On February 24, 1975, Kathleen Kasmir interviewed Marion Brooks (born 1913 in Santa Ana, California) about his life in Southern Nevada and his work as a mining engineer. Brooks first talks about his background before talking extensively about his early work in mining. Brooks also mentions some of the professional mining societies of which he was a part, and the two then move on to discuss gambling, recreational activities, and the atomic testing. Other topics covered during the interview include the price of groceries and food, the El Rancho Vegas, social changes, population growth, and environmental changes. The end of the interview then shifts back to Brooks’ work in mining at Blue Diamond and then a discussion on the possible locations of three lost mines.

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.

Folder of materials from the Mabel Hoggard Papers (MS-00565) -- Personal papers file. This file contains religious booklets, programs, newspaper clippings, and other documents. Represented in the materials are records from: Griffith United Methodist Church, Church Women United of Greater Las Vegas, Zion Methodist Church, Clark County Protestant Ministerial Association, and Desert Southwest Conference of the United Methodist Church.