On March 3, 1980, Frank Fusco interviewed Elissa Miller (born October 29th, 1935 in San Francisco, California) at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. In this interview, Mrs. Miller talks about her life in Virginia City and Reno, Nevada. She discusses the growth in Reno and the problems that came from that. She also speaks about living life in Virginia City, a much smaller town in Nevada. She talks about the people who live and work there, as well as some of the things the town is known for, such as the International Camel and Ostrich Races that are held annually.

Jillian Hrushowy arrived in Las Vegas in 1959 as part of a company hired to appear at the El Rancho Vegas Hotel in a production called La Nouvelle Eve. She has remained here (other than three short-term contracts in Reno, Nevada) until present day. She is now the production manager for Legends in Concert at the Imperial Palace Hotel. She was an only child, born in Rhodesia to English parents and raised in a home with servants and tutors. Her mother exposed her to the arts at an early age. Jillian took dancing lessons from the age of three years until she began dancing professionally. When she was fifteen years old, both parents agreed it was time for her to leave Rhodesia and finish her education in England. Living alone was difficult and lonely, but it afforded her a wealth of opportunities otherwise unavailable. She worked as a dancer in small, local productions while still in high school. When only eighteen, she got a job dancing in La Nouvelle Eve in Paris which eventually came to Las Vegas. This interview focuses on the years from Jillian’s arrival in 1959 until she retired from dancing in 1979. It follows her transitions from dancer, to principal dancer to production manager. [The first twenty minutes of the tape is warped and the text is garbled. The transcriber has lightly edited the transcript.]

D. Taylor knew from the time he graduated Georgetown University he wanted to make his career in the labor movement. He credits his Virginia-born mother as an early mentor; she was at once “nice,” “tough,” “genteel,” and “liberal,” and she instilled these values in her son. As a new college grad, Taylor headed west to Lake Tahoe, where he was hired in 1981 by the Culinary Union to organize workers and oversee an eleven-and-a-half-month strike. Culinary then sent him to organize Las Vegas in 1984, a few years after Ronald Reagan crushed the 1981 Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization strike and only months after the Amalgamated Transit Union strike against Greyhound went down in defeat. In this interview, Taylor recalls that in 1984, most Las Vegas casinos were no longer owned by individuals and families but by multinational corporations that refused to negotiate improved health insurance coverage for their workers. Taylor led a citywide strike that ultimately cost the union six casinos and about eight thousand members. In 1987, Culinary sent him back to Las Vegas, where he has remained. He tells the history of the union in Las Vegas and its leadership, especially crediting Al Bramlet in the 1970s for recruiting a diverse workforce and promoting casino hiring through the union. In 1987 Taylor changed the union rep structure to give a larger voice to Las Vegas’s racially diverse workforce and began recruiting potential leaders of color (like Hattie Canty)—thus, he followed Bramlet’s lead but pushed it further to create a truly bottom-up organization. The husband and father is especially proud of the various programs Culinary Workers Union Local 226 has implemented to improve the lives of Las Vegas union workers and their families but sees widening gaps in the city between those who have great wealth and those who do not. To Taylor, his work is “always about the members. They endure so much. They sacrifice so much.”