Oral History Project
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Joseph Buckley Wing Fong Pat Goodall Harold Boyer Ty Hilbrecht Jim Jones |
Bert Purdue J.A. Tiberti David Welles Kenneth Miller Donald Aikin |
The following interview is with Dr. James M. Jones, a resident of Las Vegas since 1932. Dr. Jones is a prominent local dentist. He joined the Las Vegas Rotary Club in 1978 and served as president during 1998-99. He is a Paul Harris Fellow.
This is October the 28th, Monday, and I am interviewing Dr. James M. Jones, a local dentist from Las Vegas. We’re in the Special Collections Department of Lied Library at UNLV. This is Patrick Carlton, Interviewer, and this is my tape one, side one.
Dr. Jones, I wonder if you’d please, for the record,give your complete name and address and your Rotary affiliation.
That’s James M. Jones, DDS. 8229 Crow Valley Lane, Las Vegas, Nevada 89113, which is in Spanish Trail Golf Community. And I’m a member of the Las Vegas Rotary Club and have been since about 1978. Prior to that, I was in Kiwanis for many years.
Ah. Perhaps I could get you to talk a little bit about your birthplace and how you ended up in Las Vegas. I do not know if you are a native or not.
I am a true native of Las Vegas, and I was born at home on South 3rd Street in 1932. I’m the son of a railroad worker. Lived in that house until I graduated high school, and then lived back on the property after that occasionally, and through times in the service and going to college.
Are you an only child, or do you have brothers and sisters?
I’m an only child. I had a brother born three years after me that passed away at one year old. Childhood disease.
So you say you went to school locally. Which elementary and high schools did you –
I went to Fifth Street Grammar School and Las Vegas High School.
Who was the principal when you were in high school?
Walter Long was the principal, and I knew of the other principals, but he was the principal when I graduated from high school.
I believe Mr. Knutson, a fellow Rotarian, was a principal there for a while, wasn’t he?
Gale Knutson was not a high school principal. He was, I would say, the senior person at the Fifth Street Grammar School, and his wife was also a teacher. They were both teachers of mine in the earlier grades.
I see. Well now you mentioned that your dad had a railroad connection at one time, so you can probably say a little bit about the evolution of the town from being a railroad community to what it has come to be. Could you talk on that, please?
My dad came to Las Vegas in 1921 in an empty boxcar as a hobo. Right after World War I, and when people had no means of support, and looking for some place where he could make a living, and he got off the train and walked into the railroad shops and asked if he could work for a few days for some food, and stayed there 21 years. So [in] my early recollection of Las Vegas, it was a railroad town. We watched the trains go by from our house. We lived in railroad housing. And I lived on South Third Street at 613 South Third Street. That was the last paved street.
I assume that business was pretty limited in those days, the number of businesses and the kinds of things that were available here.
There was residential housing on Fremont Street at that time, and most of the businesses.
Okay. At what point in your life do you recall any sort of formalized entertainment/gambling, whatever gaming coming to town?
I remember gambling on Fremont Street at an early age. I know that there was a theater on Fremont Street, there was a theater on First Street, one block south of Fremont, and I know there was casinos on Fremont and north of Fremont at the time, but I never paid any attention to them. I just thought that was part of the way the town was.
(laughs) How things were done. Right. As far as you were concerned, what was the impact of influence of the churches, organized religion, in the city?
That’s an interesting question, because I principally was raised in the Methodist church in Las Vegas. My mother was Methodist, and perhaps my father was, but I do know that the Mormon church had a strong influence and a large population, and a large Catholic population. As kids, on Tuesday, we went to catechism, no matter what church you belonged to, and on Thursdays you went to primary at the Mormon church. All the kids did. It was a form of after-school interest, entertainment, I think.
I see.
And we interacted even through high school, across church lines, you might say, and doing things with other peers.
Did you have the Methodist youth fellowship and the young people’s service for the Presbyterians?
Yes, they did. Yeah. Yes, they did have programs like that.
I was wondering to what extent you might’ve gotten involved in that.
Very little, as I recall.
Okay. How about, some of the churches have traditionally sponsored Boy Scout troops. Did you ever get involved in any of that?
Yes. I was first in Boy Scouts in the troop sponsored by the Methodist church, and there wasn’t Cub Scouts, as I recall. And so I went into Boy Scouting at twelve, and then something happened to that troop. Whether the leadership disappeared or what, but I ended up as a charter member of troop 63, which was sponsored by the LDS church. And our scoutmaster was Jack Batiti, who became a County Commissioner and was a very prominent political leader in the community later on. And I stayed with that boy scout organization until I left high school and moved away.
Does that troop still exist?
I don’t know that troop 63 still exists, but there’s lots of Las Vegans that grew up here that belonged to troop 63.
Were you familiar with the group called the Order of the Arrow at all?
I remember the name, but I don’t know what it was.
What kind of entertainment was available to you and your parents, I mean how did you spend your leisure time as a young person?
Picnics. There was a wonderful park at the courthouse which was on South Third Street and Ogden, a block off Fremont, or two blocks off Fremont. We went to the old ranch for picnics, which is Las Vegas Boulevard north near Rancho High School. I went to Mount Charleston, and after Lake Mead was formed, it was quite an event to go to Lake Mead. My dad had a little boat (he laughs). And as far as entertainment and hotels, I do recall going with my parents to dinner at the El Rancho Hotel, which was probably early ‘40s.
What kinds of community services, such as mail services and telephone services, did you have as a young person?
That’s an interesting question that I read on the list here, and as I recall, we didn’t have delivered mail service at an early age, so we walked to the post office to get the mail, which was on North Third Street. The building’s still there, and it’s still owned by the federal government. I think it still operates as a post office, which was at Stewart and Third. North Third. By the time I was in high school, we had delivered mail service.
Electricity was furnished by Union Pacific Railroad. They had a steam plant in the area of what was called “the shops,” where they repaired the engines, and all electricity for Las Vegas was supplied by Union Pacific. So was the water. The water was owned by Union Pacific Railroad, a subsidiary.
This is well water?
Well water. The telephones were a privately owned company, I think a family by the name of Lawsons were very prominent. And I remember when we had our first telephone, I was probably ten years old. Ten, twelve years old. It was – you told the operator the number that you wanted. I remember my phone number, it was 2171.
(Laughs) When did air conditioning come to town?
The early air conditioners were what we call today swamp coolers, or evaporative coolers. And I think we had one probably from the time I was eight or nine years old, because my dad made it. He built it himself, which most people did. It was where water was pumped up across an evaporative layer of excelsior, and had just a fan in there that sucked the air through that, and then the water ran down to a trough, through a hose that they used to water your garden.
I see.
It worked very well.
I’ve heard of those, but I’ve never worked with one myself. In the wintertime when it got cool, what did you use to heat your homes?
The home that we grew up in only had a fireplace for heat. And we burned coal or coke, and I can’t tell you exactly what coke is, but it’s a byproduct of coal. That’s something left over after using the coal in the steam engines or something, to fire the boilers. And we had it delivered by a truck down the alley, back of our house, and dumped into a bin, and we used firewood as well. And then I do recall when we had our first electric heaters for the house, and they were built into the wall, and that had to have been late ‘30s, early ‘40s.
Interesting.
A real luxury.
Now you said you used well water for cooking and bathing and drinking –
Everything.
How did you handle the issue of chemicals in the water? Some of it’s pretty heavy with that stuff.
We felt in those days, and I’ve had the opinion up until the last twenty years, it was very pure water. It was wonderful water. It was clear and cold as can be, and there were places around the valley where when you went on a picnic, you’d stop by the well that was just gushing out of the ground. The pipe had come out of the ground with water in it, and you’d fill you thermos bottles and your canteens, and things with that cold, clear, fresh water.
But things have changed. (They laugh.) So you said you graduated from high school, let’s see, that would have been what? About 19…
Fifty.
Fifty.
Las Vegas High School.
Okay, and then at some point you had made the decision that you wanted to go on to dental school. At what point did you decide to become a dentist?
I had some interest in high school. I had no way to go to college, financially. And I started working on the railroad when I was 15 years old. I lied about my age, with help from my father, and so I always had a job on the railroad. I worked there in the summertime and nights and whatnot, and so when I got out of high school I moved to Los Angeles to work on the railroad and I started my college at East Los Angeles Junior College. And I stayed probably two semesters, and maybe during the second semester – I was in a Naval Reserve unit. The Korean War, the unit was called to active duty, and I could’ve probably had a college exemption, but I went with my reserve unit. Because I knew I had a chance to get the GI Bill, and secondly, I conned my way into dental technician school.
(Laughs) Okay. How many years were you on active duty?
Two years. And the Korean War was over, and the reservists, we were released early.
Did you ever leave the United States, or was your duty local?
No. I [entered] dental technician school [and] worked on the Marine base in San Diego helping get the recruits’ teeth fixed before they went overseas. And I had a wonderful experience doing that, incidentally. Educationally.
I was going to say, then, did you go on to dental school in California some place?
No, I came back to Las Vegas, went back to work on the railroad until that fall, and then I went to BYU, mainly because it was the lowest tuition in the west. And they had a very good pre-dental program, pre-medical program there. And I was there two years and got accepted to dental school. And then moved to Seattle. I was married by then. I was married before I started BYU, as a matter of fact. And so that was – moved to Seattle in 1956 and graduated in 1960 with honors.
With honors. Did you come immediately back to Las Vegas, then, to practice?
I went into a graduate program during my senior year of dental school, and had an opportunity to go into what was called advanced prosthodontic program and so I stayed in Seattle for about six months after graduation to complete that program. I missed taking the board exam in Nevada, but then I managed to find a job working for the State Department of Health, Dental Division, and I was a traveling dentist with a fold-up dental chair and a fold-up light and an electric motor to run the drill, and I traveled in an old station wagon throughout the state working on children.
Where were you based?
I was based initially out of Las Vegas, and I guess I was based out of Las Vegas that whole time. But I spent a great deal of time in the central and western part of the state. There was an Indian reservation, Schurz, I worked there for about six weeks taking care of Indian children. And I went to Ely and I went to Tonopah and I went to Gabbs and I went to Pahrump and I went to Mesquite and I went to Overton. It was a wonderful experience. I really learned to know the state and to meet a lot of people in the state and we’ve maintained friendships all these years.
And when you’re working with anesthetics and so forth, are they sensitive to heat and cold and to what extent do you have to keep them at a certain temperature?
No. The anesthetics don’t have to be refrigerated.
I’m worrying about the temperature fluctuations in the state. Okay. So after several years you then established here, or how –
I worked out a contract for one year with the state, and close to the end of that year, I’d by then taken and passed the board exam, and I’d made arrangements to lease an office from another doctor, and started private practice.
Here.
Here in Las Vegas.
And you were in practice here until what, last year?
Started 1961, and finished in January 2002.
That’s a long time.
Forty years.
Mm-hmm. Forty years.
A little over.
Now you’d said you had, at the time you started to go to school, you had married. How did you meet your wife, and tell us a little about that relationship.
We met here in Las Vegas after I returned from the service. Through a mutual friend, and we were married that summer, just before I moved to BYU to go to school.
And her name was what?
Barbara.
Barbara. She was a local girl also, then?
Yes.
Did you all have children?
Four. I had two by the time I was out of dental school, and all four are college educated, incidentally, and all have successful families and careers.
All right. Okay, let me change the subject here now and ask you some Rotary questions if it’s okay. When did you first join Rotary, and what was your first club?
I joined Rotary in 1978, and my first club was the Las Vegas Rotary Club. It was – I don’t think it was the only Rotary club at that time. There was one in Boulder City, I think.
And so you’ve been a member, you said, 24 years. And do you have any perfect attendance years?
I had two or three. In my profession, it was difficult sometimes.
I understand.
The last minute, something would happen, you couldn’t attend.
As you know, that was a big emphasis at one time in Rotary. Perfect attendance. Oh, let’s see. Talk about what offices –
Before Rotary, I was in Kiwanis for seven or eight years. That’s the Las Vegas Kiwanis Club. At that time, it was a club of 245 people.
So you must have joined in what, about 1970 or something like that?
I went in in 1962 or something like that and I stayed in it. I finally dropped out, I was appointed as Chairman of the State Taxicab Authority, which is a very comprehensive job, and our meetings were weekly, it was the same day as Kiwanis, and I just couldn’t do both. We had hearings most every Wednesday that lasted four or five hours. I conducted hearings on the operation of the taxicab (unintelligible) community, and I couldn’t go to Kiwanis and have my mind ready to go and conduct hearings for four or five hours.
What was it that attracted you to Rotary, and who was it that invited you to be a member?
Actually, Harley Harmon, who’s a pioneer in the community, and was my banker, invited to go to Rotary with him on numerous occasions. And I knew most of the members of Rotary, and we met at the same hotel, and we had a lot of hijinks between the two clubs, and some community projects together. So it wasn’t that I didn’t know anyone in Rotary. I knew quite a few people, and it’s kind of a joke, I was blackballed on my first go-around. It was also a dentist who didn’t think there should be another dentist in the club, so a few years later I was I guess nominated, and they went through quite a secretive process in those days. The initial complaint was classification. It was a conflict of classification. It wasn’t anything unprofessional about him, it was just classification.
I guess that’s before they had the additional active category.
Right.
It says here, in the history of the club, you served as a director and as a vice-president prior to becoming the president in 1998-99. I wonder if you could talk a little about your Rotary career and the different kinds of responsibilities that you had while you were working your way through the chairs, if that’s the right way of describing it.
I think in my first time as being a director, I worked on a number of the different projects and committees and found it to be very enjoyable, and gave me some good background for the years later when I was then on the board again and then was elected vice-president and became president. And by then the club was smaller. When I first ran the club, it was a membership of about 250, and as other clubs were sponsored by our club throughout the valley, our membership was diluted. Same thing happened to Kiwanis, they had the same thing, their club dropped down to like 45 members. We were down to like 175 I think when I was president.
I wonder if you’d talk a little about the way the club was organized and its general interests .
Well I think historically that the Las Vegas Rotary Club included some membership of the leaders of the community. I mean the salt of the earth leaders of the community. The business people, the bankers, the mayors, the president of the railroad locally, and the power company, and they pretty well ran and developed the community. It was far more influential in the development of the city than the Chamber of Commerce was. The chamber I think existed early on, but was really not that active in promoting the community like the membership was in Rotary. And I think everyone that belonged to the Chamber belonged to Rotary, though. The Rotary has had a strong influence. Kiwanis did, too. Kiwanis came along a little bit after Rotary and they had many of the leadership people in the community in the Kiwanis Club, also. And then there’s a few other smaller clubs, Lions and a few of the others that were smaller.
It says here that the year you became the club president in ’98, you had adopted as your theme, “Rotary grows through fellowship,” and it goes on to say that you assigned yourself as “official greeter” for the club during your presidential year. Could you talk a little about your vision and purpose in establishing that theme and as serving as the club greeter?
It had become apparent to me that the membership was declining, and this was true of all service clubs. And I think that when you lose some membership in that large a number over a ten year period, there has to be a reason. And I think as the community became larger and we had additional clubs, and it was more difficult to get to Rotary, you didn’t have perfect attendance like you used to have, I thought the most important thing you could do was develop a strong fellowship with the people that you had, and you can use that to build on. To strengthen the club, stop the loss of membership, and start building it back up again. And so I thought the best thing I could do was to personally get to know every single member of that club. Usually, clubs assign the greeter from the pool of the newest members. Well, I asked them to also be greeters, but I was the greeter, and I had other people to help at the front door and to register people who were coming as guests and to do other things, but I wanted to be the actual greeter. And I was the greeter and met every person that came to that meeting every week. Enjoyed it very much. That was the most fun part of being president.
Where were you meeting at the time that you first joined –
When I became president, we were meeting at the Desert Inn.
You were at the Desert Inn.
Yes.
Okay. And then moved to Lawry’s –
We moved to Lawry’s.
-- in ’99 or 2000, something like that.
2000. In fact, Tom Thomas followed me as president, and he made the arrangements for the move. And it turned out to be a brilliant thing to do. Our concern with staying at the Desert Inn was the cost. The cost had become so prohibitive because of the union regulations about having to have a union sound person, someone to move the pianos, someone to raise the curtain. It caused our luncheon cost to increase to so high we were losing guests. And for years, Las Vegas always had an enormous amount of visitors at our meetings. And the cost was just too prohibitive. For make-ups, members from other clubs didn’t come, even, because it was like, thirty, thirty-five dollars for lunch. So Tommy, in his wisdom, thought, “We need to find another place.” And so we started looking around and he ran it by the board, which I was on, as past president. Had the opportunity to go to Lawry’s. The president of Lawry’s International happens to be a Rotarian. Strong supporter of Rotary. And a member of the local Lawry’s was in our club, and so they worked out a deal, and lo and behold, we got ready to move and found out the Desert Inn had been sold.
Closed anyway, yeah.
And they were going to close it anyway. So we’re fortunate to have had the opportunity to move when that happened.
Now it says also in the history that there was some fellow named Cork Proctor, and he said things about you during some sort of a roast at the first meeting that you conducted, during the first meeting you conducted as president. What’s that all about?
Cork was my best friend in high school. There was a group of eight of us that, best of friends, and there are still six of us left and we still stay in close contact. Cork’s a professional entertainer and comedian, and has worked everywhere in the country, and so I arranged for him to be the first program, and to roast the members. And he knew many of the members that were there, and I gave a little information about each of them, thought we’d start out with a fun meeting. I also had a professional piano player, and piano and live music for the first meeting, which was nice frilly music before the meeting started and whatnot. Well, Jon Ralston had been invited to be the speaker at another meeting and had to cancel, and so he called at the last minute, I think, and asked if he could come on that day. So here I had two programs. And so Cork decided he would take the back seat to Jon Ralston, and so he did a very short monologue on me and some of the things that we did as children, my adult career, and made fun of me, and then Ralston was the program.
(laughs) I see. It sounds like a good day. At the district conference, the club history says that the club was able to present a check for $8900 to the Rotary International Foundation honoring RI past president Cliff Doctorman. I’m wondering why it was you would’ve given this donation and what Cliff Doctorman’s relationship with the club was or is.
He had been our District Governor, and was a wonderful, warm person. Still is. And had visited our club many times, and we just thought that he was the epitome of a Rotarian. And he had done so much for Rotary over the years, and we raised an enormous amount of money that year, and we thought when we presented this check at district conference, we would do it in his honor. It was something we just decided to do. And so we had the check made out on a four by eight poster, or very large poster, anyway, and carried it into the grand ballroom in the meeting and presented it in his honor.
Well now, does this mean, then, that at one time the clubs here were part of a district that goes all the way up to where Cliff lives now?
It very well could have been. I don’t recall.
‘Cause you know, he was out of the San Francisco area, or still lives up there, as a matter of fact. I was curious as to –
I don’t think we’ve always been district 53 here.
Some reorganization must have gone on?
Yeah.
Two hundred local high school valedictorians are reported to have attended your annual luncheon in their honor, and this would have been during your presidential year. It says the club awarded scholarships for Las Vegas area graduates during the ceremony to go to college. Could you talk about the nature of that event, and the club’s purpose in implementing the scholarship program and the valedictorian honor program?
This started many years ago, when we only had one, two, three high schools. In those days, there was only one valedictorian. And now they have structured as valedictorians anyone who’s a 4.0 student, plus – it can be more than a 4.0 student now, I understand, depending on how many classes you take, the type of class it is, and how high your grades are, and so you could have five valedictorians, say, at Las Vegas High School. And so every student who was a valedictorian in my year as president, came to that luncheon. I think we still do. Now we have so many there along with their principal, and we still give scholarships. Not to all those that attend, but we’ve given quite a few scholarships every year to students who graduate from Las Vegas high schools. And there’s no requirement on where they go. But that’s why we had 200. The numbers have increased over the years, we’re having a tough time accommodating all of them now, and it’s expensive to do. It’s easier at Lawry’s than it was at Desert Inn, though.
Alright, now, here’s another one: why were you – this is an ugly question – Why were you accused of being an absentee president by the club during your presidential year?
That’s very hard for me to figure out, because I probably didn’t miss three times, maybe four, and Katie and I were married in September, and we went to France for two weeks, I know we missed twice then. I don’t think I missed over two other times the rest of the year. But anytime I wasn’t there, I really got razzed about it. I probably made up or sat in for the president ahead of me more times than I missed the year that I was president. (He laughs.)
You don’t get no respect, is what you’re telling me, with those people.
TAPE 1, SIDE 2
I wonder if you could talk a little about your family relationship and how you and Katie Crockett got together, and so forth.
Well, I knew Katie’s father from Rotary, and I actually, I had known Katie’s father since I was a youngster, because my dad took flying lessons from him, and I had the opportunity to go along for a ride in an airplane with Katie’s father, George, and my father, and I was just absolutely hooked on flying from then on. I must have been ten years old when that happened, eight or ten years old. Katie had been in Rotary about ten years, I think, when she became president. When her father passed away, she came into Rotary, and she preceded me as president by about three years. I chaired a couple of committees for her, and we were always friends, and prior to that, I mean just Rotary friends and whatnot. And I was divorced, and I was working on assignments for Rotary, and with her, and we got to be better friends, and then we were having – one thing I did as president, is I had a bimonthly meeting of all past presidents, and we’d sit and critique how our club was doing, what we could do to make it better, and how the committees were functioning. So sometimes we met at the Las Vegas Country Club, and sometimes we met at Katie’s art gallery.
And so I went over to meet her at the art gallery about something to do with Rotary one evening, and she had three people from District there trying to do something to set up some sort of a conference here sponsored by Rotary. It wasn’t District conference, but it was like a training conference for incoming governors. And she says, “Don’t leave me here with these people.” (he laughs) It’s closing time, and they needed a ride back to hotel, and she says, “Would you go with me?” I says, “I’ll go with you if you go to dinner with me.” She said, “Well, I can’t, I’ve got someone else to meet for dinner, but I’ll go have a drink with you.” So we took these guys and dropped them off, and then we went to this restaurant where she was to meet these people. They weren’t there yet, so we sat there and ended up having dinner and talked until 11:00 that night. And we’ve been together ever since, just about. We worked together for a long while in Rotary and became dear friends, and just had a wonderful relationship.
Great. Speaking of women in Rotary, think back now. You would have been a member of the club when women first came into Rotary, so you knew Laura Belle Kelch, you knew Thalia Dondero, who was a member at one time. I don’t know who else came in as the women. Talk about the entrance of women into the club and what challenges, if any, that raised for you.
I think it raised some real challenges for a lot of the members, and I think it still does today. And they were a little concerned about Laura Belle coming in. See, Laura Belle’s husband had been a member forever, since – They came here in like 1941, and he became a Rotarian then. Now if Thalia’s husband had been a member or not, I don’t remember, but Katie came in early on, and Katie was the first and only woman president, of course. So she came on early, but everybody knew Katie pretty well, a lot of people did, because her family and a lot of the old-timers’ families all socialized together and had business interests together and that sort of thing, so she wasn’t a stranger to a lot of members when she came in. She was well received. And Laura Belle certainly proved to be an outstanding member. Thalia left the club because of her demands as a County Commissioner, I think. She just couldn’t make the meetings. And I think we lost members over the fact that women came. They just in general didn’t think women should belong to Rotary. And I can’t help but think I felt a little bit the same way. I wasn’t a hardliner about it, but I thought, you know, why do they have to belong? We don’t belong to the Mesquite Club, and we don’t want to belong to the Mesquite Club. That was kind of the attitude I had. This is kind of a men’s club. And I think we’ve all been proved wrong. I think we’ve had some wonderful women members that have been very, very productive for Rotary. Hard workers for Rotary. And I think that’s because those who have come in have been well-chosen. And they come in under the regular guidelines of whoever else is invited to belong to Rotary. And it’s important that they be business people, or professional people, or teachers or university people, that sort of thing.
I wonder if you could talk a little about the ongoing relationship between the Rotary Club of Las Vegas and this university, UNLV, both as an organization, Rotary organization, and on the part of individual members, and how has that relationship matured and evolved over the past 25 years or so?
I think it’s been a situation that we’ve just been so close with all the years, it’s hard to see where the university wasn’t always a part of Rotary. When it first started. And the same way with Kiwanis. My Kiwanis club, while I was a member, planted a hundred trees out here on this ground before it was even a campus, when it first started out here. And the only thing was Maude Frazier Hall, which is the building up in front. The first Maude Frazier Hall was at Las Vegas High School, incidentally, and the first class of this university was taught at Las Vegas High School in that Maude Frazier Hall. And I attended it. I was a senior in high school.
Was this a separate building, or just a room within the building?
It was a separate building that was called Maude Frazier Hall. It was part of the high school, but they did offer several classes there for Nevada Southern, was it at the time?
Yes. Yes. Does that building still exist?
I think it does. But I think they changed the name of it after they had put the first building on this campus that said Maude Frazier Hall. But I think that the leadership of the university has always a member of Rotary Club. Someone in leadership, be it president or a major position. The chancellor has, but there’s always been at least one or two representatives from the university in our club. And we’ve always felt strongly about giving scholarships to kids who would come to this school. I think that most of the service clubs have sponsored or felt strongly to help in any way they can with the university. So I see no separation or effort to say, “We have to go help the university.” I think it just always happens. It was an evolution.
It’s important. In looking back now over your over 24 years of Rotary membership, I wonder if you could characterize the contributions of the club to the development of the city. Of course, once again, you’ve got to talk about members to do that.
I think the Rotary Club has contributed many things to the community. The fact that their members were the leaders of the community. They were mayor, they were city councilmen, or president of the power company, the water district, all the utilities, the banks, everything, most of them are Rotarians, or in other major service clubs. I think that there’s been so many charitable things that Rotary has done that have helped people, that have helped make this community a better place to live. Gave people the opportunity to help themselves and to move along and get better jobs and grow and raise their families in the community. Encourage their children to go school and graduate school and college and whatnot within the state.
Okay, I’m going to change topics now and talk about some more general things, get off of Rotary specifically. When you were living here during your early years, what racial or ethnic groups were you aware of as being present in the community?
I saw that question on the list there. We had Chinese working on the railroad. They came with the railroad. The Chinese were very much involved in building the railroads. Several of those families located in Las Vegas and became businessmen. Restaurant owners and bankers and that sort of thing. At least their descendents did. We had quite a few black families. Here again, that was because of the railroad. They were helpers, what they called a helper, a swamper on the railroad, or janitor or something. Nice families. We knew them all well, went to school with them. Started kindergarten with them, they were best friends. Same with the Spanish. We had Mexican families and Greek families that work on the railroad, and they were mostly track worker people, or oilers, and they worked on oiling the wheels of the trains when they stopped. And the Mexican people were gardeners. Some of the Japanese people were truck farmers, like Tomiyasu, those families. So we knew all these people as children, and they were all our friends and accepted well. They came to our homes, we went to their homes. The black people principally lived on the west side. I worked on the west side and met a lot of the kids on the west side. North Las Vegas had more of the Mexican families and the other lower income people, and I lived down there at one time with an aunt. Had a lot of friends in that era.
There was a change that occurred during World War II with the building of the Basic Magnesium plant, and a lot of people from the industrial cities came out here to work on the construction of that plant. And so when you have the influx of the black families from the industrial cities, who’d lived a different lifestyle, than the ones who had lived here all their lives and their father’s, whatnot, I think there was a shift in attitudes between the whites and the blacks, and I think there was some racial tensions in schools and the community in general. And that was a disappointment to see that, as I recall.
And this, as far as you know, would have happened before you graduated or after you graduated from school yourself?
I think it was happening before I graduated high school.
Okay. Yeah. But you say you were able to socialize some across ethnic and racial lines as a young person.
Sure.
I don’t know whether this is a fair question, but let me ask you anyway. There was an outfit called the Moulin Rouge, I believe that’s the right name.
Right.
Which opened and closed after only six months. Can you tell me anything about what it was that caused that outfit to fail so quickly?
I don’t know. I was in college at BYU when it opened. In fact, I came down here with a friend with a load of chickens that had been processed to sell to hotels. One of my little jobs, and we did the delivery at the Moulin Rouge, and then hung out there in the bar for a little while afterwards to see what was going on, and I’ll never forget, there was a young black singer there that absolutely wonderful. His name was Johnny Mathis. He was probably 18, 19 years old. And we were welcomed there. We weren’t out of line to go there. In high school, we went to some of the west side entertainment places as kids.
But I think it was built ahead of its time, and it may have been underfinanced. I think it was built to try to give the black people a place, and that was in a way, since it was built on the west side, was not helping them integrate in the community. I think they wanted to integrate in the community, rightfully so. And they couldn’t afford to support it financially themselves. And the people from the other side of town had other places to go, so it just didn’t have a chance.
I see. Now, by the time you were becoming a young adult, the construction industry was becoming fairly important in this town, was it not?
Yes.
I know some of the members of your club have been very active in the construction industry. I wonder if you could talk a little about your observations of construction as a way of life, if that’s the right way of putting it.
Well I think Las Vegas has always been fueled by construction. The railroad, initially. Boulder Dam or Hoover Dam. That was the biggest construction project in the world. And we had thousands of people came here to work on the dam that didn’t have jobs anywhere else in the country. It was a tremendous boost for employment nationally to build Hoover Dam. And so those people didn’t have homes, and those people had to have groceries, and they had to have other services, and so shopkeepers came, and grocerymen came, and dry goods people came. And that started Las Vegas, really kicked it in the fanny and got it going. So that was the first case where construction really helped.
The second construction project was the building of Las Vegas Army Air Force Base, which is now Nellis. That started about mid-’42, 1942. I remember going there with my father for the groundbreaking. C.D. Baker was the keynote speaker, he was the mayor. I was so impressed to go listen to the mayor speak. And the next project was the building of Basic Magnesium, Inc. during World War II. Enormous construction project there. And of course that brings more people, they need more shopkeepers, more everything. And so someone has to build them housing. So construction has been a tremendous motivator for the growth of this community. After I was out of dental school and moved back to Las Vegas, it was a tremendous boom there because of the building of more hotels, then more houses had to be built. More apartments had to be built. So the construction people were employed again. Unfortunately, many times the city went through booms and then busts because they would overbuild, overfinance, and they’d stop construction, the construction workers would move on to another city. Now, there’s so many other things being built than just individual homes and apartments that require skilled labor that you have a regular, steady [employment] of skilled labor to build these things. I don’t think you have bust and boom anymore.
You graduated from high school around 1950, you said.
In 1950.
And just about that time, the powers that be locally were negotiating with the University of Nevada at Reno about a presence, a local presence. And I think part of this was driven by the Air Force. They wanted to have opportunities for the enlisted and officers to go to school. James Dickenson came down here as the first assigned person from UNR in 1951.
To what extent to you recollect anything about that period of time and the building of the extension program which became Nevada Southern, and then became UNLV? I realize you were away at least part of that time.
Right. That was it. I was away. Probably my closest relationship to this was the first librarian at UNLV was my aunt.
Celeste Lowe.
Celeste Lowe. And she was Ed von Tobel’s lumber company’s secretary and treasurer, cashier, whatever they wanted her to do. And she needed a raise and they wouldn’t give her one, so she saw this ad in the paper for a librarian and she applied for it and got the job. She had no experience as a librarian, but she did have a college degree, surprisingly. She was born in Baker, California and lived her whole life in Baker, Shoshone, Tecopah, Good Springs, and Las Vegas. And she’s a very bright, very well educated woman. But I was gone through most of this period. Was involved in it when I came back. Fundraising for some of the buildings, and worked very closely with it. I formed a group, or helped form a group called the Academic Scholarship Foundation. They had a football scholarship foundation, which I was on, and I was vice president of the Rebels Club and was going to be the next president, and that’s about the time the whole thing fell apart because of the NCAA and whatnot. Fortunately, I wasn’t involved in any of that. But I went on a trip, a university trip, to the Grand Canyon. And before we went on that trip, we had eight one-night classes to educate us about what the Grand Canyon was all about. We had a department head – We had eight department heads there. One each night, to lecture on the Grand Canyon. Paleontology, archaeology, you name it, we had them. And we all went on the trip together. So afterwards, I said, “We need to have more trips for these things.” And so we had to find a way to do this, and a lot of the manpower on those trips was students, so I said, why don’t we start an academic foundation to raise money to assist students to help on these trips?” And so we started this, and we raised money for a few years, and I drifted away and they drifted away, and I’m sure that that effort was taken under some other area’s wing and continued in some fashion.
I guess you came back in what, sixty –
’61.
’61. To what extent by 1961 did you have the feeling that you were living in a tourist town as opposed to a “regular” home town?
I never noticed it was a tourist town per se because it had always been one. Essentially, Las Vegas, from the time of the construction of the dam, was a tourist town, because people’d come here to see the dam, and they came by train. And they came by private railroad cars, and then they were taken out to Boulder City and to the dam on tours. I used to go with my dad, who conducted some of these tours in those days. And so the El Rancho was built, and people’d come here to stay at the El Rancho. And then the Last Frontier was built. Tourism was always part of Las Vegas. There was always lots of motels here. People were coming here for some reason. I think probably the dam was the beginning attraction.
To what extent were you aware of what you might call “shady activity” or we hear stories about mob influence and participation in various parts of the economy. To what extent would you have been aware of this sort of thing, or would you have heard about it?
Well, having started practice here in 1960 and having grown up here in this community, I had many patients who were involved in the hotel industry, and the business of the community, and the owners of the hotels, many of them were patients, and many casino bosses, and so I knew lots of people who had been in gaming in other areas of the United States before they came here. And they were very honorable people. They were very community-oriented people. They were very concerned about helping people in need, and a lot of those people have done a lot for this community that no one ever knows about. Somebody’s down on their luck, or a family needed something, they got help by the hotel people, casino people. It was a community of people in those days. Everyone knew everyone. They were not corporate owned, they were individually owned. And they were a group of people who had a certain honor society of their own. They looked [out] for themselves and each other and the people in the community. And they were good citizens. They invested their money here, and they put money in the banks, and they put money in real estate, and they put money in hospitals. And that’s what it took to get this town going. And so they were good people. And they may have been in a business in some other state at one time that involved gambling that may have been illegal there, but it wasn’t illegal here. And they lived by the rules and the regulations of the State Gaming Regulations. And so they were good people.
Let’s see now, in 1961, I wonder what the population of the city would have been.
My guess is about 65-68,000.
What size would the Metropolitan Police force have been in those days, and what was their reputation?
I think they had a very respected profession. You had two different entities of it, the Las Vegas Police Department, and they had the Clark County Sheriff’s Department. And they both really had different areas of enforcement or control, but yet they overlapped. But there was always a jealousy between the two, who did what, and who was the better, and that sort of thing. And I knew people in both organizations very well, and I had a great deal of respect for them. I thought both organizations did a fine job, and I think there was strong talk about consolidating the county and city government and [that] made sense as the community grew, and there was a time when the state legislature did pass resolutions that would allow them to consolidate, and some of the agencies started to, and the police department and the sheriff’s department were the only ones that everybody did it.
Got it done.
And I happened to be on the Housing Authority board at that time, and we had everything in place to, say, on September 1st, become one unit with the other, the Clark County Housing Authority, and it all fell apart, and it’s too bad. It’s too bad that the city and the county didn’t merge, and all government entities. Now Boulder City wanted to stay separate, and Henderson wanted to stay separate. They were little places out in the country anyway, so that was no problem. But that’s where our sheriff’s department and police department merged together to become the Metropolitan Police Department. And to this day, I think there’s still within the departments, some little frictional issues: “Well, I came from this group,” or “I came from that group.” But those people by and large have retired and there are not many of the old-timers left that had memberships or belonged to the organizations, the police department’s side or the county sheriff’s side.
You were saying a movement toward merger in other areas sort of fell apart. What were the public reasons given for this? Why did this happen?
I don’t think they gave good public reasons. The reasons were that it wouldn’t work, they couldn’t afford it, it would cost the government more money. It was jealousies of power and who had to give up power, and no one wanted to give anywhere. They couldn’t look at the long-range opportunity and goal to make it a better place to live and have better agencies like building departments and water, power, regulation and all the community services would have been one. I think it would have worked better. Fire department. See, we still have two separate fire departments. That was one of the things, I ran for County Commissioner in 1966, and one of my platforms was to merge the two fire departments. Another one was to train all policemen to be firefighters and have foam tanks in the police cars so that when someone’s car caught on fire, or their couch caught on fire and they were patrolling the neighborhood, they would be the first ones there to do something. And that didn’t fly, either. (They laugh) The policemen didn’t want to do it.
You were talking about water issues just then, and you said that earlier on there were lots of wells, artesian wells, I imagine. At what point did Las Vegas start to use Lake Mead as a major source of water, and how did that come about?
I worked for the Water District two or three summers when I was in college, and at that time we were still primarily on well water. And I don’t know just when the first pipeline was completed from Lake Mead, but I would say it was in the late ‘50s. And at that time, the water from Lake Mead was supplementing the wells, and gradually it’s changed. Now the wells just supplement the water from Lake Mead.
There is some well water, though.
There is still some well water. And up until maybe 15, 20 years ago, there were a lot of private water companies around the valley. They were privately owned, but still supplied water to residents and then when the Las Vegas Valley Water District was formed, they stopped the water company from the Union Pacific Railroad, and the members of the Water District board were actually appointed by the city and the county. That was in essence a form of merging the two agencies together. And the Water District then started buying up all the little private water companies so that you could then have standard rates and standard services and have a better operation.
When I was working for the Water District, we still had just direct water lines to home. No water meters. You paid a flat rate for your water. And that’s one of the jobs I did in the summer, was to install water meters and repair water lines and whatnot. In fact, I remember one summer, in 1956 or ’57 when everybody was using swamp coolers. A hot August night, hotter that blazes and everybody’s coolers are going full blast and the line water is going full blast. A huge thunderstorm moves into the valley and starts raining and everybody shut their water off. I had so much water pressure pumped into the lines, it blew all the lines out of Las Vegas. Redwood lines. Las Vegas still had redwood main water lines, and the lines from the house that went under the redwood just blew out like a cork in a champagne bottle, and Las Vegas was without water for two weeks. A lot of Las Vegas was without water on account of that.
This was what year again, now?
’57.
That’s quite a story.
TAPE 2
Okay, this is October 28, a continuation of interview with Dr. Jim Jones, and this is my tape 2, side 1.
Dr. Jones, we were talking about water, and you mentioned the sale of certain water rights by the railroad to the Water District. I wonder if you could talk a little about the withdrawal of the railroad, the UP, from this community, how that happened over what period of time, and what the general reasoning was behind that.
I think the Union Pacific was a very dominating force in the operation of this community from the beginning of the railroad up until the ’50s, possibly. And this was a major base of operations for the railroad. Major shops here, had stockyards here. In those days, the beef that was corn-fed beef from the Midwest was shipped to Los Angeles. The cattle were loaded into railroad cars, and they could only be kept on railroad cars so many hours and they had to be unloaded and they had a term called “feed, water, and rest” for the cattle. So it was a major stockyards here. You’ve heard of stockyards in other cities. That’s generally why they had stockyards, where the stock could be unloaded from the railroad car, and were fed, watered, and rested. And so as the need for the shops diminished, and these shops were torn down and then the stockyards were torn down, and the lack of interest in people traveling by passenger rail, the influence of the railroad started to diminish in the community. And it was still a division point then for the railroad, which means that’s where trains stopped and crews changed and came from Milford, Utah to change crews in Las Vegas to change again in Yermo California and then they went on to Los Angeles. It still became a division point as far as crews were concerned, but as far as being a major employer, it wasn’t anymore. And they had pretty well pulled out of here.
Now you had mentioned your dad was connected with the railroads for some extended period of time. What kinds of jobs did he hold with them and when did he finally retire?
He started out in 1921 just working the shops as a helper, and he was a self-taught welder and mechanic and machinist, and he grew in that position to the point that he totally rebuilt crashed steam engines when they were capsized in train wrecks. And he was their chief boilermaker, which he rebuilt the boilers for the steam engines.
How often do you have to do that on a steamer?
I have no idea, but they had a roundhouse which is where they moved the engines in, that probably housed 20 engines, and it was always nearly full of engines being in there, being repaired in one fashion or another. And that’s what he did, is rebuilt those engines, the steam engines. As well as when they turned them over and the cranes picked them back up and brought them back, he mainly rebuilt those engines and put them back in service. And then when they started building the plant at Henderson, the Basic Magnesium plant, he was too old to go in the service, but they had a civilian draft program in those days. They would draft civilians and put them in war-related industries where they needed people to do certain things. Well, he went to Basic Magnesium to help build those steel buildings out there, and became, from a home study course, a structural engineer. Got his engineering training through ICC. (He laughs) International Correspondence Schools. ICS, I guess it was. So he did a lot of major design and construction work on all those buildings out in Henderson. And then when the war was over, he went to Nellis. Didn’t go back to the railroad. And worked at Nellis for 21 or 22 years until he retired.
And what year did he retire, finally?
1961. And he was a machinist, ran a machine shop out there. Maintained all the heavy equipment, road graders and that sort of thing. I worked for him out there one summer. After World War II, the base was deactivated, and had just a skeleton crew there, and I ran the street sweeper and the water truck to water the streets. They had mostly dirt streets at Nellis at that time. And buried the garbage at the garbage dump.
All the important things.
Right. I think I was fifteen years old. It was quite a fun summer. (They laugh.)
Let’s see. All of us are interested in Howard Hughes’ contribution to Las Vegas over the years. You know, the Summerlin work, and all the various wonderful things he did. Talk about what your observations were about Howard Hughes’ participation in this community and the contributions that he made.
Howard Hughes started coming to Las Vegas in the early ‘30s. There were some dude ranches here out in the valley that catered to the stars and the entertainers and businesspeople from southern California that came here to get away, to come for a divorce or to party, and Howard Hughes came here a great deal in those days. When the El Rancho was built, he hung out at the El Rancho a lot. And he was notorious for being a flake and not paying his bill and things like that. As I’ve been told. So he also owned a tremendous amount of land in Nevada. And I’m only going by what I remember about the land holdings, but he owned an enormous amount of land up near Fallon, Nevada, which the government wanted to build that Fallon naval ammunition [facility]. And he traded that land in Fallon for the land which is all the western bench of Las Vegas Valley, which is now Summerlin. So that’s how Hughes got the land which is Summerlin. Traded the government for it.
Then when he came back here and was living at the Desert Inn, he was an absolutely fanatical freak over the atomic testing and the operation of the test site. And he was staying at the Desert Inn, and I knew the owner of the hotel, he was a patient, and they had a big group of people coming in for the holidays, and so they asked Howard Hughes to move. And he told them, “No, I won’t.” He says, “Well, you will or we’ll throw you out.” He says, well, I’ll just buy the place, in so many words. And so he did. They gave him a number, and he bought it. And in retrospect, he stole it, pricewise, but he bought the hotel. And he stayed there. And so he had such a paranoia of the test site that he wanted to eliminate it, and he did everything he could to stop them from atomic testing and whatnot, and then he started bringing his team of people in here and buying real estate and buying land, buying more hotels until the point where he pretty well controlled the gaming industry. Of course, then he was under the regulations of the State Gaming Commission and all the ramifications of that, and no one had ever seen him. They knew he was here, but no one ever had seen him, and no one ever personally got to talk to him. Unless Governor Laxalt may have.
Now his chief operations officer was Bob Mayhew, and that’s someone you really ought to interview, because he can really tell you the insight about the development of Las Vegas and the Hughes industry, and he still lives here. He spoke at our Rotary Club two weeks ago. I could probably make a contact for you. And he has written several books about Las Vegas, about his relationship with Hughes, anyway. It’s a very interesting read. One of them’s Next to Hughes, by Bob Mayhew.
But you see, in order to operate a gaming [activity] in the state, [it] had to be licensed. And only individuals could hold licenses. And so Hughes had to personally be licensed. Or somebody did in the corporation. So I think the biggest influence that Hughes had – landmark influence was – through his relationship with Mayhew, and Mayhew’s relationship with Governor Laxalt, Laxalt pushed legislation through the state to allow corporations to hold gaming licenses. This was the big boom of Las Vegas. Because then the Hughes Corporation could own all these hotels. Hilton Corporation could come in here and buy a hotel. They didn’t build the first one, you know. They bought a hotel that someone else built. The present Hilton was originally the Las Vegas Hotel or – The International Hotel, and it was privately developed and built. But when the corporate structure was allowed to hold gaming license, then you had corporate groups that could raise money to build hotels. And the town started to explode, and is still doing it. That was Hughes’ greatest contribution. If that was really good – it’s been beneficial to many people: builders, developers, doctors and whatever because it made the community grow faster. It changed from a little, fun gambling town to a big city. The most exciting big city in the world.
That’s interesting. You know, there are some people that argue that now – folks that have been here a while – that Las Vegas “feels like a big city,” whereas others still say, no, it’s really a small town in its style. How do you feel about this?
I think there’s still a core group of people who were raised here, grew up here, that still see each other and are involved in things together, that still have a small community feel. And a mystique. But I think it is a big city. It has big city problems. It has big city crime, it has big city needs, power, water, streets, fire protection, police protection, growth, like any other big city. And I think they’ve done a remarkable job of providing services for the community [considering] how fast the growth has been. There’s always a lag. It’s been very difficult to always keep up with it.
We have big city services. We have everything any other big city has. We have all the greatest shopping that you find in New York City or Chicago. And we have it concentrated in smaller areas. We have a great ballet theater. We have a great philharmonic orchestra. We have an opera company. We have all the things in those areas. We have a great university. We have probably 50,000 people going to school [beyond] high school in this community right now. That’s big city.
That’s a good point.
Tremendous community college program. Tremendous university program.
To what extent as you see it, is the presence of the various levels of government felt and obvious? You know, the city government, the county government, the state and of course the federal government as it plays into the mix here.
In the ‘50s, and then up into the ‘60s, the city government was really the major player in the community. And as the Strip grew, which is in the county, the major players became the county commissioners because that’s where the growth is, that’s [where] the tax base is, that’s where the revenue is, and they really are the major players in the operation of this community. And believe me, what this community does, the state does. And that wasn’t always the way it was. Reno was Nevada, and they thought they were the only part of Nevada. And some of them still think they’re the only part of Nevada, and that’s why it was so difficult to get a university started down here. They wouldn’t give it up. And people who lived here that moved to Reno to start a business had a very difficult time. They just weren’t accepted up there. And Reno’s still a little town. And it’s interesting how the legislature has changed over the years. Really, southern Nevada should control the legislature, without a question. And they do, but tongue in cheek. They still rely on the (unintelligible) to side with the southerners in order to outvote the northerners. I think the power base is the county and the county government, and they have the biggest influence on the elections and the elections of the people who run the community and the state and the state legislature and the governor. So the county’s the big player.
Big player. Interesting. I was going to ask you where you see the “power” as being hidden? Where the decisions are being made. And you just said the county commissioners. How about the governor? Where does he play into this whole equation?
The governor’s been from southern Nevada for a long while now, obviously. I think that we’ve had very, very good leadership as governors. Really have. I think Bob List was a great governor, and he was from the north. He lives here now. And Grant Sawyer was a great governor. He was from Elko originally, but he became a southern Nevadan after his term as governor. I think the governor plays a tremendous role. I think he has to be the leader of the state legislature, obviously. He has to be in charge of the budget process and make the presentations to the legislature for his programs that are needed by the state to continue to operate. And so I think he has a very important role.
If you were looking at southwestern cities in general, how would you compare Las Vegas in terms of its similarities and differences? I’m thinking of places like Albuquerque and maybe Houston and places like that.
I don’t think there’s any comparison. I think that we’re starting to develop a very, very large community. Large city in a very, very nice way. When I say nice way: the streets are nice, the housing is nice, the parks are nice, the shopping areas are being done in a very tasteful way with a lot of thought and proper landscaping. Proper street lighting, proper architecture. It wasn’t like that for many years. It pretty well grew helter-skelter here. I think Phoenix was a good example for us to follow because it was developed very nicely down there for many years. I think except for Los Angeles, we’re the biggest city in the west. Really. Most action. We have the best restaurants. More of the best restaurants. San Francisco isn’t the restaurant capital of the west anymore. Las Vegas is.
So you cannot compare Las Vegas with other cities, because we have a whole different industrial base, which is entertainment, tourism, gaming. It’s a nice place to live. It’s not expensive to live here. Property is still not expensive here like it is in Phoenix or San Diego, even. Or San Francisco, or Seattle. And we have climate. We have a community that provides good services for its residents.
Now transportation obviously is becoming a major factor for this community. The 9-11 problem hurt the airline situation for a while. We all worry about the road nets and the notion of the new train they’re talking about. What’s your observation or view on where we’re going with transportation in this town, this city?
I think the airport, McCarran Field, has done a phenomenal job of staying ahead of the need to supply air service into Las Vegas, which is the lifeblood of the community. It’s a very well run airport. It’s a city unto itself. Employs a lot of people. Derives a tremendous revenue for the community. And they think 20 years ahead all the time. They’ve done a phenomenal job there. And this is a county operation, if you stop and think about it. And they’re looking ahead for another airport to be built in another valley.
I think that the rail situation is a disaster, but it is all throughout the country. And there’s a strong organization trying to build a high speed train to Las Vegas, and the money’s available to build it, if they can get the politicians to get together. And the right of ways and all the things that are necessary. Other countries do this, but the United States can’t do it. There’s too many entities playing for power [who] want to be in charge of it, and so it’s an uphill battle. The monorail is an example of something that’s been talked about in Las Vegas for 30 years, and so two hotels finally built one. It’s successful. And now little by little, another one’s being built to the northern end of the Strip, and then eventually on to downtown Las Vegas. The reason why they could never build it before is the cab companies resisted it. Cab companies generate a lot of money in the community. That’s a very lucrative business to be in, and they had a lot of political clout. And they kept their thumbs on the doggone monorail. It’s never going to hurt the cab industry. It’s too big now. You can’t put enough cabs on the street to meet the need for the number of tourists that are here.
You mentioned McCarran a minute ago being a county operation and so forth. I know that the Las Vegas Rotary Club was involved in helping to build that museum in the airport. You were probably a member of the club when that happened. Could you talk about the circumstances surrounding that?
Very close to me. My wife Katie’s father came here in the ‘40s. He was from Missouri. He also flew an airplane, and he landed here for some reason and thought, “You know, this is a perfect place for an airport.” Because it’s halfway between Los Angeles and Salt Lake City. And so he bought an old tractor and he bought some land and he leased some land and he built an airport, which is now McCarran Field. He built it out there and he operated it as a private airport. The first Las Vegas public airport or air transport center for commercial airplanes is where Nellis is now, and it was called Western Air Express Airport. And that was there before Nellis was built, which was in 1942, as I told you earlier. And so the commercial aviation still operated at that airport during World War II, when it was the Army Air Corps base. And in about 1948, the county bought the airport from George Crockett, and it was called Alamo Airport, incidentally, because George Crockett was the great-great-grandson of Davy Crockett. That’s where he got the name Alamo Airport. But the county bought his airport, and moved the commercial aviation from Nellis out to Alamo Airport. And George Crockett then kept the ownership of the fixed base operation, which is the private plane operation. He kept that for many, many years after that and eventually sold it to Howard Hughes.
And his ranch, the Crockett Ranch, was all on that property?
It was south of the Airport, the Crockett Ranch. And it was up on a hill and you could look down and watch the whole airport and all the planes coming and going and whatnot. And we had our annual Rotary installation or debunking party at the Crockett Ranch for 30 years in a row, I think. Thirty, 31 years in a row.
What is on that ground now?
That’s the tunnel that goes into the airport. The county bought the ranch, and it was about 30 or 40 acres. And I think that was the end of George. It broke his heart to lose his place. He died after they bought it.
That’s some story. So a descendent of Davy Crockett.
Yeah.
Very interesting.
And of course Katie and I have a lot of fun arguing about this, because my great-great-grandfather was general of the Texas army. There was a General Jones and there was a General Sam Houston. And Sam Houston was also a relative, and General Jones had gone back to North Carolina and those states to raise money to fund the Texas army to save the Alamo, and didn’t get back before the Mexicans overran it. And then Davy Crockett and his army were lost there.
That’s quite a story, too.
I’ve got most of that in genealogical records that I’ve uncovered just in the last few years.
Very interesting.
Crockett’s had a tremendous influence on this town. And then Katie’s mother’s family owned one of the dude ranches out in that area where Howard Hughes stayed, and all the Hollywood stars came when they came to Las Vegas to get their divorce.
Now what was her family name? The mother?
I can’t remember the last name now. It was Hiddenwell Ranch, was the name of the ranch, not far from the airport.
Interesting. Let me go back. Of course, Las Vegas, as you know so well, gets a lot of attention because of the gaming industry, and I know there are some conservative people in town who have certain views on it, pro and con. I wondered how you feel the attitude about gaming has changed in recent years, pro or con.
I guess I look at it differently. I think it’s a form of entertainment, and Las Vegas is really in the entertainment industry. They just have a license to have gaming, which is legal and regulated in this town. Very, very closely regulated so that it’s fair and honest. But it is an entertainment city. And they’ve emphasized that in the last ten years. It’s a fun place to go for vacations or conventions. If you want to gamble, you can.
I think that as a native, it’s something that I’ve always accepted and understood, and I’ve never had a moral issue with it whatsoever. I don’t think many of the community have had a moral issue with it. It’s part of our life.
I was wondering how the local religious groups have reacted to the whole –
I don’t think there’s ever been a reaction. I think that some of the religions may prefer that their members don’t work in the gaming industry or the liquor industry or things like that. A lot of them do. It doesn’t mean it changes their views or the way they live themselves, but they may work there. And certainly, whatever you do in this community, whether you sell shoes or deliver milk, you’re being influenced by the entertainment industry in this community, because if it wasn’t here, we wouldn’t be here.
That’s right.
And neither would this university.
(laughs) Excellent point. Let’s see, I guess it’s sort of a culminating question. I wonder if you could talk about what you see to be the future of Las Vegas as a city, say, in the next ten years. You’ve been watching it now for fifty years or so.
I’ve been involved in the community ever since I came back from dental school, since 1960. I ran for office three times, ran for Board of Regents twice, almost won twice, within a hundred votes one time. I’ve always had an interest in the university. I’m on the Community College Foundation board now, I’ve been on a lot of committees out here. I think the most important thing for the continued growth of this city is the university. Because we have to educate our people, we have to bring in the best minds in the country if we’re going to bring the best industries in the country here. Those people insist on having a place for their children to be well educated. And I think the university is the core of all cultural functions. This is the center of it, and without it, we would be just an old town. I think the university is our leader in where this community goes.
Now if we can train people to work in the casino industry, we can train them in gaming and culinary arts, hotel management, all these things can be fueled by this university. We can train people to be schoolteachers, to have business degrees, medicine, dentistry, law. Any area that is necessary to make a community a quality community with growth potential and cultural potential is centered at the university. And communities know that. I think there is a sense of community pride with the university. And I think most of the people have no qualms about having taxes raised for education and for the university. We all know we have to do it. I think the biggest resistance may come from the senior citizens’ group that have moved here. But they don’t want to spend any money on anything. They don’t think it’s their turn. But they have to look at it differently than that. They live in a very fine quality of city with low cost housing, low cost entertainment, low cost food, low taxes. It’s because we have an entertainment industry. And so they have to give back a little bit. They have to understand that their grandkids are being supported in some other community by some other industry. If the university’s an industry that drives this whole thing from now on, then they have to support the tax base to take care of our grandchildren. It’s a tradeoff. And the taxes here are so reasonable for what you get anyway.
This interest about taxing – the governor has a tremendous task to see that the tax base is changed, so that everybody helps out a little bit more than they’re doing now. We have to have better education. We have to have more teachers and better teachers, we have to have better grade schools and high schools.
Good point. Well you know, despite my best efforts I have probably failed to ask you something really important that should go on the record. What did I not ask you that I should have asked you?
I have a big list here! I think one of the things I’ve enjoyed about the community is being involved in the community. And in retrospect, when I think back, the years that I spent in Rotary, Kiwanis, on Boulder Dam Area Council of Scouts, worked on the board of YMCA, worked on Nevada Dance Theater. All of these things that I have done have made me a better person for doing it. And all people should give to the community in some way, and that’s what makes a community grow and get to be a better place to live. And I’ve been fortunate to be here through that growth. Besides my career in dentistry, and that’s been extremely rewarding, not only with the wonderful patients I had through the years, and the deep friendships I developed, but I’ve had an opportunity to learn to be a leader. I was president of the County Dental Society, State Dental Society, been a national officer. I’ve done about everything there is to do in dentistry, from the standpoint of organized dentistry. Dentistry’s provided me a great continuing education. And we have a great continuing dental education program based at this university that started on this campus, that I helped start. We started our first continuing education program out here, and we did it through – I can’t remember the three of us who started it. Three people from the university and myself. And now the Clark County Dental Society’s doing it on their own starting this year, but it’s always been a partnership with the university. It’s been an outstanding program.
I had the opportunity to go into banking, had a 20 year banking career as a director of a bank. Worked five days a week at a bank starting at five pm, then I’d go to my office. The [people] who started that bank met every day for five days a week to keep this bank going until we got it going. Then it became a very successful bank. It was started as Continental National Bank. We started with a capitalization of three million dollars and then raised another five and then really got it going, then it was eventually purchased by First Security of Utah. It was a very interesting career, and the relationships that developed there with the business community and the leadership of the community were just wonderful.
Sounds as though you’ve had a great life so far.
I’ve had, yeah. Still will have for a while, hopefully. That’s about all I can think of.
Okay. This is great.
Your questions are very thoughtful and thought out and I made lots of notes, and Katie and I talked a lot of the questions over. She was a great help in reminding me of things to tell you. And you interviewed her mother, or someone did. Mrs. Crockett
Well, I sure appreciate your willingness to participate. It’s going to make a big contribution. Of course, this will be here forever now, right here in the library, and hopefully –
I was really honored that I was asked, actually. I feel like I’m a newcomer. There are a lot of people around here.
Thank you very much.
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Oral History Project |
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