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 Mr. Norman Ty Hilbrecht, the Principal Attorney with Hilbrecht and Associates. Mr. Hilbrecht has been a resident of Las Vegas since 1939. He is a former Nevada State Assemblyman and Senator. Mr. Hilbrecht joined the Las Vegas Rotary Club in 1997. He is a Paul Harris Fellow.
This is Claytee White, interviewer. Today is Tuesday, August 29, 2000. Would you give me your full name please?
Norman Ty Hilbrecht.
People call you Ty. Is it just Ty?
Yes.
Does it stand for anything else?
Yes. My full name, actually the only place I think I’ve seen it is on my birth certificate, is Tyson.
Thank you. So, how are you today?
Very Well, thank you.
I would like to start with your early life and I’m going to ask you about your parents, sisters and brothers. You can tell me their names, where your parents are from and where you grew up.
As I think you know, I grew up here, but I was born in San Diego. My mother was a nurse, a registered nurse. My father was a professional engineer, structural engineer. I have only one sibling and that’s a brother whose name is Felix. He also lives here. He was an engineer. He’s now retired. He was an engineer for the Sahara Hotel for virtually all of his working life after a few years in the Navy.
How old is he?
He is seven years younger than I am.
Give my your parents names.
My father’s name is Norman Titus which accounts for the fact that people call me, erroneously, Junior because our middle initials are the same. Titus .My mother’s name was Elizabeth May Lair Hilbrecht.
Why didn’t he make you a junior?
I really don’t know. I think it was my mother kind of wanted me to be a junior as she recounted it to me and he abhorred juniors. So, they compromised and made my name very similar, but not identical.
How long were they in San Diego?
I really can’t say. My impression was that they lived there for about 10 years. My father moved with a portion of his family from Ft. Wayne, Indiana where his father was a Lutheran minister. I have the impression that they moved out there somewhere between five and 10 years before I was born, that is, my father did. He met my mother in San Diego. She was a trainee nurse at the time at the County Hospital in San Diego and they were married there and I lived there and went to kindergarten in Lemon Grove which is, as you know, a suburb of San Diego, but then we moved to Las Vegas when I was in first grade and I went all the way through the grades with one hiatus here in Las Vegas.
Why did they decide to come to Las Vegas?
They came here first just on a vacation in 1938 or 1939. My father had been injured on a dam site and after he went through about six months of rehabilitation, they recommended that he take off another three or four months and he came to Las Vegas with my mother and myself, a little shaver at the time. They liked it and stayed on, except for a year or two when my father got assigned to work in San Jose in a housing project. So, for second grade I was in San Jose, then came back to Las Vegas and in true form, Nevada always thought they had a better educational system than California. I was kept back in second grade. So, that’s why I say I went all the way through the grades in Las Vegas.
Did you think that was fair? Did your parents think that was fair?
Well, I managed to redeem myself because I was promoted back and put in what they called in those days, the one section. You have to understand that they had kind of a caste system in school in those days in Las Vegas. For example, when you got to fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth grades, all of which in those days were grammar school, they would have a one, say, through five section depending on the number of children in the grade and they would try to keep those with approximately equal academic achievement in the same section. I’m sure that wouldn’t fly these days, but in those days it was acceptable.
Where were you?
I was in the one section.
Do you remember where the family lived when you first came here and which year was that?
That year was 1939 and, yes, I do remember where they lived. They came here in a very nice-- I don’t think they made Airstream trailers in those days-- but they had a very nice travel type trailer.
That you pulled behind a car?
Yes, and when they came here, since they were coming on vacation, they simply went off, I guess like most people or many people did in those times, and kind of camped at the end of Carson Street near what is now 15th Street..
So, they were on the Maryland Parkway end of Carson?
As a matter of fact, they were very near Maryland Parkway and the reason they located there is because there was a forest of little Mesquite trees with the terribly long needles on them. I remember they kind of set up camp there and we lived there for a while until they decided they were going to stay and then they bought a home down in what is now, I guess, on the news they would call it Sunrise Acres part of town. It was the East Charleston and Fremont area.
When you were at the Carson Street, Maryland Parkway area, were there other people camped there as well?
Probably not, certainly not in the same little Mesquite thicket, but I have the recollection that there were a number of other people that would come in with campers. You see, they didn’t have formal motor home camps or whatever they call them where people can bring a motor home and hook up and so forth. You were pretty much on your own in those days. So, there were a number of people out and around. They weren’t clustered, however, because there were no formal trailer parks.
When you moved to the home when your family purchased the home, do you remember your neighbors by name?
Yes, there were, I remember particularly the fellow who lived across the street from us. His name was Elmer Wagner and he was a deputy sheriff and they had some horses. My parents never got into horses. Dogs and cats were enough for them, but we became very friendly with Elmer and his wife. I don’t remember her name. The fellow next door to us was, strangely enough, a fellow named Wagner, too, only his name was Paul Wagner and they were completely unrelated. Paul Wagner was a contractor and later founded Intermountain Lumber which was a big lumber company here for a while. Many years later Paul Wagner helped me secure lumber for my home.
Did you attend school right away even when you were camped?
Yes, my parents were very interested that I not play hooky. I was in a first grade class, I think. Burt Purdue and I were arguing about what the name of the teacher was. I think her name was Schultz, but he believed it was Schneider.
Do you remember Burt?
Yes, I remember Burt, but you’ve got to remember that Burt was in and out of public school. He went to a private school for a while and I would be less than honest if I said we were school chums. Unlike people like Frosty Cahlan, for example, who attended school with me all the way from first grade through high school and whom I can identify, Burt was kind of in and out of things.
Did you ever ride horses?
Yes, although my mother told me that she didn’t think it was a good idea because I wasn’t much of a horseman and I never had any training. I would occasionally ride when I was in grade school. Actually, the under sheriff lived down the street in the next block and his name was Johnny Lytle and he had a daughter about my age whom I had some interest in and she and I, occasionally, would ride. I didn’t particularly advertise it to my mother because she would have been neurotic about it.
What other recreation was available to you as a child?
Well, as I recall, we did a lot of hiking in the desert to which I can probably attribute the spots on my face from time to time. I built a lot of model airplanes and cars. We used to go to a lot of movies. That was kind of our family thing in those days. We’d go to the movies, maybe a couple or three times a month and then my brother and I generally could talk someone into going to the kiddies matinees. I don’t know if you remember kiddie’s matinees, but it used to be a real bargain. Cost you 14 cents and they would do all the old time cowboy movies. You know, Roy Rogers, Tom Mix and the Mark of Zorro type of things.
They had those movies in addition to a regular run movie?
Sometimes, it depended. There were generally two theaters in town that would run kiddies. Because it was close to my house, there used to be a theater where I think there is a vacant lot now, but on Fremont Street near 15th Street, there used to be a theater called the Vegas Theater and we used to go there and at the Vegas Theater they had [about] 10 cartoons in a row plus some feature which would be a cowboy or some kind of action movie.
Now, this is the first time I’ve heard of the Vegas Theater. I’ve heard of the one downtown, The Palace, but not the Vegas, so that’s interesting.
Yes, the Vegas was on East Fremont between 14th and 15th Street in the Biltmore area.
Were these theaters integrated?
I just couldn’t tell you. I think that they probably were, [but] I can’t say. The other one that ran the kiddies things was the Palace and I’m quite sure, that was right across from the Courthouse where the Golden Nugget parking lot now sits, right next to the old Ed Von Tobel home. That was integrated. That is, I remember seeing blacks going to that. There wasn’t a large African American population in town at the time and so I just can’t really be accurate about it. It was never an issue to my knowledge. I’m sure it would be to African Americans if they were denied access, but I never became aware of it.
Then we are talking about four theaters. We’re talking about the Palace, the El Portal, the Majestic and the Vegas?
I don’t remember the Majestic. Now you got me. I remember the Huntridge. The Huntridge was the big, new theater that opened up. I think I was just about ready to graduate [from] grade school when that opened. The Huntridge tract wasn’t opened. That was the really modern theater. It had a cry room for kids and all that stuff.
What does that mean? If the child started to cry…
The mother could take them up there and there was a sound proof glass and she could watch the movie and, probably couldn’t hear anything, [but] at least the other patrons weren’t disturbed by the child crying.
Was it an atmosphere where everyone knew everyone? Could you just run from house to house or run downtown? Were you free to do all of that or were you limited in your mobility as a little boy?
When I first enrolled, that is when my folks moved into the house, my father built a house, we bought a lot, built a house. When we first moved into the house and my mother enrolled me in school. This was after, it strikes me that it was during the summer time when we bought the lot and moved in, I remember K.O. Knudsen was the Principal of the 5th Street Grammar School at the time and he was quite outspoken like most people who had been in town for any time and I felt as though they were kind of resentful, that is the administration, of people moving in here because they were moving in far too fast. He told my mother because I was there, I remember it, he told her, she was inquiring about whether they had any school transportation and how I should get to school. He told my mother, you know, you really have no business locating way out there in Sunrise Acres, so far away from school. I’m sure there are houses available up on 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th Street, all the way on over to, by that time, 9th Street, 10th Street. Why didn’t you buy uptown? She said, because we like to live a little out of town. He said, well, I guess you’re just going to have to figure a way to get your boy to school then. There was no public transportation at that time and there was no school transportation at that time. So, when I was very young, my parents would drive me to school. When I became older, more independent, they let me ride my bike to school. That was a long ride, a couple of miles, but it was good for me.
It was a very safe community then?
Oh, yes. The only brushes with crime I had were minor vandalism to my hot rod. I think the worst criminal first hand experience I had was with a fellow who later became a cop, I believe, who popped the Cadillac hubcaps off my ’37 ford and stole them. That was about the worst thing that happened to me.
What kind of recreation was available for your parents and did your mother work?
Until I got out of grade school, she did not because my brother and I [were] at home and my brother was a good deal younger than I. As soon as I got into high school, she began working at the County Hospital here. She went back to finish her professional degree when I went to college and got an advanced degree at UNLV and became a charge nurse after that.
What did your mom and dad do for fun?
Well, we used to go out on weekends, sometimes, and climb hills or mountains. Go up to Mount Charleston. My mother was a Girl Scout executive of some kind. She didn’t meet regularly with a troop, but she had some kind of supervisory position and she volunteered with Girl Scouts and as a consequence, my father and I got volunteered and we used to haul up provisions to the Girl Scout camp up in Lee Canyon at the beginning of every summer. That was real fun because we would go up there and we would stay over a couple of nights to get the place up and running and then we’d go back down while my mother stayed up there for a couple of three weeks with the summer camp.
What other civic activities did she participate in?
Well, she founded the Las Vegas Rose Society.
What is that?
It’s a national organization that encourages the husbandry of roses, the propagation of roses, particularly hybrids. She also founded the local chapter of the Navy Mother’s Club. My brother was in the Navy. I was in the Army, but she didn’t found an Army Mother’s Club. Maybe there is no such thing. I don’t know.
I’ve never heard of either of those organizations. Was your father also involved in any civic organizations?
He was more involved professionally. He was the first secretary/treasurer of the State Engineering Society and he was one of the charter members, I believe, of the National Society of Professional Engineers in Nevada. He served on the governing board, the board that passes on licensure for members of the Engineer Society.
I want to know now about what you did when you finished elementary school and went on to high school. Where did you go to high school?
I went to Las Vegas High School. There was no choice.
Then, once you finished High School what did you do, where did you go?
When I finished high school I was very fortunate. I received a scholarship to Northwestern. So, I was going to college and I wasn’t looking for permanent employment. I had a fairly high profile because I had been involved in a lot of speaking competitions and I was graduated as Valedictorian. So, the superintendent of mails, who had a son in school with me, but a year behind me, invited me to work a summer job at the post office. There was only one post office then, as well. It was on Stewart Street at the end of 3rd. What I did was work as a substitute mail carrier and the idea was that I’d been here for a number of years at that time and knew where most of the streets were and could figure out where most of the addresses were and if I got lucky, I might even know some of the names of people here. So, that was a great job. I think if I went into retirement and they said, ‘would you like to have a little job just to keep you active,’ that I would want to be a letter carrier, because you could walk around composing stories, you could be doing anything you wanted as long as you got the mail sorted correctly and delivered in a timely fashion. The only problem I had was, I walked pretty fast and I could finish the route for the regular carrier that I was substituting for in about half the time it took him and if I dared come back to the post office, I would be in serious trouble. So, I would go home and take lunch and then come back and clock back in. Because we were substitutes, we were permitted to work any number of hours. I guess, until very recently, it was deemed that the wages and hours laws did not apply to government employment. They didn’t care if I wanted to work 20 hours a day, they could use all the help they could get.
With a job like that, could you see how fast the city was growing?
Yes.
Was it getting to the point that you didn’t know everybody anymore?
Oh, yes. As a matter of fact, I didn’t even know where all the streets were anymore by the time I stopped which was pretty much the last year of college. In law school, I worked with my father as an engineering assistant, which paid a little better and so forth, although in college, pretty much all the way through, I worked as a substitute mail carrier.
Now, that’s during the summers?
During the summers and Christmas holidays, because they worked you as long as you wanted to.
Where did you go to law school?
At Yale.
So, you were back east the entire time. Now that you can see Las Vegas from a distance, what was your impression of the city?
The defining difference in the East was that we had gambling. Cities back there did not.
How did people react to you when you said, I’m from Las Vegas?
That was a whole trip. When I was admitted to Northwestern and knew I was going to go, I began getting invitations to join all of the various fraternities. Northwestern in those days relied very heavily on the social fraternities and sororities to provide undergraduate housing. What they did is they would build a quadrangle with several three or four story dorms that we would now call condominiums or apartments and turn them over to a social fraternity to run because they felt they had less liability that way.
Was this on campus?
Oh, yes, a lot of them. Management was in the hands of the corporations that belonged to the various fraternities. Anyway, I began getting all these letters from all of these organizations with funny Greek names that I didn’t know anything about and they kept inviting me to their house to make sure to enroll for open rush and to attend their functions. I’ll never forget, I went back to Northwestern by way of train and I was met at Northwestern Station by some members of the Theta Xi Fraternity, not the one I joined which was Theta Chi. They picked me up and drove me up to campus for which I was grateful for because otherwise I would have had to take a cab. I’d never been to Chicago before in my life. So, the most frightening moments in my life, up until that time, had been riding the hammer at the carnival. But getting on the Outer Drive, Highway 42, was a new experience. It was a freeway before freeways were fashionable. These kids were driving, you know, these cars were side by side inches apart and they were driving 60 miles per hour and I thought we were surely going to crash before we got up to Evanston.
It became apparent to me when we were riding up there why they were so anxious to pick me up at the train station and maybe learn about me and possibly invite me into the club because I came from this swinging city, you see. Las Vegas was just beginning acquire an international reputation as being a great recreational area. They asked about gambling and said they couldn’t believe that there was anything but casinos. I had a lot of fun with that.
Had you ever been in a casino at that point?
Oh, yes. I had been because you eat at the coffee shop and that kind of thing. I’d never gambled because it was illegal at that stage until you got to be 21.
How did your family feel about gambling?
My family always believed that it was inappropriate for the government to intervene in things like vices, that as long as someone isn’t being injured or you’re not taking someone’s property, the government should pretty much butt out. They, therefore, were in favor of choice on the abortion question, they were in favor of legalizing gambling and prostitution. I moved to Evanston to go to college and that’s the only city that I’m aware of in the United States where it was illegal 24/7 to serve booze, alcohol. Evanston was the National Headquarters of the WCTU, Women’s Christian Temperance Union. There was an ordinance that prohibited serving alcohol in that community at any time.
So, you’re from Las Vegas, the party town, and you decide to go to Evanston. What is the hammer?
The hammer is a ride that they used to have at carnivals that would come into town. I think they still do. It’s something that spins you around at the same time it twirls you around at the end of a 30 foot arm and you don’t want to have a full stomach when you get on one, that’s all. It’s kind of a mix-master for people.
One thing that I failed to ask earlier, tell me about church life, your religious life, growing up here.
My father who was, as I said, a minister’s son and was educated in a church school in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, totally rebelled in his teens and claimed to be an agnostic although I didn’t believe it. He permitted me to be baptized in the Lutheran faith, but we did not attend church regularly. My mother kind of missed that and when I had gone to law school she had developed an interest in studying the family lineage. She became interested in the Mormon Library here. At first, she worked as a volunteer and later on she became a convert to the Mormon faith. She attended church fairly regularly. My brother was also persuaded, kicking and screaming, to make that conversion and I don’t think he ever took it too seriously. That’s about it for our religious background. Now, mine, when I went to school in Evanston, it was a city of churches, compared to Las Vegas, and I became interested in the Unitarian Church there which had a very fine pastor. It offered the opportunity to get involved in discussions with just great intellectuals. Albert Schweitzer used to attend and participate in many of those programs. Homer Jack was the minister at the time and it was a very, very popular church. It was really small by modern standards and they used to hold three services on Sundays and at that they would bring in several hundred folding chairs until the city of Evanston told them they couldn’t for fire safety reasons. So, then they had to begin making collections for a nice facility which I never got to attend because I was graduated before it was opened.
Was it unusual for a woman to join the Mormon Church without her family coming with her?
I’m ashamed to say that I don’t know that much about the Mormon faith. I think it might have been and that might explain why my brother was co-opted into it.
Once you finished law school, did you start your practice here right away?
I had an obligation to the Army and those were selective service days when there was compulsory military education and so….
Which year was this?
I was graduated from law school in 1959. I served a short stint in the military for my basic training. Then, I was assigned to Fort Ord where I was a training officer of one of the training companies. That was a big training base on the west coast. It has since been closed down, as you know. But, it was ideally near Monterey and Carmel.
I’ve watched JAG on T.V. Did you do anything like that while you were in the military service?
Yes, I did. As a matter of fact, I attended the army JAG school. Actually, it’s the only JAG school. All services attend one JAG school. It’s at the University of Virginia. That was very good duty. I enjoyed it. Never stood formation and probably, you were supposed to be in uniform, but I suppose you probably could have gone in civvies if you had to. They were very laid back compared to most military assignments. It was a good school, good experience.
During the cold war period at the end of WWII, was your father at all drafted or in any way involved in WWII?
I believe that initially he was rated 4F because of his industrial injury. He had a broken back and I think that they wouldn’t take him. I don’t think it would have mattered because when he came back to Las Vegas from San Jose which was in 1941 right after war was declared, he was put in the engineering office to convert the Las Vegas Air Field into and army airbase. So, he was involved in militarily sensitive work, at least during the early stages of the war. I doubt they would have drafted him out of that.
You were just moving here in 1941, 1942 when the war was on. Do you remember a military presence. You were a little boy, so do you remember all the soldiers?
Yes, I do. As a matter of fact, while I began school at 5th Street, they built a concrete block community, part of which is still intact on the east side of town on 8th, 9th, 10th, and 11th and 12th that was called Kelso Turner and it was built for the families of military people who were based at Las Vegas Army Airfield and the cadre, the staff, the people who were training these boys as they would come through. Because of the region of town, you remember the Principal wasn’t too excited about us people who lived out in the hinterlands, anyway. Because of the part of town, the way they divided the town up, they opened a new grammar school. They moved me over to North 9th Street School, which is no longer operational. I went to third, fourth and fifth grades there. I was moved back in the sixth grade to 5th Street because they changed the zoning. They opened a school in the Huntridge area called John S. Park, which was a pretty large school.
Huntridge is right there at Charleston and …..
It would be Charleston and Maryland Parkway. Circle Park is in the middle of that subdivision and if you go off to the west of Maryland Parkway about three blocks you’ll come across a large grade school which is John S. Park. Now that’s where Dick Bryan was transferred to. They divided the town up again at that stage. Anyway, North 9th Street school was located right in the middle of the Kelso Turner Tract and most of the kids that I was going to school with had fathers in the military; even the teachers were wives of military people.
You are telling me things that no one else has shared with me. I really appreciate this. Once you had finished your military service, was it short? We are back now in the ‘60s.
Yes, I served for a total of about two years on active [duty]. I remained in the reserves until 1968 when I was honorably retired in the grade of Captain.
That’s interesting. Getting back to growing up here during the war, at the end of the war we started testing bombs here [during] the cold war era. Do you remember that period and do you remember seeing the tests?
Yes, when I was still in grade school they began atmospheric tests. I can remember going out in my back yard in Sunrise Acres and setting my camera on time exposure and taking pictures that looked like daylight at four in the morning when they used to detonate those atomic bombs. I also remember one of the last atmospheric tests was done when I was a senior in high school and I remember the Principal permitting the whole senior class to march dutifully up to the top of the Las Vegas High School building (which is now the Las Vegas Academy) to watch the mushroom grow over the test site.
We didn’t know. Do you remember how the business community reacted to those, how they would advertise and get more business in town?
Well, there was an electrical supply company at the corner of Gass Street and Charleston that adopted as its neon sign the mushroom cloud. I’ve forgotten the name of the company, Clark County Electric or something like that. Let’s see, I believe Clark County had the mushroom cloud as its symbol on its little trucks and cars that they used. I remember Archie Grant used to be the Ford dealer. He relocated his Ford store from Main Street, to Las Vegas Blvd. at the corner of Stewart and Las Vegas Blvd. I remember one of the explosions knocked out the plate glass windows on his Ford agency and he was a little perturbed about it. I’m sure that the Atomic Energy Commission reimbursed him, or his insurance company did. I remember, he groused about it. This is the same Archie Grant after whom they named the first building at UNLV. I think he contributed substantially to the beginning of the university.
Now did he use the glass as souvenirs? Is he the one who did that?
Archie Grant would do something like that, yes. Early businessmen were quite flamboyant. For a while, Ed Von Tobel seemed to believe he owned the town, I’m talking about old Ed, a contemporary of my father. He had a section of 1st Street where he had built a little showroom for paint and hardware as part of his lumber business. He had the temerity to put out signs on the public street saying, parking for Ed Von Tobel Lumber Company only, and the amazing thing was, nobody argued with him.
Is that why you said he thought he owned the town?
Yes.
Tell me about coming back to Las Vegas after living in Chicago and then in New Haven. After living in those places, you did come back for vacations, but what was it like? Did you see a lot of differences?
I’d have to say, I was always frustrated when I was in grade school and high school because I wanted to do things like buy cameras and model airplanes and things we could get at only one supplier in town and they were usually outrageously priced. You’d look in the L. A. newspaper and see where you could buy all these neat things in Los Angeles or Phoenix or Salt Lake City, but you could never get them here in town because it was so small. Remember I was in touch with it and probably more than most people because I was delivering the mail. I was on the street when I’d come back in the summer time and [at] Christmas time, so I kept in touch so I wasn’t surprised by the growth like I am now if I drive around. The impression I had when I came back was that I really became more comfortable with the town in the 1960s because it was big enough that we began having stores like Diamonds and we began having wholesale outlets in town where you could buy cameras and electonics and building supplies less expensively and you could do things without having to pack up and go out of town or send a mail order for it. I really enjoyed the town. I was talking to Tom Hickey at lunch and we both were kind of reminiscing about how we really enjoyed it when the population was somewhere between 250,000 and 500,000 because you had most of the amenities of a big city, but you didn’t have the traffic jams, you didn’t have the crime and the smog that you have with a million and a half. It just seems too big now.
Are you going to leave?
I don’t know whether I would leave. I think that there are always things that compensate, one way or another. There are a lot of assets available to you here that you didn’t have even at a half million.
Tell me about your model car collection.
Well, we belong to the Mercedes Benz Club and these are all Mercedes Benz back to the first one. The Simplex was the first Mercedes Benz that was put into production and this is the latest one and I have one of those, a little SLK.
I shouldn’t be talking about pictures because the transcriber will never be able to do this, but is that Mercedes, your wife?
Yes, it is and these are two of my cars.
You have twin cars, almost?
Well, let’s see. One of them is a 1955 and the other one is a 1998.
Shows what I know about cars. Have you always been self-employed?
Yes. Well, I take that back. I worked for the state as a legislator for 10 years. I was a State Senator and State Assemblyman during the period 1966-1978.
O.K., after Yale Law School and the military you returned to Las Vegas?
Yes.
Tell me what happened in those first few years.
I went to work for one of the three largest firms in town called Jones, Weiner & Jones. It consisted of Louie Weiner, the two Jones Brothers, Cliff and Herb and Frances Horsey.
Are they related to Jan Jones?
No. Jan Jones is the T Mart family. They are the people who used to have the Thrifty Mart grocery stores. I stayed with Jones, Wiener and Jones for a couple or three years. I was doing two things for them; divorces which I hated and did more of than anybody else in town and Supreme Court appeals which I enjoyed.
Any famous divorces?
Yes. Carol Channing. Then another local attorney named Cal Cory , whose two sons have since gone into practice, came over and asked if he could take me to lunch one day and he said, you know, I’ve been driving by 230 Las Vegas Blvd. South for a number of years, I drive by on my way to work and I don’t see your name in gold leaf on the door there and I thought I might make you a proposal. He said, I’m the regional counsel for the Union Pacific Railroad and to tell you the truth, I’m withdrawing pretty much from trial practice and the railroad is all I’m doing these days, but I’d like to have somebody there to cover for me when I’m not there, so I wonder if we could work out a deal. I’ll hire the secretary, which I have to do anyway, and you come in and review all my wires in the morning, let me know if there is anything important and you can put your name on the window overlooking Fremont Street. We were right over the Melody Lane Restaurant on the corner of 3rd and Fremont, put your name up there on the glass and you can have your own private practice as long as you do that for me. So, I did that for several years. Later I became a partner with Bill Ryman who was a former Kefauver Committee attorney. We formed a partnership with Terry Jones, a fellow who had the misfortune of going to Harvard Law School while I was at Yale and who had been my debate partner in high school. The three of us formed a partnership, Ryman, Hilbrecht & Jones, which was a storefront firm on Third St. half a block from Fremont.. That lasted about three or four years until we had a difference of opinion about what office building we ought to move to. At that time (1964-65) the first high rise office buildings were being built in Las Vegas. Terry and I formed our own partnership, later incorporated and developed into Hilbrecht, Jones, Schreck and Bernhardt. It became a fairly large firm which purchased the historic Wengert house located at 6th and Charleston. They State Bar Association later purchased the building. Well, the firm was going in one direction and I was going in another, we decided to separate company, amicably, in 1983.
So, tell me about your political career.
In 1965, I became involved first as a young democrat and later became part of a group that organized to change the leadership of the county Democratic organization which at that time was run pretty much as it is today by the Culinary Union. We took advantage of the fact that there seemed to be developing a schism between the Culinary and the Teamsters, which as you know, at that time were no longer part of the AFL-CIO. So, the Teamsters sort of teamed up with us, to coin a phrase, and we took over the convention. We had a very colorful convention. That was another thing Tom and I were talking about at lunch. I was chairman of the convention and I got punched out in public by a culinary union bodyguard named Mike Marathon. I was on the front page of the newspaper with a band-aid on my face. I guess that literally propelled me into politics.
I have to find that paper.
Mike Marathon was later was convicted and went to jail for something having nothing to do with hitting me. I then attended the state convention in Winnemucca where I became chairman. When I came back I was elected the first vice-chairman of the County Democratic Central Committee.
And you were still practicing law during all of this?
More or less. If you’d ask my partners it was debatable. This was back when I had a fairly good-sized firm and they could support me, I guess. Anyway, I decided I would run for the Assembly and so I did and I was elected. I was appointed chairman of a pretty responsible committee, as it turned, out called State County and City Affairs. Now it’s called Government Affairs. Paul Laxalt was Governor. His big project was protecting Lake Tahoe and that was our committee’s responsibility. So, as chairman I received rather strenuous lobbying from the joints up around Lake Tahoe explaining how dangerous it would be to Nevada’s principle industry and the tax mother lode in general if we were to get too interested in this league to save Lake Tahoe. Well, we went ahead anyway. We weren’t able to complete the work on the bi-state compact because when the end of the legislature came in 1967, we had passed our part of the bi-state compact, but California had not. It took two states to put it in a form to send back to the U.S.Congress for ratification.Assemblyman Zieberg was in charge of it in California. We adjourned and then in 1968, Governor Laxalt called a special session as soon as California passed their part of the compact. We had to go back in and ratify what they had done so that both States would have adopted the same compact. That’s how the Lake Tahoe Bi-state Compact came into being. That was my special session. I served as Minority Leader in 1971 and then I ran for and was elected to the Senate. I served in 1975 and 1977 sessions. I finished up in 1978.
Why did you quit? I’ve heard that once politics gets into the blood, you just cannot quit.
For people like Dick Bryan and Harry Reid, who were contemporaries of mine and who were in the legislature at the same time, that’s true. But, it never got into my blood, I guess. I began getting troubled by the fact that I couldn’t make a decent living. In the Senate, I was on the Legislative Commission which is the interim legislature in Nevada. I was on the Interim Finance Committee, because I served on Senate finance. I was chairman of the Committee of Medical Malpractice Insurance and I served on the Public Lands Committee which went back to Washington and lobbied the United States Congress on changes on public land laws.
I decided then, since I was giving up at least one day a week to State business, at the very generous per diem of $60.00 a day I just couldn’t afford to serve any longer. Even in those days a lawyer made several times that if he worked at it. I guess really, though, I didn’t make the decision until I got a check from Sidney Stern, a fellow who had supported me in the past and who had started the savings banks in town. He sent me an unsolicited $500.00 check for my campaign, for my upcoming reelection and I thought, you know, I had really taken a lot of heat because I had spent $70,000.00 to defeat Chic hecht, who was later elected to the U.S. Senate. . I had spent other peoples’ money in an amount many, many times more than the $3600 per session the job paid. My campaign advisor, Kent Orem whom I had hired to run my campaign at the time, estimated that I would be spending between $100,000.00 and $140,000.00 to be reelected because of the way the city had grown and media costs had gone up. I just decided it wasn’t worth it. Particularly in view of the fact that I really didn’t feel that I could contribute to my practic with the commitments that I had. So, I elected not to run for reelection.
When you think back about your life in politics, what stands out as your major accomplishment, your major activity or your major bill that you thought you really did to help the State.
Two things, and both of them have to do with Governor Laxalt. The first one was the Bi-state Compact and that I view as a real accomplishment because it was a matter that was not inherently of interest to me. I knew very little about Lake Tahoe, but maybe that worked out for the better because I also didn’t have any prejudgments about it one way or the other and was able to broker a compromise between the Nevada gamblers and the California conservationists. The other one is a bill that I had drafted and got passed that would have given Nevada the first presidential primary in the United States. Governor Laxalt vetoed the bill as the result of a call he’d received from the Governor of New Hampshire, assuring him they would only leap-frog us. I remember that well because there was a democratic fund raiser for legislators here in Las Vegas where Ted Kennedy was invited out to be one of the speakers and Ted Kennedy came up to me, was introduced to me and said, ‘ I understand you passed a bill that I have a great deal of interest in.’ He said, ‘I certainly hope that you will get those Democrats organized so that they will override that Republican veto when you get back into session.’ Well, we didn’t. Anyway, those are the two things that I remember the most about my legislative career.
What are the possibilities of a bill like that now?
I don’t know. I have the feeling that we are going into regional primaries and it would be more important for Nevada, probably, to team up with another state like, maybe, California or Arizona, Utah, Wyoming, Montana. If you got this group, everybody would get a fair showing. If you team up with California, they are a country unto themselves. That wouldn’t be appropriate. I think this is the way it’s going to happen. I think we will have presidential primaries all over the country.
You mentioned Kefauver earlier. Most people can’t give me any information about that period here in Las Vegas, how it affected the community; if the community even knew what was going on, how the average person felt about those hearings.
Well, they certainly weren’t as involved in them, I think, as they were in the McCarthy hearings. There the editorial people took positions. I think the Kefauver investigations and studies were not as well understood. This was not a very sophisticated community. That’s why I was kind of impressed by Bill Ryman because he was a person who understood a lot of things about what was going on in the country. Nevada was quite insular, I think, quite parochial. I believe we were doing our own little thing here and it was working so nobody cared what was going on in any other place.
Tell me about the business community here. The major industry is gaming. Tell me about that early ownership in gaming. You can call it the family, the mob, what was that atmosphere like? Give me some examples of what it was like to live here during that era.
In the first place, when my family first came here, gaming was not the biggest industry in the city. The Union Pacific Railroad ran the city, not gamblers. The big gambling places were run by people largely I’m told, although I don’t know first hand because I was just a boy at the time, who had been illegal gamblers in the Eastern cities like Kansas City. I think an example of that is a guy named Farmer Page who, I believe, owned the Boulder Club or was one of the principals in that Fremont St. property. I think there was a group of them. But, what I do know, when I became old enough to pay attention was when a guy named Guy McAfee came to Las Vegas and he closed down the pool hall and started what is now the Golden Nugget initially at the corner of 2nd and Fremont Street. It was nice, it was a big casino and he was the first one to put up all these light bulbs that created what was called “Glitter Gulch. That was the beginning of Glitter Gulch. That’s what they used to call Fremont Street, Glitter Gulch. Then, my father told me that this guy had been a captain of vice on the Los Angeles Police Department. He had observed the activities of a guy by the name of Tony Cornero who owned a gambling ship off the coast of Los Angeles and was doing very well. So, what he did after he determined that he didn’t have a way to entice Mr. Cornero to share with him was get his own ship out there and he called it the Star of Scotland. Tony Cornero’s was called the S.S. Rex. Now, when McAfee came to Las Vegas I was told he sold out the Star of Scotland or sunk it or something and used the money to build the Nugget. I am told legal gambling on shore was a big deal. He had a very nice place. Within a short time the Apache Hotel, owned by P.O. Sylvani which was located directly across the street, from the Nuggett, was leased to somebody named Cornero and Cornero put in a gambling hall over there which he called, would you believe it, the S.S. Rex. So, Cornero was on one corner and his archrival was on the other corner, across the street. This was a most colorful era. The Elks Club used to be the meeting place for all the lawyers and judges. It was across the street from the courthouse on 3rd and Carson. I’m a lifetime member of the Elks Club here. The Elks Club organized something called Helldorado, which you may remember if you were here during the 40’s and 50’s. They used to put on a Beauty parade that would put many Rose Bowl Parades to shame. The hotels, when they got into this competitive mode, would spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on these floats that paraded down Fremont Street. They had three successive parades. One which as a school kid, I marched in which was called the Kids Parade. There was the Old Timers Parade and then the Beauty Parade. The Beauty Parade, of course, was the real highlight. It was the last of the three.
Three parades on the same day?
No, the same week which was Helldorado Week.
This went on for how long?
For about 20 years.
I always thought it was one day.
You probably got here when the Beauty Parade was the only thing left. They used to have a Western old timers Parade and that one, in the beginning, was the big one, with the 20 mule teams and they’d have the Budweiser horses and all of that stuff. When Tony Cornero moved out of downtown and out on the strip with the Stardust and the places on the Strip became big, the Beauty Parade took it away from the rest of the community. You asked me about the gambling that was in the community and most people, I think, who were around at the time, believe that there were fewer problems. I’m not saying that it was better, but there were fewer problems apparent because early gamblers were just hypersensitive to public criticism because they recognized that they were a privileged industry. The whole country frowned on what they were doing, but they could do it legally here. They were very self-conscious and they did not want bums sleeping on the street. I don’t know what they did with them and I don’t think it was probably very good, but they did not have homeless people in Las Vegas that anyone could see. When I was a boy in high school, you would go to the Junior Prom and after the Prom, instead of going to the drive-in for a soda you would call up the Flamingo and if you were a local and it was prom night they would put you at a ringside table and you could hear Tony Martin sing and they would serve you cokes for fifty cents a pop all night long, as long as you wanted to stay there. Locals used to be catered to because gamblers believed they had to curry favor with locals in order to keep their otherwise illegal business going. They catered to people who lived here. Now they don’t. If you’re a local, forget it. At lunch today, at the Golden Nugget, the waiter said, oh, by the way, are either of you staying with us? He looked disappointed when we said no.
But, don’t you think now it’s getting to the place that they’re beginning to respect the locals again? I see two for one coupons for all kinds of things now if you are a local or half price show tickets if you are a local.
I think the market drives that because you have two different classes of casinos.You had the Silver Dollars and the Saddle Clubs, you always had local clubs, but now, they are big local clubs and they rely on a constituency and they have to compete to get it. I’m talking about Station Casinos and, to some extent, the Boyd Group and these folks, Arizona Charlie’s, yes, they are locked in bitter competition. But you don’t get those deals at the Treasure Island or at Caesar’s Palace.
Yes, you’re right. Contrast the city’s atmosphere during those days with what happened once Howard Hughes came and other corporations started coming.
One of the things that I have mixed emotions about happened when I was in the legislature. I think that there was no reasonable alternative but we authorizes corporate gambling. You could not feasibly license a corporation to conduct gambling under the Nevada laws in 1967 because every stockholder would have to be licensed. The Golden Nugget was a closely held corporation, but it was a corporation and all the stockholders had an individual gaming license. But, you can’t do that if you are going to be a public company.
How many owners were there?
I don’t know exactly. I know who some of them were, but I don’t know how many there were. I would guess, fewer than 15. This was after McAfee sold out. The corporations, I guess the biggest change from the so called gangster days when as a high school kid I could sit stage side and watch the most expensive shows in the country for a pittance was because these people did not identify the showroom, the restaurant or even the hotel rooms as a profit center. They identified the casino as the profit center and all the rest of these things were just there to support the casino. They just counted down the casino and if they counted down the casino and it was doing well, they didn’t care what the rest of the place was doing. As soon as corporations took over, a different kind of economics began to be applied. People who are accustomed to manufacturing automobiles want to make sure that you are making money in the parts department as well as in the vehicle department as well as in this and that. So, when they buy stock in a hotel that happens to be a gambling casino they want the rooms to pay their way and they want the meals to pay their way and they want the shows to pay their way and I think that was a substantial change from the past.
Earlier you mentioned the hearings that were held here during the McCarthy era. Tell me a little something about those. I don’t know anything about what happened locally in any place. I just know the national picture.
Well, I’m not sure the local picture was much different from the national picture although you have to understand that when Bugsy Siegal came here, he brought a great P.R. man with him by the name of Hank Greenspun. Hank Greenspun eventually bought a struggling local newspaper that was founded by the Typographical Union when they walked out in a strike with the Review Journal. Now, Hank Greenspun wanted to make this paper pay for itself. There had been a half dozen failed efforts at establishing a competitor for the Review Journal in this little town. He did it by sensationalizing anything that he could and generally he took a fairly responsible position. He, perhaps, was dogmatic in the way he presented it. As I recall, probably the best example of that is, he took on Senator Pat McCarran who was probably as near to the Dalai Lama of Las Vegas as you could find at that time. He took on Pat McCarran and I can’t tell you as I sit here what the issue really was, but he sold a lot of newspapers because people wanted to know what that crazy Greenspun was doing. The Hotels would jerk their advertising out, so he filed a lawsuit because they were organizing to blacklist him. Things really got interesting. Well, he supported, not surprisingly, the movie industry and the people who he thought were being victimized by McCarthy and the McCarthy investigations. Of course, being dogmatic as he was, he used straight talk. He didn’t beat around the bush. He was not a brilliant linguist. He got the whole community kind of going. So, the other newspaper felt duty bound to point out all of the good points of what McCarthy was doing, you see.
I didn’t realize that there was a relationship between Greenspun and Bugsy Siegal. I had forgotten it. Can you give me any more details about that relationship?
I don’t know first hand about them. I do know, however, when the Review Journal, no, maybe it was the Sun, published on the 40th anniversary of the Flamingo Hotel, I believe the hotel teamed up with one of the local newspapers and published a little tabloid that was kind of a condensed version that had a lot of little articles about how the Flamingo was founded and so forth and Hank Greenspun came here as the public relations director for Benjamin Siegal who was the owner of the company. I don’t think he stayed long, but that’s how he got here.
In the very beginning of your law practice, I know at first you were doing a lot of divorces, I know at that time law firms didn’t advertise.
No, it was against the law.
Yes, so how did you go about getting clients there in the beginning.
I was working for Jones, Weiner and Jones and I thought, they never offered to print any cards for me, so I went down to Mark Wilkinson, the local printer, I’d gone to high school with his kid, and I said, I need some cards and probably a little stationary. I said, you know, I’d like to have it gray and printed gray on gray because I think that looks cool. So we did and I handed Frances Horsey my card when I got some and he looked at that and he says, you know, they are going to disbar you.
(Laughter) It was too fancy?
Yes, he said, that’s advertising. You can’t do that.
It would have to be black letters on white paper?
Yes, that’s how strict they were. You know, I can remember, nowadays the bar says, look, when you have a first meeting with a client, one of the things that you have to do, you can’t let him leave your office without telling him what you are planning to charge him. In those days, you never told the client what the fee was going to be because they had to take it on faith. Like doctors now. Do you ever say, doctor, how much is this going to cost me? Well, maybe a dentist. Endodontists always do because they are going to charge you an arm and a leg anyway. This was high professionalism. It would be beneath a lawyer to discuss a fee with a client. They just sent a bill out at the end of the month and knocked him dead.
Criminal as well as civil, it made no difference?
I can’t speak for criminal. Although my first five jury trials were all criminal jury trials. In those days in a small town, with a little court house and three judges, every Monday the junior member of the firm would be sent down to Law and Motion and you’d dutifully take notes on what cases your firm had, when the trial was going to be set and all of these things. I would go down and here I would be sitting there taking my notes and you would always try to hide behind a senior lawyer in front of you, but the judge always knew I was there and some guy in the dungeon in the basement for forgery or embezzlement or some other minor felony would have to take me as his defense lawyer. “Mr. Hilbrecht, you are going to represent so and so’. He’s incarcerated and you’d have to go down and see him, organize your case, try the case to the jury. Predictably you would lose and they’d send you a check for $150.00 or something like that.
So, it was almost pro-bono.
Not only that, but you had no choice and you had no training. I was not a criminal lawyer. I never intended to be a criminal lawyer. I took one criminal law course in Yale Law School, a lot of constitutional law which is kindred but not criminal law. Those poor people did not have adequate counsel. If there are any of them still in the penitentiary, I will join in their petition on the grounds of inadequate counsel. I finally got a federal appointment. Judge Foley appointed me. Federal Judge Roger Foley appointed me on a Lindberg case which was a fairly serious thing. I think the punishment was 10 years to life.
What is that?
You remember that Lindberg was a kidnap case. Part of that act says that you can’t threaten or extort over interstate telephone and, for some reason, as the result of domestic difficulties, my client had been arrested at the behest of his father-in-law who had the political clout to persuade the F.B.I. to listen in on an extension when my client tried to call his wife, was rebuffed by his father-in-law and told him that he was going to knock his block off if he didn’t connect him with his wife. The F.B.I. accommodated the father-in-law by arresting him and charging him with a Lindberg violation. I won that case and I said, I’m going to quit while I’m ahead. I’m never doing another criminal case in my life.
What I had to do to do it is to get the local bar to support a public defenders office here, and I did it. I had many, many arguments with lawyers who felt that the criminal appointment system was how you trained lawyers at the expense of the criminally accused. I disagreed, always, for selfish reasons. But, we finally got it on and I was successful in getting Dick Bryan appointed as the first Public Defender was Dick Bryan. Now, defendants at least have a shot at acquittal because even it they are bad lawyers, at least they have experience.
I failed to ask you about your family life because your professional life is so interesting. So, tell me, when did you get married and who you married and if you have children.
Actually I was married when I was in officers basic in Fort Benning, Georgia. I was married to a lady from here who decided that she wanted to come down there and we’d get married there, so we did. We had one daughter. She then got involved in computers, and she became what they used to call a programmer, but that really meant going inside the computers and wiring the computer because you did a lot of things with hardware that you now do with software. She was very good at it and, boy, here I was a beginning lawyer and I wasn’t making very much money and she was making a lot more money than I was, so she said, who needs you? So, we were divorced, but amazingly enough, she got a really good deal from the government, the defense department and they shipped her overseas. She was over in Vietnam in headquarters, doing programming and computer work there. So, my daughter stayed with me.
What’s your daughter’s name?
Bonnie. So, I reared Bonnie between the ages of about five and twelve when her mother got back from her assignment. Then she took over again. I was single for about seven or eight, maybe 10 years until 1978 and I met Mercedes whom I had met at a time when she was married. When she and her husband were divorced several years later we got together. We were married in 1980. She also has a son, my stepson, who works for the state parole and probation.
What does Bonnie do?
She has credentials as a masseuse. She does physical therapy. She works in a physician’s office where she does this. She and her husband, who is a deputy sheriff, live in a small town in North Carolina called Manteo.
Yes, that’s one of the first settlements in North Carolina.
Correct. It’s kind of an island type thing. They are out on the Outer Banks, I think. She has two children, a little boy and a little girl.
Do you go back to North Carolina often?
No, they come here. Because, you see, this is the exciting place to go.
But, if you ever want to relax, the Outer Banks is it.
I’m told that, yes. I really missed the shot because I had a client that owned a famous golf course on the Outer Banks on Hilton Head. Anyway, they owned all the golf courses on that island and I had the opportunity to go out there, but I never did.
Do you golf?
No, I don’t. I did when I was college. Northwestern used to have its own golf course and we used to have intramural golfing, but I haven’t since then.
What kind of hobbies do you have and then tell me about your civic activities.
Well, my hobbies are gardening, photography and I do a little with cars although not that much anymore. It gets uncomfortable to lie on my back that long. History, I enjoy history, particularly WWII airplanes. When I was a boy, growing up here, I knew every airplane type in the United States military, both the Navy and the Army and Marines, of course, and who built them, who built the engines, who built the propellers, who built all the parts of them, what their power was, what their gross weights were, how many bombs they could carry, how far they could fly, how fast they could fly, all those things I used to know. Don’t ask me now, but I used to know.
You probably would have been great on Jeopardy.
Yes, if you got on the right subject.
What kind of civic activities did you get involved in along the way?
I became involved in a lot of little things. I was involved in N.C.C.J. for a while.
What is that?
National Conference of Christians and Jews. I was involved as relief minister for the Unitarian Universal Fellowship here for a while because they hired a minister that had a day off and I got to manage the service during the day that he was off. I was president of the Legal Aid Society, chairman of the Clark Country Law Library-things like that.
An attorney that is a part time minister.
Not any more. That was years ago. That’s in my youth when I was young and foolish. Mercedes and I are both Lutherans. We go to that church. We support one pretty heavily back in Wisconsin where her mother lives. What else? I belong to a lot of professional associations, bar associations. I’m in the leadership of the United Fund, these kinds of things. I’m a member of the President’s Council at UNLV and Rotary Club, of course. We can’t forget the Rotary Club.
Were you surprised that UNLV hired a woman president? I always look at Las Vegas as a John Wayne type town, so was that a surprise?
I guess I don’t look at Las Vegas as a John Wayne type town. No, I wasn’t surprised. I served in the legislature with some very, very capable women.
Did you serve with Jean Ford?
Yes, I did and I served with Flora Duncan and I served with Jean Ford’s very good friend Sue Waggoner. I served with Geraldine Tyson, Eileen Brookman and a number of women, Margie Foot who was a real solid legislator.
Was Dina Titus after your time?
Dina was not elected until after I was already out of it, but I think she is very able.
What does Mercedes do for a living and what kind of organizations is she active in?
She is active as a legal administrator. She runs my office. She’s actually in quasi-retirement at this stage. We are trying to slow down the practice a little bit. We have a couple of resident agent firms that you may have seen on the door out there which are companies that serve as agents and advisors on corporate matters. That requires less legal time and, therefore, we can get by with fewer lawyers. I got out of the big firm and I wound up here with eight lawyers and I finally said, now wait a minute, when I began worrying about the nut again, why am I doing it? So, we have slowly tapered down. I have one associate.
How long do you plan to remain in practice?
Well, I will probably remain in practice, just because I like to have the office. It’s a good center. I feel comfortable today, here. You don’t have my cat sitting on your lap. You appreciate that, although I have a cat here that would accommodate you if you wanted him to.
No, thank you. I do a lot of interviews with African-Americans. Tell me about race relations from the point of view of a person who grew up when you did here and with the friends that you had and with your kind of activities. Did you, at all, intermingle with the African-American community at any point along the way?
Pretty much in school. Of course, I was active in what they used to call Wildcat Lair, which was a teenage social club. When U.S.O. closed up after WWII, the school district took it over. A delightful lady by the name of Jeannie Roberts who ran a school of dancing in the community organized a board composed of students in high school to run a teen club there. So, we just took over the U.S.O. and made it into a teen club and it was called the Wildcat Lair. There were several African-Americans active with us. Now, there was a good friend of mine all the way from grade school was a guy named Jerry Hogarth. He calls himself David Hogarth now. His father used to work for the Post Office where I worked with him during my college years. There were a couple of girls that I remember that I went through the grades with. Ones name was Madeline Coleman, another one, Evelyn Dishman. So, my contact with African-Americans was mostly at school. Because of my background, I was just not sensitive to racial differences, I suppose. A lot of the people who came here during the war, came from the South. I think they were probably biased and felt racial differences were significant. But, I have to be honest, from my perspective, which is probably not a very good one because I was just a white guy in school like most of the others, African-Americans were a real minority in school, a very tiny minority and I can’t say they were treated any differently than others. I have, as I look back from where I am now, I feel the reason is that, probably, unless their parents were in a professional or management kind of position they might not have gone to school. You know, that troubles me in hindsight, but at that time, you never gave those things a thought. I would say everybody was fighting the war in the ‘40s and trying to avoid the draft and Korea in the ‘50s. I guess, nobody was at that stage until the late ‘50s was really sensitized to racial issues. So, I can’t say that I really gave it much thought.
It seems that there were some elementary schools on the Westside. It seems as if after that, those students, a lot of them, must have stopped school.
They must have.
One high school in the beginning, then two high schools, but most of the white kids here who went to those high schools don’t seem to remember enough black kids. There should have been more black kids in those high schools. They seemed to have either dropped out of school or maybe went to the South, I can’t understand it yet, what happened?
I don’t understand it either although, as I said, those three names I gave you were the only three people that I can recall going through high school with. I think I had gone to grade school with either all three or at least a couple of them. When it came to my observation, my contacts, being ostracized in some fashion, I didn’t think so. But, you never know what’s going on back home and what pressures are there.
Do you remember the mid ‘50s when the Moulin Rouge opened?
Yes.
Did you ever go to the Moulin Rouge.
Yes, I think I may have gone there once or twice. I know I went there after its heyday, after it was closed down, I think kind of a shopping center type thing. I know I went there for some political things. Bob Bailey had Sugar Hill and that thing over there. I used to campaign over there quite a bit when I was in politics. That’s really all I remember.
If you remember Bob Bailey, you probably remember Dr. West, Dr. McMillan. So, in 1960, do you have memories of, there was a campaign afoot to integrate the strip, but it was integrated without incident. Do you happen to remember that Saturday and how Oran Gragson went over and was able to make a deal?
Frankly, I don’t. I hold Oran in very high esteem. I think he is a sweet guy and I’m sorry to see him withdrawing. I think he ought to stay more involved in things than he is.
So, has he retired?
Yes, he’s retired from everything as far as I can tell.
When you look at Las Vegas as a city, where does the power lie? Is the power here in this community on the strip with the businessmen, the casino owners or is it with the county government, city government, State government?
The power lies in the hands of a few people who are the C.E.O.’s of a few large hotels. They are challenged from time to time. Regrettably, I find the County Commission to be a serious disappointment. I also find the legislature to be a disappointment. When I was in the legislature, the State ran the State of Nevada. Even Howard Hughes sent Bob Meheu to talk to me in 1968 when I expressed concern at Hughes purchasing six hotels. Now, I’m afraid the Clark County Commission and the corporate CEO’s run the State of Nevada and I find that very undesirable.
Are you going to run again and make it right?
I doubt it. Too old for that kind of stuff.
When you think of Las Vegas in a national picture, its national visibility, its national image, how do people outside see us, see this city?
I don’t believe they are amazed anymore like they were when I went to college. I think that they realize that you can’t have a million and a half people in a community all living in resort hotels and I think they recognize that there are a few churches in town and a few other businesses. I think a lot of the community is still generated by the same kind of people who created the old image of Las Vegas glamorized by the News Bureau when they used to have little events here. As a matter of fact, when the corporations got into the hotels, they admitted they were staging events and they weren’t all just boxing matches. They would have an event. I remember because I was representing transportation companies. They’d call up the client and say, we’re going to have an event. We don’t know exactly what it’s going to be yet. Maybe it will be a rock concert, maybe it will be this, maybe it will be a prizefight. We don’t know yet. This is all, it has a gloss. It’s not reality. It makes you think, gosh, the room census must be down or something. There must be a reason for doing it. It’s not because they want to improve the quality of the service they are offering, or make the food cheaper or anything of that kind. It’s just because it’s a cheaper way to get the bottom line up. They say the more things change, the more they stay the same. What I do see is a basic change, a shifting to make this a shopping area, a focus of high-class retail merchandizing and I approve of that. I think that can be a very vital thing for the community. I think that this is the kind of thing that will bring people back without special events. They will say, gee, Neiman Marcus in Las Vegas is just so much better than it is in Dallas because they sell things a little differently there. Desert Passage stores, you know, I think that this kind of thing opens up a real new industry that’s within reach. You don’t have to build space ships and it’s really related to and compatible with the, so-called, gambling resort industry.
What communities did you live in here after leaving your childhood home?
I lived in Charleston Heights. I lived in one of the first central air-conditioned homes built in the Las Vegas Valley. It was build up in a tract that the Beckers developed, what they called Charleston Heights and it was way out in the sticks at that time.
Where is it now?
Well, now it is several blocks behind Arizona Charlie’s, off Decatur. It’s west of Decatur. I lived up on a little street called Idle.
What other communities have you lived in?
Not very many. I moved from Sunrise Acres up to Charleston Heights and then I moved out where I live now. I live way out of town on Mohawk, off of Blue Diamond Road. I allways lived out of town. You know, I saw all those John Wayne movies and I believed it when he said, “Get out of town.”
Are you near Pahrump?
Our main way into town is the Pahrump road, although we are not nearly that far. We are still in the Las Vegas Valley and we are very near I15.
What do you think is the most major change that you have seen in this city since 1939?
The most significant change, to me, has been the improvement in your ability to buy nice things in town. The most significant change in the State’s economy, I believe, is still probably the enactment of corporate gaming which probably saved us from being ravished by Robert Kennedy.
The very last question and I want you to add any comments that you want to add to the tape. What do you see as the future of this town? You talked about the high-class shopping that we have now that’s going into another ear. Do you see anything else that shows you what the future is going to be here?
I don’t think we are going to get into heavy industry. I think we are shouldering out, what is here, the chemical plants and so forth. I believe that the opportunity for diversification, in addition to a very high-class retail Mecca, will probably be in the area of things like the movie industry, television production. The infrastructure is here for that kind of business. The skills are here. You have everything from musicians to stagehands in an abundance here whereas you don’t have them in most communities. As the resort business, the gambling part at least, tones down those people will be available for doing movie work, T.V. work, that kind of thing. We are a short drive from varied kinds of locations. I think that is a compatible kind of industry that will kind of develop. I would like to think that we could get into something a little more sophisticated like Silicon Valley industries, but we really lack some opportunities for those people. We do not have a strong university, yet. We do not have a good engineering program, yet. We do not have a scientific community. We did in the A.E.C. days, we had some very sophisticated scientists. But this is a gawkish, fast-growing community that destroys its past in an effort to reidentify itself. We have no “culture.”
In what ways?
When the Atomic Energy Commission was operating in this area. But, we have lost those people. They are very mobile and they are gone, hopefully never to return because we don’t want to go back to that again. I think we have an opportunity to get into some areas of that kind, but we have to build a university and a cultural environment that will attract people. Do you ever wonder why no theater in Las Vegas wins the Emmy for the best regional theater in the United States when one up in a little town of 20,000 people in South Central Utah does? I see this guy on television saying, hey, we got it all here. We got all the culture in the world, but we don’t. Until we can reconcile our past with our future, we never will. We should stop imploding our past.
But, we have such great possibilities, though.
We have the potential for it.
And, the University is growing rapidly. It surprised me.
But, growing rapidly and growing academically can be two different things. One of the reasons I think, has been the shift of emphasis from basketball U to academic program. The reason I joined the President’s circle is because I think it’s important that we keep our valedictorians in the State and not send them all to Harvard and Yale and Columbia and Northwestern. I think we ought to try to keep them here. The only way we are going to do that is first, getting qualified kids and, second, attract and keep qualified professors. Qualified professors that are not challenged are not going to stay.
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