The following interview is with Mr. J. A. Tiberti, a resident of Las Vegas since 1941.  Mr. Tiberti is CEO of J. A. Tiberti Construction Co.  He joined the Rotary Club of Las Vegas in 1948 and served on the club Board of Directors from 1973-75 and 1995-97.  He is a Paul Harris Fellow.

This is Claytee White and I’m with Mr. J. A. Tiberti.   Today is August 17, 2000 and we are in his office on Industrial Road in Las Vegas.  Good morning.  How are you doing today?

Good.  Can’t complain with the weather the way it is.  It’s not too bad.

That’s true.  First, we’re just going to start talking about your family.  I just want you to tell me about your mother and father, sisters and brothers; their names, where you grew up.

My mother and father were both born in Italy and, today’s time, they were born about one hour apart in Italy.   They met in the territory of New Mexico and were married in the city of, I can’t remember exactly, but they were married in northern New Mexico in a mining camp.  My father originally came over, was brought over as a miner, a coal miner and my mother came later with her family.  First of all, my mother came with her family and they went to Colorado to a mining camp.  They were in the mining camp that is now a ski resort.  He was a coal miner, but they were going to have their third child and the doctor said she couldn’t make it, she was going to probably pass away.  So, they decided to go back to Italy if that was the truth.  He didn’t want to be over here without a mother to the kids.  So, they did and she did pass away in childbirth and the child died.  My mother was about 11 years old at that time and went to work for different people in their houses and so forth.  When she was 18, she and another friend came over from Italy, alone.   Took 22 days on the boat and then on a train to Colorado and then on a wagon.  That’s how they finally got to their destination in Colorado.

A male friend or female?

Female friend, two women.  My sister, oldest sister, Catherine was born in Wooten, Colorado which is not far from where they were in New Mexico and my second sister was born in Wooten, Colorado.  Her name was Maria Tiberti.  She just passed away in April, she was 87 years old.  Third sister was born in Wooten, Colorado.  Her name was Margaret, called her Marge and then my brother, Joe was born in Morley, Colorado which was not too far away, about 14 miles away, another coal mining camp.   Then, my brother Jim was born there and I was born there.  I had a sister Rosina Peterson, who lived there and was born and raised there.  Then we had two children that passed away, infants.  There were nine in our family.  

What are your mother and father’s names?

My father’s name was Andrew, or Andrea they called him and my mother’s name was Alissa.

Why the attraction to Colorado?  Why was your mother, your mother came there by herself and she went to Colorado.  Why Colorado?

Well, I think her friend had some friends there.  They had a landing place, so to speak.

So, now you grew up in Colorado?

The name of the town was Morley.

Give me your first name.  

Jelindo.

Is that a family name?

Not that I’m aware of.  My middle name is Angelo.  That’s why I go by J.  A.

Tell me a little bit about your childhood, growing up in the mining town.

Well, it was a great place to grow up because all the kids in the mining camp came from similar parents, what I call foreign parents.  In fact, we had a group of Slavs, we had a group of Italians, we had some Mexicans, we had one black person who had been a slave.

Was he a miner?

He was retired.  He had been a miner, but now retired and living there.  Old man Mote, they called him.

Did he have a family?

He had no family, but everybody loved him.  He was great.  All the kids would stop and visit with him.  He like to visit with the kids.  He was the only [Black]  person in the mining camp.   Then we had the manager of the camp and someone else, they were English, Irish descent and we called them the Americans.  If you go down by the American’s house  you’ll find the so and so and so.

What kind of minerals and ores did you mine?

Coal, only coal.  It was a coal mining area in Colorado.  Played lots of baseball and lots of games in town.  We lived in the mountains.  This was a mountain country, so we did a lot of mountain climbing and going into the mountains.  We had a little stream that came into the camp and we’d dam that up every summer and make a swimming pool.   I had a picture of the camp but I took it up to the mountains.

Do you have a home in the mountains?

Yes, now we do, Mammoth Creek in Southern Utah.  It’s up in the mountains.  It’s got a nice stream in front of it.   Now that I have 21 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren,  Fourth of July we had 17 people up there.

That’s wonderful.  Tell me about growing up in a mining camp, how did you go to school?

We had the local schools up through the eighth grade in the camp.  In fact, one of the schools was a Sears and Roebuck School.  It was delivered by Sears and Roebuck.  They bought it from Sears and Roebuck and they delivered it and put it up.  Even then, can you imagine that?

So, the building was purchased from Sears and Roebuck?

Yes, an additional building.  We had one building and it was the second building.  It was right across the street from our house.  High school was in Trinidad, Colorado which was a city of about 11 thousand people.  That’s where all the various mining communities sent their kids.  We had a beautiful high school.  In fact, as nice as anything we have here, even then.  It had an indoor swimming pool.  It had [a] gymnasium with a running track, elevated running track inside the gymnasium.  It had a theater with nice leather seats.  It had a concrete stadium seating area for football.   The reason they had all of this, the mining camp companies from different mines around, all contributed to that because they sent all the kids to Trinidad to high school.

In your camp, was it kindergarten through eighth grade?

Yes.  Kindergarten was primarily to teach kids to speak English.

What year were you born?

I was born in 1919.

So, you went to high school.   How did you get back and forth?

School bus.

How far was it?

Eight miles.

So, it was really close.  Most of the kids came from about that distance?

I’d say, yes, roughly eight to ten miles.

What kind of competition could you have in sports?  Were there other high schools around that you could play and compete against?

Yes, they did, but they were cities as much as 40 to 50 miles away.  My brother was captain of the football team.

Did you play football as well?

No.

What did you play?

I didn’t play anything.  I think this is kind of interesting.  You know, the big beef about the players at the University, they have to be so careful that somebody doesn’t loan them their car, let them take their car, all these things.  My brother, this is high school, captain of the team, but he lived in the mining camp and the bus left at five o’clock and that’s when they were practicing so he couldn’t stay to practice because he didn’t have a car to run back and forth.  So the Cadillac dealer let him have a car to drive back and forth to school.  Isn’t that something?

He’d be thrown off the team today.

Today, they’d put him in jail.

How long did you live there?  Did you finish high school?

No, two years.  Second year of high school we moved to Detroit.

Why?

The reason was that the recession, this was 1936, 1937 and the mines were closing down and my two sisters, the older sisters, one was married and they went to Detroit to work.   He worked in the automobile factories.  My other sister went there to get a job.  She became a nurse for the city of Detroit, Maria.  So, she was a nurse and they invited the family to go to Detroit.  You know, talking about Okies, when we went to Detroit, we had an old Willys Knight, big square, boxy car with wooden wheels.  He built a platform and we carried a piano from Colorado to Detroit.

Before I start talking about your life in Detroit, tell me about the life for women in a mining camp.  What would your mother do?

All strictly for the family and then, of course, she also took in boarders.  Believe that?  Nine kids and she took in boarders besides.  What she did was cooked and cleaned and so forth. 

Her daughters would help her with the chores?

Absolutely.  Very much so.

Did young men work in the mines?

They did work in the mines, but our father said, my children will not work in the mines because he was determined that they do something else.  In fact, he died at 65 with what they call ‘black lung.’  The mining camp was an interesting place because everybody knew everybody and they had a YMCA there.  Again, the mining company produced the YMCA and they had basketball courts and they had plays.  I remember the first sound movie I went to was at the YMCA.

Do you remember what it was?

No, but I remember that it was a cowboy movie because we talked so much about the horses going through the water.

How large was it?  What was the population?

About 800, 600 to 800.

Everybody knew everybody?

Yes.  Quite an interesting place to live and I tell people about kids being out of hand.  We used to play ball games.  Five o’clock the company blew their whistle to indicate five o’clock and that was some shift or something.  Everybody put down their bat.  You could be up to bat and it was over with.  Everybody went home because they ate between five and six o’clock and that’s how well trained the children were at that time.  And it wasn’t just one family, all of them did the same thing because when that whistle blew the game was over.

Tell me what the housing was like.

We had good housing, comparatively because the company had built it.  It was a company town and they were  concrete block houses and there were four rooms, two and two.  If you had a big family, we had one that had six, but they were still, no halls, you went from one room to the next to the next.  We didn’t have indoor plumbing.  We had privies on the outside maintained by the company.  We had what they called the ‘honey-dippers’ that came twice a year to clean them out.  That’s what they were called.

How much did your father earn for working in the mines at that time?

You know, I can’t recall but he was one of the better paid men because he was what they called the ‘fire boss.’  He went in at two o’clock in the morning, ahead of all the other crews and he had a fire lamp and they would check for gas.  If there was gas in there they would hold off because miners couldn’t work in it.  They actually searched the miners, made them change their clothes and everything, so that they could not carry a match or anything flammable in it because it was a very gaseous mine.   Some of the others weren’t, but this one was.  

That was pretty dangerous.   How did your mother feel about that?

Well, the whole camp felt [strongly] because the minute somebody said or somebody heard an explosion or something, the whole camp went down to the mining company offices to see who it was and what happened and how serious it was going to be.  It all concentrated around the mine.  The mine had one building, [a] nice big building, that had a company store.  People in the camp bought at the company store.  It was a general store.  You could buy clothing and you could get your mail there.  They had a post office and they had a butcher shop.  I was telling somebody about lard the other day and they said, lard, what’s lard?  I said, you don’t know what lard is?  Never heard of lard.

I know what it is.  Were they paid with cash?

Absolutely, paid with cash.  I don’t remember [how much]  it was, but he was one of the better paid because he was considered a fire boss and it was a little more dangerous because he went in first.

Did they have accounts at the general store or did they just go in and pay in cash?

They had accounts, but you could pay in cash also.  Either one.

Tell me about church life?

Church.  We had a church that was built on the hill and it was a Catholic church.  I don’t know that the others had church.  They may have had a church, but where they had it I don’t know, but Catholic’s had their own church.  The priest came up from Trinidad,  eight miles, to serve mass.  

Just once a week?

Yes, once a week, on Sunday.  

You don’t remember everybody going to the Catholic church, so there must have, probably, been other churches?

Oh, yes, there were protestant churches, but they were not churches per se.  They had them either at the YMCA or some public building like that.  They didn’t have their own church.

Thank you for that.  That’s a great look at a mining town.  I’ve never talked to anyone whose grown up in a mining town.  How old were you when you and the family moved to Detroit?

I skipped the eighth grade and went from seventh grade to high school because I had the shine on a little Mexican girl and she was a year ahead of me.  She was going to be going to high school and I was going to be left in the mining camp, so I hustled and got organized and took some courses in the summer and I skipped the eighth grade and went to high school.

Motivation is something, isn’t it?

Isn’t it though?  I think, two years later they moved away.

You were moving away about two years later as well.

That’s right.

So, you went to Detroit.  What were the major differences that you remembered or that you realized immediately.

First of all, people and traffic and no open spaces.  I was very, very unhappy about moving to Detroit as a young boy.  I just didn’t like any part of Detroit because it was so busy.  You waited so long for busses.  It just didn’t have the same things as being in a mining camp.  Going to a big city, I just didn’t like it at all, but I got along all right.  Later, my father bought a gas station while I was still in high school and my brother Jim and I worked in the gas station with my dad.  

So, you worked in the gas station during high school?

Yes.  

What was the difference in high school in Detroit and high school in Trinidad?

The difference was that it was not nearly as nice a school as the one we had in Trinidad or nearly as friendly.  Of course, I knew so many people.  When I went to the city, I was lost, a complete lost soul.  But, I got along all right.

What subjects did you excel in?

I was always good in math until I took trigonometry, or was it calculus, in college.  I was an A student until I hit that and I couldn’t understand it worth a darn.  The professor said, it you promise not to take any more math, I’ll give you a D, otherwise, I’m going to flunk you.  I said give me the D and I’m through.

What was your major in college?

Engineering.  I took civil engineering.  I knew that I wanted to [work] on the outside.  I didn’t want to be tied in an office.  Under other circumstances, I thought maybe I would be a forest ranger and that didn’t work out.  I thought maybe I’d be a carpenter or be outside, but then my sister Maria, the nurse, said, if you want to go to college, I’ll help you a little bit and I said O.  K.  Between what little my folks could give me and what my sister gave me and I got a job in college, Kalamazoo College, which is not too far from Detroit, I did all right.  I have a book with every penny I spent.  If I went to church and gave them a dime I put it in the book.  

Why did you start doing that?

I don’t know.  Maybe to see what it was going to cost and how much I would have to have each year.  I sent my laundry home to my mother in Detroit from Kalamazoo.  They had little boxes and they called them laundry boxes and they were kind of a plastic, but they weren’t plastic, like pressed paper.  It had a card on it and you could turn the card over and it had a return address.  I’d send it to my mother, she’d do the laundry, I’d sent it for twenty-five cents, she’d do the laundry, turn the card over and have my address on it and it would have my address on it.  So, for fifty cents, I got my laundry done.

That’s good.  So, you finished college in Kalamazoo and then…

I did not finish college.  I went for two years in Kalamazoo and then we moved to California.

The whole family moved to California?

Eventually, yes.

Did Maria move to California?

Well, she came a little bit later, but she soon came.

So, how many children actually went to California with your parents?

Well, my brother was already there because he was out of high school, my brother Joe was already out of high school and he was there working in California.

So, Joe left the mining camp and went to California?   Did he ever…?

No, he went to Detroit first and then he went to California.

So, was Joe the first one to go to California?

Yes, because everybody really wanted to go to California and nobody truly liked Detroit.  California had the great appeal then.

You aren’t the only one who was really unhappy when you got to Detroit.

That’s right.  So, he decided to go and then he had a buddy that wanted to go or something.  They went to California and got jobs and kind of led the way.

Was it Los Angeles?

First to Los Angeles and then it wasn’t long before we moved out to San Gabriel or Rosemead, little town of Rosemead.  That’s where we started settling in.  We bought a little piece of acreage and it had orange trees, it had plum trees, it had a big vegetable garden, it had a big barn.  Even in Colorado, we had a cow and my dad from his experience in the old country of taking care of cows, milking cows, when we were in Colorado we had all the milk we could drink.  We sold enough to pay for the feed for the cow and then he made cheese and butter with the remainder.  We had two hundred pounds of cheese in the basement at one time.  We made our own butter.

How do you keep two hundred pounds of cheese?

In the basement in Colorado we had it in what you call the ‘screen box,’ just made out of screen, so the animals and bugs couldn’t get too it.  It was a cellar.  Colorado never gets very hot, in the mountains in Colorado, so it [was] maintained pretty good.

How much butter did you have?  Did you share it with neighbors?

Yes, we sold it.  Sold milk and sold butter, also, or traded it.

Your mother really had a production business.  She rented space to boarders.

Yes, and she fed them too.

O.K., she cooked for them and did she do laundry for them as well?

She did laundry for them.

Then she made butter and cheese from the milk.

That’s right, of course, she had the girls help her.  

Did the boys ever help the mother?

No.

The boys didn’t have to work in the mines, so what did the boys do?

They went and got the cow, helped with the cow and the boys played.  We did a lot of the gardening.  I raised rabbits, though.

Were the rabbits used for food?

The rabbits were used for food.   I sold rabbits and I skinned the rabbits and sold them to Duper Furrier in Detroit.  For a whole big gunny sack full, I got two dollars, but that was a lot of money for a kid in Colorado.

So, you were an entrepreneur even as a young boy.

Yes, I was.  I took care of those rabbits and I sold them and I took care of the skins and I sold those.  I didn’t waste them, I didn’t just throw them away.

Did you see your mother as an entrepreneur?  Did you get that spirit from her do you think?

Yes, she was truly more an entrepreneur than my dad was.  She had good business sense, my mother did.

Now, you’re in California.  You finished two years of college.

Then I went to USC.

Why did you decide to move with the family and not continue college in Michigan?

I don’t know, I think I liked the family and I had an appeal for California too instead of Michigan.  Kalamazoo was all right, I enjoyed the school there.  It was a nice school, too.  I enjoyed that and had a lot of friends there too.  I didn’t go back, it would have been my 60^th anniversary there.  The year of 1940 was my class year.  I didn’t graduate there but it would have been the year.  

So, you went to USC.  Do you remember USC as being very expensive at that time, especially now that you can compare it with Kalamazoo?

It was expensive, but there again, with my sister’s help, my mother’s help and I had saved a little money too.  So they all stretched for me.

Did the other brothers or any of the sisters go?  O.K., Maria was nurse.

She went to nurse’s training. 

So, did anyone else go to higher education?

No.

Just you and Maria?

That’s right.

You became an engineer and how did your life proceed after that and at what point did you get married?

Well, first of all, I came to Las Vegas in 1941.  I was not graduated from USC.  What I did, I stayed out summers, I mean some quarters or half years, and worked.  I worked for the State Highway Department in California and I worked for the Corps of Engineers in California on the Hanson Dam.  So, I had three and a half years, I had a half a year to go when I had a chance to get the job up here.  This job was with the Corps of Engineers to build Nellis Air Force Base and I couldn’t believe that people lived in Las Vegas.  There was only 8700 people in the whole valley.  I’d go to a basketball game [now] and there’s 18,000.  Plus, it was hot and it had rocky hills and they’d say, aren’t those mountains beautiful? And I’d day, those aren’t mountains, they don’t have any trees on them.  Those are rock hills 

You came because of the job and what month was it?

It was in April of 1941.

And it was hot in April?  Really hot?

No, but it was already beginning to warm up.  Comparatively, you know.  I worked out as Nellis, first on a survey crew, laying out the airfields and the encampment there.  I was out in the field for the first four or five months and then they took me into the office and I stayed in the office all the time as an engineer and I was in charge of the construction because all the work was done by outside contractors and the Corps just supervised it.  That’s what the Corps of Engineers did, they supervised the contractors that came for the job.

You went into engineering so you could be outside.  How is you like the office work at this point?

Well, when I first went in, it didn’t like it, but I knew if you are going to go up in the field, so to speak, you had to be inside.  You just didn’t get it out there on the survey crew.  You had to move along.  I could see that.  There again, I was ambitious enough to see that you had to do it, so I went along with it.  The base kept growing because they needed houses and hangers and the airfields themselves and all the things that go with an encampment of that nature.  It was very busy and about every six months or so, they would threaten to draft me into the service, but my supervisors, who were all military men, my bosses were always either captains or majors, they’d request that I be kept there because, for one thing, I knew what was going on from the very beginning.  They’d come in and sometimes, they’d change them out every six months, moving them.  I knew more than they did at the time about the job.  

Tell me about the military presence.  You saw the military as it grew here.  So, tell me about that presence.  Was it everyplace you went? 

Very much so.  It got to be.  At first, they kind of stuck around the camp, but then pretty soon they started coming into town and the town was accepting [of] them.  In fact, a lot of people were good to the military.  They gave them a water well and then they started having things in town for the military.  They wanted them and they knew it was good business.  Plus, it was the thing to do, when the war was on.

What were your feelings at that time about being kept out of the military?

I wanted to go into the military at first.  I was telling my sister, [Maria] who by the way, now was in the military as a nurse.  She was under Patton in North Africa and she was with them when they went into France.  She was quite a goer.

Is Maria still here?

No, she passed away this April.   87 years old.  She was quite a gal.  I was telling her in a letter about wanting to get in and she said, you’re doing as much or more than you could do any place else.  Stay where you are.  Don’t be a fool and get involved with all of this.

So, I thought that was the thing to do and stayed with the Corps of Engineers right there at Nellis.

How long did you work with them?

About six years, ’41 to…five or six years for sure.

Tell me what Las Vegas looked like.  Where did you live when you came here in ’41?

I lived on 604 So.  4^th Street, almost downtown.

Was that with another family, was it with..?

I’ll tell you what it was.  It was a company house that the railroad built here in town and it was a block house, very similarly built.  I was trying to find a place to live and I couldn’t find a place to live.  There just wasn’t anything and somebody told me about this rooming house, so I went over there and knocked on the door and told the lady I was looking for a room and she said, I don’t rent to men.  I have a room, but I don’t rent to men.  I said, please lady, I have to have a room.  I’m not going to hurt your girls, please.  I finally talked her into letting me have a room.  My children, now, I’m not sure they like it now, but somebody said, how did you meet Marietta?  Oh, I said, she moved in with me, which she did because I had a room there and they had another room, so she came in with a friend and they got another room too.  I said, she moved in.  I was there first.

She moved into the same rooming house.  This is the way you met your wife?

That’s where we met.

That’s exciting.  Why did she come to Las Vegas?

She came to Las Vegas as a nurse, also.  They needed nurses badly like everything else.  She heard about it from someone and she came from Kansas, Garden City, Kansas.  She came because she had a job [offer].  There was a county hospital and only one other private hospital.  She needed a room, so somebody said, go over there and she moved in.

Tell me, other than the downtown part, what did the town look like?  What were your first memories of Las Vegas?

Pretty much a downtown.  Of course, I was busy working and I didn’t spend much time, but soon became aware of the lake, which had been built, Lake Mead and Boulder Dam and I was interested in that because of my engineering [background] and when I first came to California, I came through Las Vegas.  I didn’t spend any time in Las Vegas.   I spent it all at the dam because I was interested in the dam and so forth.   That was part of my interest and then being from the mountains, I gravitated to Mount Charleston, which was a mountain that had trees on it.  It wasn’t these rock mountains out here.  But, I think they are beautiful now.

As a young couple, what kind of recreation did you have?

Well, of course, we went to the lake, we went to the mountains and it got so, we were eating out because we didn’t have any place to eat.  They didn’t serve food at the rooming house.  It wasn’t a boarding house, per se, it was a rooming house.  So, we had to eat out.  She ate her lunch at the hospital.  I was out at Nellis which was, of course, eight miles away and I had to go out to eat.  So, I’d invite her to go out to eat with me and we got acquainted better that way.  We were at the opening of the El Rancho, the first hotel in town.

Tell me what that was like.

It was very, very exciting.  We were both from small towns and suddenly were involved with nightclubs and all that type of thing.

What did it look like?

It was, I think back now, at the time I thought it was quite nice, but it was pretty much, the intent was, it looked like a ranch.  I remember the seats in the bar were tractor seats.  You know how they are and garden seats.  Scooped out metal type seat, that’s what the seats were in the bar.

They were metal?

Yes, they were.

Were the seats at the slot machines metal?

No, this was at the bar.

So, the seats at the slot machines were more comfortable.

Do you know though, all the time I’ve been in Las Vegas, I’ve never put one dime in the slot machines.  Never put one dime.  I’ve never gambled because my businesses have always [involved] plenty of gambling.  The reason I didn’t smoke when other kids smoked in the camp is because they were ten cents a pack and I couldn’t believe that anybody would blow ten cents in the air.

You know, when you told me about writing down everything you spent, that’s what I thought about.  I thought to myself, he’s never going to smoke.

Never smoked a cigarette.  I later smoked some cigars and I like the aroma of smoke, not cigarettes but a pipe and some cigars are good, but cigarettes I never did [care for.]

But, you would go into the places where they gambled to have dinner?  What about going to shows?

We went to different places where they had dance bands.  We danced, Marietta and I were very good dancers.

Where did you learn to dance?

Well, in the mining camp they did a little bit of it and then in college, at Kalamazoo, I used to eat in the girls dormitory; that’s where the dining room was for the whole campus, the lower floor of the girls dormitory.  After dinner, we’d go upstairs and they had music and a little floor and we’d dance until eight o’clock and go home.  So, I learned to dance.  That was the recreation we did.  We danced, we went to not too many movies, but some.  Even now I don’t go to movies very often.

Tell me about the movie theaters?

There was two theaters in town.   One was on Fremont Street and it was owned by the mayor of the town and the other one was on 2^nd Street.  

Tell me about the racial makeup of the town, all groups.   Do you remember African Americans, Mexican Americans, Asians?

Not as such, I realized they were there, but I didn’t think we had a preponderance of any one or the other.

But there were all groups living in Las Vegas at that time?

Oh, yes.

Tell me about the theaters when you would go.  Do you remember how the seating was arranged at that time?

Not noticeably.  If there was anything, I didn’t notice it.

I wanted to know if it had changed over those five years, from’41 through ’45 or ’46.

No.

What was the security of the area like?  I talked to someone the other day who had lived in Henderson and they told me about the security because of BMI and its purpose for the war and how secure that place was.  Other than the presence of military, was there anything else to make you think that there’s a lot of security around here?

Never had that feeling.  

Did you ever drive out to the dam during the war?

Yes.

Was there any security there?

Oh, yes, they had security there.  Absolutely.

What was that like?

Well, it was very tight.  They wouldn’t let you park on the dam or around it.  You had to go all the way across to one side or the other.  They reported to the other side that you were coming and you didn’t dare stop, that type of thing.  So, security was strong at the dam.  They were afraid of bombings I guess.

What was Boulder City like at this time?  Did you ever drive out there.

Yes, but Boulder City was a typical company town.  It was build by the original Boulder Dam company to house people.  Las Vegas wasn’t big enough at the time to house an influx of that nature.  Boulder city became a company town.

How long did you date Marietta before the two of you decided to get married?

About, let’s see, we met about ’42 and we got married in ’44.  It was about two or three years.  

Did you live together the whole time (laughter)?

We moved separately.  I moved out.

So, did you move out because you felt it wasn’t a good idea to live in the same house?

No, it’s just that I had a better proposition.  I didn’t move far, same block I think or across the street.  We still kept going together.

So, in 1944 did you get married here in Las Vegas?

No, got married in California, in San Gabriel Mission.

Oh, that’s beautiful.

Yes, because me folks were there and my family was there and that’s where we got married.

Was Marietta’s family ever…

No, her father had passed away and she had two sisters, but they were back in Kansas.  Her mother lived in Kansas also.

No one else ever moved out from her family?

Later, her one sister moved out.   Cordette, her name was.

Where did you live when you first got married?

We lived for a very short time in a little apartment downtown and very soon after, we built a house.  I bought 40 acres of ground and built a house on it.  I told my grandkids, when I was thirty years old, I’d already built a house, married and had my first baby on the way, you guys are sitting around here not even married.  What’s the matter?

Where was the house located, the forty acres?

It’s located, it’s almost adjacent to what they call the Westside, the colored section.  It was almost adjacent to that.  It was forty acres.  It had a well on it and it was high enough so you could see the town.  Kind of on a knoll.  I thought that was really great.  

Is that piece of property still in your family?

Sold the property.  Marietta called me and said there’s a man out here looking at the house and wants to buy this property.  I said, it’s not for sale.  What do you mean?  We just moved in not too long.  Well, I told him that I’d tell you, but he kept hounding me and I finally said, O.K., I’ll teach this guy and I think I had about total value in it, the lot, the forty acres and the house, I think I had about $12,000 and it was a nice house.  I said, I’ll scare this guy away and I said, $27,000.  A little more than double of what I had in it.  He said, I’ll take it.

Who was it?

Can’t remember his name now.

What did you feel at that point?

Well, I thought, what did I do now.  I was thinking of going into business by myself and that’s where the money came from.  That’s when I started in business when I sold that property.  I had enough money.  In fact, we bought another place for about six thousand dollars, closer in town and had the rest to start in business.

Tell me, you married in ’44 and you’re still with the Corps of Engineers?

At that time, yes.

So, you went from the Corps of Engineers to your own business?

Well, I worked for a very short time, half way between here and Henderson, at a gravel pit.  

Marietta came here to be a nurse.  Did she continue working once she got married?

Yes, she worked quite a long time.

So, how many children did you have?

We had six children.  The first baby we had, she quit [working] for awhile, but they’d always call her back because they needed extra help.  She’d bundle her baby up and take the baby to the hospital with her to work.  She was a good surgical nurse.

Can you give me the children’s names?

John Tito, Laura, Sandra, Renaldo, Mario, Jelindo.

Your middle name?

He has my same name, Jelindo Angelo.  He finally became junior.

Does he like his name?  Does he call himself J.  A.?

No, he sticks with Jelindo.

Are all your children still here in Las Vegas?

Except Laura, who is in Canada.

So, you are now living in the house and you are starting a business.  I want to know what that business is, how you get it started, who your clients are in the beginning.

First of all, very first job I had, I bid $100,000., to be built in 100 days with a penalty of $100.  a day.

Anything over.

Anything over that much time.  I was with the Corps of Engineers and it was three spotting towers up at Indian Springs, which was controlled by Nellis.  The towers were to be used for the first international meet of the world, really, for gunnery control and so forth.  It was to show strength or something for the allies.  They had to have it in 100 days, so I bid the job and I was low.  I got a call from one of my military bosses out at Nellis, who is not here anymore, but he was one of the big shots in the California office, he called me and he was one of these guys that cussed a lot, and he said, you little shit, get started.  I said, I don’t have a contract and he said, I’m telling you that you can pick up ten days time by getting started.  So, I trusted this guy so I started getting everything organized and hiring people.  I had to hire new people because I had just started.  Lo and behold, I got the job alright.  Of course, I knew every nut and every bolt because that’s the only job I had and it was comparatively a simple job.  But, I precut everything and prebuilt everything right in town and took it up to Indian Springs almost like an erector set.  The cab was steel and [we] had to have it built.  This is kind of interesting, I had to have it built at the Holy Steel Plant, a little place on Main Street.  I had three trucks and I had [one of ] the only crane[s] in town.  There were two cranes, one was the Air Force’s, they owned it and the other one was Jake Deilman, Jake’s crane and rigging, did all this high rise stuff, he had one crane.  Picked the steel things up, put them on the trucks, had everything on the trucks ready to go and, lo and behold, that is when they closed Charleston Blvd.   Went over the tracks, Charleston did.  They closed it and opened up the new Charleston underpass, but my stuff wouldn’t fit under there.  So, I thought, I jumped on the phone and I called the local office and I said, I would like to cross this street and you closed it up and I’ve got all this equipment.  Oh, we can’t do that, it’s out of the Omaha office.  I called Omaha and explained it to them, well, no, no, no, that’s not our [responsibility].  That belongs to the California office.  So, here I’m sitting with all this [material].  I went out and told the crane guy, how they closed it off, they put railroad ties in the ground on each side so that you couldn’t cross.  So, I got the guy with the crane and told him to pull up the railroad ties.  We passed everybody over and I left two guys back there to put the railroad ties back.  I thought, I might go to jail, but it’s not going to cost me any money.  Never heard a word from anybody.

So, did you get the job done in 100 days?

I got the job done exactly in 100 days and I remember saying a prayer when we were going up with those cabs in there.  I said, dear god, please don’t let us drop it because if you do, I’ll be back working.  Everything fit like magic.  If you’ve got a lot of time and you know that some things hinged on it, your whole future is hinged on something, you do it and you do it right.  You’re not depending on 14 guys below you and it worked out beautifully.  I made, on that first job, I made $16,000 dollars out a $100,000 job.  Percentage wise, it’s the biggest profit I’ve ever made on a job since I’ve been in business.  But, as I’ve said, I knew every bolt and every nail and every screw in that whole job.  That was the beginning.

When did you actually incorporate and name your company and all of that?

It was a little bit later.   That’s kind of an interesting story too.  I was ready to more or less set up a company  and this was maybe two or three years later and I went to Leo McNamee, who was [one of ] about three or four attorneys in town and he was a good Catholic man that I knew.  I went to him to set this up and by then I had ideas of grandeur and I had Worldwide Construction and High-rise Construction and all these names for my company.  He listened to me and he finally said to me, don’t you like your name.  I said, what do you mean?  He said, what’s wrong with J.  A.   Tiberti Construction Company?

I said, oh, that would be good.   I never thought about it.  That’s how I got the name.  He suggested that I call it J.  A.  Tiberti Construction Company.

You and your wife have been married a couple of years by this point, so have you started your civic activities at this point?  Have you joined any organizations, either of you?

I don’t know exactly the dates,  [but] I was on the Planning Commission for 25 years.  Lets see if I can give you some dates on it.

While you’re looking, tell me what the Planning Commission is.

The City and County Planning Commission at that time was a regional Planning Commission and it plans for the growth of the city.  I named this street out here in front of me.  Somebody said, why didn’t you call it J.  A.  Tiberti Street and I said, no, it was Industrial Road because I knew it was going to be an industrial road and that’s why we called it that.  I was the third one out here on the street.

Now the street goes almost across the city.

Yes, it goes quite a ways now.   It stops down here a little ways and it jumps and goes again.

Yes, because I got on at Tropicana.

Yes, it goes all the way out to almost where it meets the L.  A.  highway now.  The Planning Commission, let’s see, 1954 to 1979.  That was the main board that I was on and it took quite a bit of time.  We met at least twice a week sometimes.

What were some of the most exciting things that  you helped plan for the city?

Well, I don’t know that it’s the individual [things] that  [we] set up because we were basically [in] overall planning.  We didn’t plan buildings as such.  We planned areas, we planned streets, so I can’t say [much] about any one thing of that nature.  

(end of tape 1)

This is my second session with Mr. Tiberti.  It is Thursday August 24, 2000 and we are in his office.  How are you this morning?

I’m fine, Claytee, how are you?

I’m doing very well.  The last time we left off, you were talking about the planning commission and your role on that commission.  At this point, you’ve been married for a few years, you’re a member of the planning commission and you’ve started your business already.  Give me some additional information about the planning commission, any memorable meetings, memorable decisions on that commission?

Well, I can’t think of anything special right now, other than the fact that we were very, very busy.  You think we were busy the last 10 years, we were busy then, too.  We met two, three times a week as much as two and three hours.  There was a lot to do and, at that time, it was called a regional planning commission, so we had the whole area.

The city now seems to be able to keep up with the growth, infrastructure and all of that.  Did that advancement have anything to do with the plans that the planning commission put into effect way back then?

Well, it could have.  For example, this street, I think I mentioned it before, but this was done primarily as an industrial street and it turns out to be a very high traffic street.  We planned to widen it at the time and we were criticized.  They said, what are you doing, making a big wide street out there?  Well, it’s not too wide for the traffic that’s out there now.  I sat here the other day and counted the cars and it was 22 cars a minute that go by there.

It’s a great street, not as busy as some of the other major streets and it takes you through faster.  Getting back to the war itself, do you remember the security around the area called Basic?

The security was all over during the war, but I’ll give you a little example.  When we first started Nellis, the war wasn’t on.  It wasn’t declared until December.  So, when we went through the gate we waved and they knew who we were.  Well, the morning after the bombing and the security went on, we still waved and said, see you guys, and they said, halt, halt.  Well they stopped us real fast and from that time on, you halted at the gate.  So, security came up immediately.  Out and around the plants in Henderson, I wasn’t out in that area that much, but there was security out there.

What about the security at Lake Mead?

Well, Lake Mead didn’t come on quite as fast as other areas, but the traffic got too heavy and then there was the overall threat of bombs.  Then the security got  pretty [tight].  They made it so you got out and checked you out and so forth.  Especially trucks were checked very thoroughly.  That came on a little bit slower, but it finally [happened].  Then, they had machine gun nests scattered around, observing the traffic.  They were in contact with the guards and so forth.  If they [tried to] stop somebody and they didn’t stop, well that’s what the machine gun nests were for.

What kind of drives were you involved in?  Did they have scrap metal drives or any of those things here for the war?  War bonds, anything like that?

Well, the war bonds, they sold war bonds all along.  Everybody got involved with the war bonds.  I don’t remember scrap stuff.  We didn’t have any scrap stuff around here.  The war bonds were very popular and people bought them quite readily and a lot of my friends bought bonds.

As soon as the war ended, a few years after the war, the strip began to grow, 1947 the Flamingo was constructed.  There began to be more of a mob presence in the town.  How did that effect regular business men?  You had started a business at that time.  Did they have any…?

Other than the talk in the papers and the stuff of that nature, it didn’t bother anybody that I was aware of.  It certainly didn’t bother my position or any work that I had done.  So, I think a lot of that was just paper talk.  It was a different group that was coming to town, so to speak, and it had its place because people got interested and it went out world-wide so we were recognized much more  than we were before they came in.  As far as the town was concerned, the people in the town, I don’t think it bothered most people.  There may have been some illegal activities, but as far as general business, I don’t think it bothered them at all.

Tell me about starting a construction company.  You told me about your first job, the $100,000 job, one hundred days.  And by the way, since you started that 10 days early, would you have been 10 days over?

I would have been 10 days over, yes.

Tell me how a construction company works.  How many permanent employees, how do you get the part time employees when you bid a job, how does it work for someone who has no idea about construction at all?

Of course, it has changed some, but basically as I started out, you’re in the field, so to speak, and so you know and you put the word out that you’re hiring or someone brings in the fact that you are hiring.  So, you hire people that come around.  Right now, they promote.  They go out and get other people to come to work for them from contractors that are already in business.  I never had to do that.  Most of the time people came in looking for jobs.  By interviews and so forth, that’s how we selected them.  Sometimes you take chances.  One of the first, and he still works for me, Don Beagle, he works half-time.  The other half he goes up to Montana on a ranch up there and spends all summer playing golf and playing cards and fishing and so forth and the other half, he comes home in the winter time and comes to work.

You must pay him well.

He’s paid well.

Now tell me, from the beginning of a job to the end, for someone who has no idea how a construction company works.  Tell me about bidding a job, how you find the job to bid.

First of all, you either hear by word of mouth that somebody wants to have something built or they come to you and say, look, I understand you’re a contractor, we’re going to build this bank, would you like to bid on it.  Or they tell their architects to go out and get five bidders.  So their architects come to us and say, would you like to bid this job.  We say, yes, or we’re too busy, we can’t bid it or whatever.  Most of the time you say yes.  Then they say O.  K.  We will give you a set of plans, or as many sets of plans as you want and specifications and  most people get anywhere from two to three sets because they’ll distribute them to sub-contractors.  Now they have locations where the subcontractors can go and take it off.  They even go to the architects office.  They have a place and various other general contractors have places so it’s not you alone that are using them.  So then we get the plans and we start taking off the quantities.   How much concrete, how much roofing, how much electrical, and so forth and those are subcontracted.  They take them off the same as we do and they give us their sub-bids.  We bid, generally, the excavation, that is the smaller excavation, not the big heavier excavation, the concrete work and the carpenter work and the finish work.  That’s the work that we basically do.  Then we supervise or put together the package of the subcontractors, the electrical, the plumbing, the heating, the air-conditioning as so forth.  We’re responsible for that because we take the overall contract.  We say that we will do that for this much of money on this set of plans and these specifications.

Included in that bid is what the subcontractors have told you.

That’s right.  So, it’s our responsibility to tie them down to their package.  We’re responsible for the overall package.  The owners, as a rule, do not care about the subcontractors.   They want to know who they are and all that, but basically, it’s your responsibility and when you bond a job, you say, I will bond for the whole job and you are responsible and the bonding company is responsible to the owner.   They set a date for the bid and we all come into one point.  Generally, it’s the owner’s office or at the architect’s office and submit your bid.  Closing time is two o’clock in the afternoon.  They sit there and open the bids and say, you’re the low bidder or you’re not the low bidder.

Are all the contractors sitting there as the bids are opened?

That’s the normal way that they do it.

So, you know immediately whether or not it’s your job.

Well, you know if you’re the low bidder.  As a rule, used to be it was your job.  Now, a little bit of shenanigans  [may be] going on, but basically you know it’s your job and that it’s yours to do.  They have changed it somewhere, like in the hotels, they don’t have a full set of plans and specifications anymore.  They have ideas, so to speak.  We’re going to build this big of a building and we want you to get an architect or we will have an architect for certain things, but you will have a certain architect and we want you to tell us how much it’s going to cost and how long it’s going to take to build, and so forth.

Does it mean that you now have a designer working for you as well?

Yes, well, you sub it out.  You go get one of these planning groups or architectual groups and they work together and you do the whole thing.  You give them your ideas.  Just like if you came in and wanted a house.  You’d say, well, I want three bedrooms and I want a bathroom for each one of the bedrooms or I only need two bathrooms, one will share a bath, and stuff like that and you design the house.  Whereas, normally you would go to an architect and get your plans drawn up for you the way you wanted them.  You’d say, no, that’s not big enough, or how big is this room, well, it’s this big, it’s as big as this room right here, well, that’s big enough or it’s not big enough, make it bigger.

Are you spending more money now to submit a bid than you did at one time?

Well, I think we are spending more money.  The one thing, you don’t know for sure if you’re even going to do the job.  They want you to submit prices on an open package, so to speak.   You’re not sure what it’s going to be and it gives people a lot more room to maneuver when it’s open like that.  First of all, when I told you they have the set of plans and specifications, here it is, bid it, and you’re going to build it according to this and if you don’t, at the end of the job they go through the plans and they say, there’s supposed to be another plug over there.  Why do you say that?  Well, it’s on the plans right here.  It says they’ll be another plug right there on that wall, so you have to put it in.  That’s the way it used to be and there is still a lot of work done that way.  But, in our town, there’s a lot of work that’s done on a partnering basis, so to speak, and you have to work with them.  You have to depend on them having the money to pay.  That’s the trouble with a lot of big hotels.  It’s not that they’re fighting so much, the contractors, but they don’t have the money and then when the time comes up to give the money, it’s hard to get.  When we build schools and banks and stuff of that nature, they have budgets and you know it when you go in that the budget is this much and the architect knows that the budget is this much and if you bid over the budget they don’t award you the job.

At one time the lowest bidder would get the job, but now…?

It just depends on who they want.

Once your bid has been accepted, what happens?  Your company J.  A.  Tiberti has the low bid and you are going to do the job.

At this point you get a contract signed with the owner.  You’re going to do it according to these plans and specifications.  Now you get maybe 10, 15 sets of plans and specifications because you have [a] superintendent, you have to give one to each one of the subcontractors and you start.  You start out by a layout, you layout the project and you have the superintendent, you have a project manager first that more or less coordinates with the office and then you have the superintendent.  He’s solely on this job.

The project manager, is that an engineer?

Generally, more so than ever he is an engineer.  Doesn’t have to be because experience will do it, but most of the time they have experience in engineering or he is an engineer.  The superintendent is [chosen] more from experience.  A lot of them are getting to be engineers too, but it’s experience starting out generally on the job as a laborer or a roustabout as they call them and then the first thing you know, they are a carpenter and then they’re a carpenter foreman and then they become a superintendent.  They kind of build up their program from experience more than the project manager.  The project manager, as you say is more of an engineer technically.  He’s more involved in the plans and the spec’s and the contract and so forth.

The superintendent hires the people?

He’s in charge of the job.  He hires the people and fires the people and sees that the job gets done.

Then, a construction company doesn’t have to hire everybody because the subcontractors bring in their own people.

Absolutely.

You are not concerned with that payroll?  You pay that person a lump sum.

That’s right.  We pay them a portion of their job each month.   Each subcontractor submits his pay requests and in his pay request he’ll say, we are 40 percent done and we’ve done this, this, this and this and we want our money.  The superintendent checks them and says, yes or no, you’re not that complete, you can’t have that much money.  But, once he says O.K., then we submit our overall request for payment and that includes the areas of the subcontractors, material houses, people who furnished materials and so forth.  In today’s world  you have the power company that’s bringing in extra power and you pay them so much extra.  Permits from the county and city are very, very expensive and every time you turn around, you have to get a permit for something.  Those are all included when you submit your bill.   Of course, theoretically, you should have put them in your bid in the first place.  

At the point that the job is completed, everything is done, what happens to the workers that you’ve employed?

We try, very hard, to have started another job and move them over to the other job.  Sometimes, you don’t have the work and you lay them off and they go to work for another contractor.   We try and we have been fairly successful at keeping a lot of our employees.  We try to schedule work.  Sometimes you can’t because if you’re not low bidder, you don’t get the job.  You try to schedule it, but you bid enough stuff so that you get a job, and you anticipate that these people are going to be done and you move them over.  Sometimes you do pick-up work or clean-up work temporarily.   For example, these warehouses out here in the back, they were built by my original superintendents.  One time, I didn’t have any work at all.  I had a superintendent and foreman out here building warehouses to keep them working and one at a time I’d put one of them on this job and this one on this job and I might have to wait for that to be finished, but I’d later finish them up.   That’s how come I have the warehouses because I started to try to keep my good men on the job.

What would you say is the number on your permanent payroll?

Including offices and people on the permanent payroll, we’re probably, in number of people 24 or 25.

Now, I think I understand haw a construction company works.  Tell me about one of ther most exciting jobs you’ve had?  First, tell me some of the jobs that you’ve had.  I know that  you’ve had jobs at the University.  You build a lot of schools.

We’ve done a lot of different work.  One job that was exciting and it was early on when we did the remodel work at the Boulder Dam.  It wasn’t too long and they had some remodeling of some offices up on the seventh floor, inside the dam and also the machine shop down below.  I think I told you, when I first came, I spent time at Boulder Dam because I was a young engineer and I was excited.  So, here I am, a relatively new contractor, probably in my second year, [and] I did this remodeling work down there.  I’ll never forget my one boy Mario that’s the engineer, he was telling his friends, my father is remodeling Boulder Dam.

How old was he at that time?

He was probably 13 or 14 years old.

That was very interesting.  

It was exciting because I got to be on the dam.  Boulder Dam was exciting to me anyway and I liked every part of it.  When I got to work there, I was only remodeling offices and the machine shop, I wasn’t remodeling the dam.

How many jobs do you like to have in the hopper at a time?

Actually, going, moving along, probably four or five.

Tell me about the casino, hotel-casino, that you’re building now.

The hotel-casino that we are building now is part of the Coast Casinos.  We are also building for the Station Casinos, but these are called the Coasts, the Barbary Coast, the Gold Coast, The Orleans, the Sun Coast.  It is what they call a local type of casino with the bowling alleys, theaters, it has 16 theaters in it.

Is it going to have the stadium seating, those comfortable chairs?

Right, absolutely.  Then they have 47 bowling alleys and [an] arena for fights and then they have a showroom.   So, it’s an interesting place and it [is] interesting to build because it has such a variety of different things in it.  Beside the gambling pits and all that, it has a big variety of things.  We know the owners, in fact, my son Tito is one of the owners of, 10 per cent owner I think, which isn’t bad.  He was with them from the very beginning when he first did the Barbary Coast.  We did the Barbary Coast and we did….

How old is the Barbary Coast?

It’s about 25 years old.

The Barbary Coast, when you look at all of the casinos around it now, Caesar’s Palace with all its…, The Bellagio….

It’s a hot corner right now.

Yes, it is.  So, I’m sure they been asked to sell.

Yes, the Flamingo, next door, has been after them but they can’t agree on a price.  They are only about 20 million dollars apart.

That is a prime location.

Yes it is.  They were hurting a little bit until they started with the Bellagio and the Mirage.  They’ve got these cross sidewalks and they all dump right into it.  It’s done very well.   There was a period where it was just treading water because it is a small casino.  The excitement, or course, goes to the bigger places and all the new stuff.  They have changed and they’ve got some different restaurants and so forth.  And, Michael’s, the restaurant over there, is still one of the better restaurants in town.  That’s named after Michael Gaughan, one of the owners.   It’s a five star restaurant.

Getting back to the new one that you’re building now, the community casino, is this the first community one that the Coast….?

Oh, no, the Gold Coast is one and the Orleans.

This one is going to open September 1st.  What does that mean to Tiberti Construction Company, when I say September 1st?

It means that we’ve performed our job, basically.  It means that we did it the way we said we were going to do it and so forth.  Now, there may be some things, like all these others, last minute things.  Fire alarm people go through and check and oh, this doesn’t work, you can’t open.  They do have to wait.  I understand their position, they can’t tell you, you have it ready to go in two weeks from now, they have to wait to see right before you open to check all the fire alarms and the three to four other items of that nature.  If everything is good, you’re in, but if there are things to be fixed and you can’t fix them in one day then you have to wait.

Last week we had the opening of the Aladdin, the new Aladdin, and the opening was delayed because of the inspections.

That’s right.

How did you feel when you heard this?

I thought, that’s typically what could happen and we could be in that same position, who knows.  We’re hoping that we, because of that we are checking closely and demanding that things get up to date right now.  We’re hoping that we won’t have that.

So, you have those inspectors on site often during the construction?

Yes.  They do come.  You have to call them at different positions and tell them at what point you are and that you want them to make the inspection.  Sometimes they come on their own, they don’t have to be called.

Is it the same person, let’s say the person doing the alarm systems, is that the same person throughout the building process?

Not necessarily.  It could be just from that office.  They may have 10 inspectors

Through the years, how has your construction company gotten the word out?  Has it been word of mouth or do you advertise?

A lot of it is word of mouth.  We never did advertise.  We are doing a little more advertising now because the competition is keener and bigger.  Before, it was word of mouth and everybody knew us.  

(Mr. Tiberti is looking through papers he has on his desk.)  I’m thinking of an old interview you did in the past.  

Yes, it was from other companies that had written in our behalf, saying that we were a good company and that we were honest and sincere in what we do and therefore we had a good reputation and people look for people that have good reputations.  That’s how we got a lot of our work.  People came to us and said, we understand you are a good company and we can depend on you and therefore we’d like you to do our job.

That was almost like a handshake.  

That’s right.  Some of the original jobs were handshakes.

Those days are over?

Yes, those days are over.  Now, it’s cross every ‘t’ and dot  every “I”.

(end of tape 2)

Let’s see where were we?

We were talking about your daughter’s education.

Well, they both graduated from college and they both got married.  One married a graduate of the Air Force Academy in Colorado and he now is in charge of our buildings.  He works here and has for the last 10 years or so.  He’s in charge of our real estate division, so to speak.  Sandra had eight children.  All a nice family.  Smart kids.  Let’s see, there are three graduated from college.  One’s going back to get her degree in architecture.  She’s going to be an architect.  She just went back to school again.  There’s two in college and one in Gorman High School, going to graduate from Gorman this year.  Very nice family.  I just think they have done so well, big family of eight children.  

Did your children go to high school or Catholic school here in the city?

All went to Gorman High School.

Now, is Gorman male and female.

Yes.

What is St.  Anne’s?

It’s the grade school.

For some reason I thought St.  Anne’s was for females and…

No.  No.  We’ve always promoted it from the very beginning, Gorman High School.  In fact, we just remodeled their locker rooms.  

[Speaking about Rotary Presidency of Catherine Crockett, first woman to head the Rotary Club of Las Vegas.]

Well, the guys, that’s the first thing I had to fight off guys because they didn’t think she should be president and who wants a woman president and all that.  I said, come on guys, get off of it and she’s done real well.

Hasn’t she done a great job?

We’re good friends.

I’m glad.  The only other questions I wanted to ask you about are just general questions.  Is there anything else about your community work, your community activities that you’d like to have on tape, that I failed to ask?

I don’t think so.  I think you about covered it.

I just want to ask you some of the general things about the city.  When you look at the city, do you see the base of power.  If you were looking for where the power is in the city, is it the city government, county government or is it the business community, the casino owners?  Where does the power lie?

I don’t think that I could say, I think it is pretty well divided up.  I think that each have their position and I think they take care of it and as far as I’m concerned, I think it’s good.  I think it’s divided up and I think they are doing a good job.

In a lot of different ways, Las Vegas is different from most places in the country.  How do you think, when you talk to friends outside of the city, how do they see Las Vegas?

Well, it’s changing, of course.   But, for a long time they saw it as a den of iniquity.  They couldn’t understand how anybody could raise a family here.  What do they do?  I said, well, they have boy scouts and I said, we have churches and we have universities and I said that you know that I have never put a dime in a slot machine and they looked at me like I’m stupid.  People live in town that don’t, they put up with gambling, they like gambling, they don’t see anything wrong with it, but they have their own deals.  This family, my gosh, they’re involved in sports from the time that they’re that big, they are on some team, they’re involved in the high schools, they’re involved all over.  They play instruments, they belong to the bands and I think, how could you raise a family any different?  I’m sure that some of them get [in trouble.]  I can give you an example, I know it has it downfall.  My wife Marietta’s sister, who was a nurse, had three children, had to move out of town because she couldn’t stop gambling.  On Christmas eve, she came to the house, she didn’t have money, not to buy gifts, she didn’t have money to buy food for Christmas day and you couldn’t say, here take $100.  and go buy groceries; you had to take her and go buy the groceries.  So, I understand that part of it too, but overall, I think people can handle it and people handle their lives[well].  We have all kinds of churches and lots and lots of sports events [and] fields.  I raised my family here and they did well.

Do you think it’s a great idea or a good idea now though that gambling is spreading throughout the country?

As I tell everybody, just what I said about my sister-in-law Cordetta, look at the other side too, before you decide it’s going to be all rosy, remember that you have the other side.  A lot of these paychecks are going to go here instead of here where they should go.   Its not all one sided, it’s got its bad side and you have to pay attention and try to do something about it.

Getting away from this line of conversation, what have unions meant to this town?  I know sometimes that you have to hire people from various union shops.

Unions had a position in the town, I think, when they first started out, to make sure that they were properly paid, but sadly enough, I think, they have grown out of their usefulness.  Now, they are not happy with good wages.  They want to tell you when to come to work, how long you want to work.  They want to run the job for you and that’s wrong.   They can’t do that.  Consequently, the construction people have lost a lot of their unions.  Who has gained their unions?  The cities, police forces, teachers.  Those are the ones that [joined] the unions because they don’t have the same people to deny them.  Whereas the contractors says, hey, you guys are wrecking my business.  I can’t promote you any more.  So, contractors, a lot of them have left unions.  I’m a great union guy.  I believe in unions.  They just went overboard.  I’ll give you a little example.  I was always on the arbitration committees and for years they wanted to get extra pay for a guy that handled a pull saw.  We said, no, we use some of the older guys that can’t climb the scaffolds, we put them down there and all they have to do is pull that saw, they are just glad to have a job.  Well, they fought and fought and we finally gave in to them.  So, they got 15 cents an hour more for the saw.  Lo and behold, within five years, they had six [hourly] rates for that saw because now this saw was a three quarter horse power and this one’s a horse and a half power and this is a six power.  Same saw, same action, but we’ve got six rates for a saw man.  Another example, they fought and fought for high time on a scaffold.   We said no because we use the young guys, the guys that are just starting out, that don’t know too much, we put them up on the scaffold.  They can handle it.   The older guys are down below and they finally won out.  Two scaffold high, which means 12 feet, if they got up they got extra pay.  Well, that’s all right.  Listen to this.  Now, if you only needed them up there two hours, and you took them down after two hours and they went on to something else, you had to pay them for all day because they were five minutes over two hours, so you paid them all day.  Stuff like that, they just wrecked it.

Did you pay a man more the higher the scaffolding?

No, it was high time.  After two scaffold high, it was all high time.

Then it becomes a bookkeeping nightmare.

Absolutely.  It just went crazy.   Six different rates for a saw man, you know.

If you had to look back on your time in Las Vegas, what would you say the major change has been in this city?

I think the major change as far as the business overall is concerned is when [Howard] Hughes first came in, the corporations to come in.  That was the biggest fundamental change in the whole area.  We’ve always had upward looking people toward progress and we are willing to fight for it.  We’ve had that in the counties and the city and everything else.  I think that it’s been a continual thing and I think it’s going to continue.  They are willing to pay for it too.  They vote in taxes and things like that.  I think, overall, it’s been good and it’s going to continue.  I think the corporation thing is about the biggest change.

What is the future of Las Vegas?

Same line as it’s always had, a little depressed line, but the same line, it’s up.  It’s a good steep angle and it keeps growing and we’ll have our flattening out periods, but as I tell all my family, be ready, be ready for this because it’s going to happen.  If they can hang on long enough, it’s going to go back up.  That’s my revelation to anybody in this town, be ready to hang on because we’re going to get the flat spots, but it’ll go back up.  If you’re ready to hang on, you’ll make it and if you don’t, you’re going to be gone.

Thank you so much.