Search Results

Interviewed by Nathalie Martinez. Larry Mason is an Arizona native that moved to Las Vegas as a Higher Education Administrator. He was born in Tuscon, Arizona, but grew up mostly in East Los Angeles and his "Gramitas" ranch in Sonora, Mexico. He has a history in athletics as a basketball player in his upbringing which brought him to play at the New Mexico Highlands University and the European League. Earning a Masters in Education, Larry Mason came to Las Vegas to become the first Latino Director of Admissions at UNLV, first Latino President of the Board of Education, and first Latino Vice President of the Board of Education in the Clark County School District. He launched an incredible amount of movements within the educational field in Las Vegas including (but not limited to): the Mariachi program, the magnet school program, and the growth of the Diversity Division within the NSHE. Some of his greatest supporters and allies included Senator Harry Reid, John Lujan and Tom Rodriguez. Mason continues to work as a community leader for minority representation in STEM fields, as a board member for the Nevada STEM Coalition.

On the corner of 7th street and Clark, and beside the tennis courts of Las Vegas Academy, stands the law office of attorney Eva Garcia Mendoza. Eva has worked in her office since 1982, and in this time she has helped the Las Vegas community work through civil and immigration cases besides aiding in a myriad of other ways. Eva Garcia Mendoza was born in 1950, in the town of McAllen, TX-an environment that perpetuated hatred of Mexican Americans. Eva recalls the racism she endured; for instance, being spanked if she spoke Spanish in school, and her family facing job discrimination because of her skin color or her last name. Being an ethnic and financial minority was difficult, and Eva remembers nights as a child when she would cry herself to sleep. Eva showed resilience in the face of adversity as she states, “you rise to the level of your teachers’ expectations.” With the encouragement of her band professor, Dr. L.M Snavely, she began higher education at Pan American College. She moved to Las Vegas in 1971 and began to work before being accepted at UNLV to study Spanish literature. She graduated in the class of 1973. In 1975, Eva applied to become a court interpreter, a decision that would drastically change the trajectory of her career. She earned the coveted position and began to work beside Judge John Mendoza who was the first Latino elected to public office in the state of Nevada. Several years later John and Eva would wed. Judge Mendoza passed away in 2011. Eva talks about how extraordinary his legacy is-from his professional achievements to a story about his v football days and the 1944 Dream Team, this true story even piqued the interest of Hollywood writers. Through her work, Eva began to notice how she was more than qualified to become a lawyer herself, so she applied and gained a full ride scholarship to the Law School of San Diego University. Eva describes the struggles of attending school in San Diego while her spouse and children were home in Las Vegas. Despite the financial difficulties, being one of few minority students, and becoming pregnant her second year, Eva was able to finish her remaining university credits by returning to Las Vegas and working with Judge Mendoza. Together, they started the Latin Bar Association. Eva began her own practice in 1981 and would later partner with Luther Snavely, who was the son of her band teacher that helped her to attend college so many years back. Today, Eva has a new partner at her office and hired her son to work as a secretary. Eva also tells of the office’s mysterious history, of which includes a ghostly figure many clients claimed to have seen in the reception room. Eva recounts many of her professional achievements, such as petitioning to start the American Immigration Lawyers Association, Nevada Chapter, representing celebrities, winning the unwinnable cases such as against the Nevada Test Site. Eva talks about current events, such as today’s immigration laws, the discriminatory practices of revoking birth certificates from those born in Brownsville, TX., and about the importance of the #MeToo movement. Eva and her family have a great fondness for Las Vegas. The support for the Latinx community in Las Vegas greatly contrasts that which she experienced as a child in southern Texas. She describes wanting to take her children and grandchildren to visit her old home in McAllen, TX where her family grew up on the “wrong side of the tracks.”

Until her passing in 2017, Millicent (Siegel) Rosen was the living link to Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, one of Las Vegas’ most notorious links to the Jewish mob. A steadfastly independent woman herself, Millicent recalls Benjamin as a loving father to her and her younger sister. She is proud of his status as a Las Vegas visionary, though she affixes a footnote that the city of today might not be to his liking. She includes a few anecdotes about common names of the early days, including Meyer Lansky who walked her down the aisle when she married Jack Rosen. They had three children: Benjamin, Cindy, and Wendy. Millicent moved to Las Vegas to be with her daughter and her family in about 2000 and cherished her role as a grandmother. Always an artist at heart, Millicent once painted canvases for needlepoint and in 2015 promoted her clothing line.

Joyce Moore's family moved to Las Vegas from Chicago in 1953, when she was eight years old. She attended Rancho High School, married and had three daughters, and currently lives in Las Vegas. Joyce's father was in the gaming industry and her mother was a nurse. Growing up in Las Vegas meant going to shows with her mother, spending summer days in the pool at the Showboat Hotel, and riding horses to the Last Frontier. While a teenager at Rancho High school, Joyce worked at several movie theaters including the Huntridge, went to school dances and marched in the Hellodorado Parade. After her divorce, Joyce returned to work to support herself and her children, first at the Daily Fax then later on the Strip at the Aladdin and Circus, Circus doing a variety of office and accounting jobs. As a lark she and a friend applied to work as cocktail waitresses at the MGM; she was hired and spent the next five years in a job that was by turns interesting, exhausting, frustrating and fun. This interview covers several periods of Joyce's life - her childhood, teen years, and early adult life - and what it was like to grow up, live and work in Las Vegas in from the mid-1950s until the mid-1970s.

“At five years old, I was the youngest boy at the orphanage. This was the first time that I had lived with indoor plumbing and indoor showers.” To describe award-winning home builder Larry Canarelli as a self-made man is to grossly understate his accomplishments and his determination. Canarelli, founder of American West, Nevada’s largest privately owned development company, learned all about living without shelter as a very young boy. When he was nine years old, Canarelli, the second of his mother’s six children, encouraged his veteran stepfather to buy the family’s first permanent house for $80 down and an agreement to assume payments on the Veterans Administration loan. As his school peers dreamt of large, shiny cars, Canarelli envisaged big, beautiful houses. After self-funding his education, graduating from the University of California Los Angeles, completing two years of U.S. Army service, and earning his Master’s degree from University of Southern California, Canarelli began his career working with a large home building firm in the Los Angeles area. Three years later he switched firms, and the new company sent him to Las Vegas. In this interview, Canarelli reaches back to his childhood to explain his motivation to build houses: “All of my life, I had an interest in housing. Perhaps this is because of never having a house when I was younger.” He recalls how the Collins Brothers helped him when he founded American West. He describes the Southern Nevada “shelter market” of the 1970s and follows its evolution in style and marketing through the 1980s and 1990s; he talks about master planning and the builders who first master planned their Clark County developments: Pardee Homes in Spring Valley, American Nevada in Green Valley, and Howard Hughes Corporation in Summerlin. He speaks to the influences of interest rates and available land on housing prices; the importance of environmentally responsible housing; where the entry-level housing market will go, and ways that technology has changed home building and home buying. And throughout, he exemplifies his devotion to, knowledge of, and respect for Southern Nevada’s housing industry-its builders, its market, and its buyers.

Rachel Gibson was the granddaughter of Nevada pioneers. Her maternal grandparents, George Rammelkamp and Anna Dougherty, were among the earliest white residents of northern Nevada, settling first in Dayton and later Yerington. Her mother, Clara Angelina, and her two aunts, Elizabeth and Georgie, graduated from the University of Nevada at the turn of the century. Clara taught in Yerington for a number of years before marrying Chase Masterson, a dentist. Rachel was born in 1913 in Yerington. The eldest of three children, she continued the tradition of women’s learning and education that began with her mother’s generation. Her 1930 class was the first to graduate from Las Vegas High School, and soon after Rachel moved to California to attend college. Although her father had counseled her to study law, Rachel chose the field of economics. She received her Bachelor’s degree from the University of California at Berkeley, and worked in San Francisco for one year before returning to complete

Ruth Annette Mills was born and raised in Washington, D.C. She recalls the early years during WWII, her father's cancer and radium treatment under Blue Cross Blue Shield, his passing when she was nineteen, and her marriage that same year. Ruth and her husband and family lived in Georgia, Texas, and Maryland before coming to Las Vegas in 1968. She worked as a typist for the Office of Education at one point and did volunteer work for her church, the Cub Scouts, and the League of Women Voters. She also worked as a clerk-typist for the Clark County School District, and eventually became a teacher through the Teacher Corps program. She graduated in 1975 and was hired to teach 6th grade at CVT Gilbert. The school integration program was just beginning when Ruth was first hired as a teacher. She held the position of facilitator and recalls how angry parents were when they learned their children had to be bussed to sixth grade centers. Having been involved through her church with the Civil Rights Movement in other states, she was disappointed with the racist attitudes she encountered in Las Vegas. Ruth's involvement with health care began when her daughter-in-law developed kidney stones and was denied treatment. In 1993 she started the Nevada Health Care Reform Project through the League of Women Voters in order to support Bill Clinton's health plan. Fifteen years later, over 100 organizations had come on board to support the League's coalition in favor of Clinton's plan, and her fondest wish is that one day Universal Health Care will be available to all Americans.