getting called for grand jury in 1963. From 1966–1974, he was a member of the legislature, where he served two terms in the Old Capital building and held various positions such as Chairman of the State Board of Agriculture for twelve years and President of the Nevada Farm Bureau. He was speaker pro tem and Chairman of the taxation committee and decided to call it quits because of the Nixon scandal. Between 1974 and 1975 Hafen ended his political career, which he did before brothels began to come to the area later in the decade. In 1982, in the wake of the gasoline crisis, Hafen, like other Pahrump cotton farmers, could not afford to continue farming; he decided to shift from farming to development. His first development done was Cottonwoods at Hafen Ranch, which was on 160 acres of alluvial fan, non-farmable land; in 2000 he opened his second subdivision, Artesia at Hafen Ranch.