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Engineer Edward "Ed" Butera spent hours constructing models from the time he was a five-year-old boy in San Jose, California. Besides his interest in building and design, the young Butera also loved math and music—specifically the clarinet, at which he excelled, and which he still enjoys. After earning his Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering at San Jose State University he was hired by Ralph Joeckel as a consulting engineer for Trane, a heating and air conditioning company. Joeckel became a mentor and "second dad" to Butera after the company sent him to Las Vegas in 1972, and the two remain close to this day. In this interview, Butera shares how he engineered and designed power, water, sanitation, utilities, and heating and cooling systems on many Clark County high schools, hospitals, and data centers while considering such factors as the building's shape and its affect on the way wind forces act on its glass, windows, and doors. He talks of his casino work that began with the Stardust soon after he arrived in Las Vegas, and before his client list grew to include Tony Marnell, Steve Wynn, and MGM. Besides the hotels, he shares his experiences engineering the infrastructure for the Bellagio fountains, The Mirage volcano, Treasure Island's pirate show.

One cannot talk about the arts in Southern Nevada without speaking of Patrick Gaffey. The Cincinnati, Ohio, native moved to Las Vegas as a child and has served the local arts community in several roles nearly his entire adult life, retiring soon after this interview as cultural program supervisor for the Clark County Parks & Recreation Department. After earning his Bachelor's and Master's degrees in English at the University of Nevada, Reno, Gaffey married Cynthia Pearson in 1968. In 1981 he began working as a publicist for the Allied Arts Council of Southern Nevada, founding its acclaimed magazine, Arts Alive, and remaining with the organization through its several moves until 1991. In this interview, he speaks to the collaborative nature and long vision of the Southern Nevada arts and architecture community through the founding of Discovery Children's Museum and the Neon Museum and of working with farsighted public entities—the Las Vegas-Clark County Library District, Clark County,

With so much emphasis put on the growth of Las Vegas and Henderson over the past thirty years, we often forget about the development of the others cities in the Valley. Expansive growth in Southern Nevada in the mid-twentieth century shows the region being one of the last bastions of agricultural existence, and Tim Hafen has been a major player in the development of the city of Pahrump. Born in St. George, Utah, and raised in Mesquite, Nevada, he graduated from Virgin Valley High School and attended Dixie College. Before the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) was called as such, his father introduced him to the working of the land through dairy and hay farming, where a young Tim decided he would never milk a cow again. His rejection of cow milking didn’t deter him from following the influence of his father after he married his wife, Eleanor, in 1951 and moved to Pahrump to become a cotton farmer. At that time, there were only 150 people in the area with a third of the population being from the Paiute tribe. Once the city was incorporated in 1964, he founded the Pahrump Valley Utility Company to get electricity to the area along with Amargosa Valley. Top crops at the time included cotton, alfalfa as well as wheat that were picked by Mexican farm laborers used under a yearlong contract with the Bracero program. vi In this interview, Hafen shares how he began his career in politics from getting called for grand jury in 1963. From 1966–1974, he was a member of the legislature, where he served two terms in the Old Capital building and held various positions such as Chairman of the State Board of Agriculture for twelve years and President of the Nevada Farm Bureau. He was speaker pro tem and Chairman of the taxation committee and decided to call it quits because of the Nixon scandal. Between 1974 and 1975 Hafen ended his political career, which he did before brothels began to come to the area later in the decade. In 1982, in the wake of the gasoline crisis, Hafen, like other Pahrump cotton farmers, could not afford to continue farming; he decided to shift from farming to development. His first development done was Cottonwoods at Hafen Ranch, which was on 160 acres of alluvial fan, non-farmable land; in 2000 he opened his second subdivision, Artesia at Hafen Ranch.

Henderson developer and Philadelphia native Richard MacDonald is a natural storyteller, and he has stories to tell. The man behind MacDonald Highlands and the Dragon Ridge Country Club first moved to Las Vegas as a young teen with his parents in 1959. After graduating Las Vegas High School in 1963, his parents moved to Hawaii and he enrolled at Nevada Southern University (now UNLV) and supported himself in Las Vegas by selling unfinished houses. His parents convinced him to move to Hawaii, where he attended the University of Hawaii worked with his father selling blocks of pre-developed cemetery lots to Asian buyers. In this interview, MacDonald describes his experience as a white man facing racial discrimination, of Las Vegas as Hawaii's Ninth Island, of earning his real estate broker's license, and of his father's plan to develop and sell Las Vegas property to Hawaiians. Returning to Las Vegas, MacDonald worked with Frank Sala and Chuck Ruthe to obtain his first two sections of Henderson land, which became Sun City MacDonald Ranch and the western part of MacDonald Highlands. He talks of developing Sunridge at MacDonald Ranch on Eastern Avenue and The Canyons at MacDonald Ranch. He also speaks to local prejudice against Hawaiians and to the way the City of Henderson favored Hank Greenspun and American Nevada Corporation. He recalls his twenty-year experience as a developer with the City of Henderson, its planning commission, city manager, city attorney, and city council. He reveals associations with Del Webb and the Del Webb CEO, Anthem, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the Sultan of Brunei, and polo fields as well as Red Alerts, the Foothills project, and MacDonald Highlands. Along the way he talks of golf course architects and planners and the MacDonald Highlands golf course, his family, the Great Recession, and his current status with the City of Henderson and the Archaeological Institute of America.

Las Vegas has been home to Irene Fisher (1940 - ) since the early 1970s. It felt like home as she connected with the Jewish community, including a dear friendship with Roberta ‘Bobbie’ Gang, who sits with her during this interview. During their oral history conversation, the seemingly common concerns of any mother are touched upon. In their case they were young Jewish women looking out for the well-being of their children. They cover a range of topics, from b’nai mitzvahs to Hanukkah to shopping in those years of raising children, being active in the community, and maintaining career paths. Irene begins by describing her ancestral background that includes parents who emigrated from Poland to New York. In New York she met and married a young doctor who she followed to Nellis Air Force Base. Irene was a recent graduate of Brooklyn Law School. In Las Vegas, though Irene did not practice law here, she immersed herself into civic contributions. Chief among those was with the Clark County

Minnesotan Don Laughlin landed far from the land of (more than) 10,000 lakes. His office 90 miles south of Las Vegas in the eponymous town of Laughlin commands an unimpeded view of a very different landscape from that of his youth. Here, where the Colorado River flows south through one of its narrowest channels, Laughlin arrived in about 1966 and purchased what would become the Riverside Resort Hotel and Casino. The endeavor was so successful that the then-settlement of 10 to 15 people at that tiny spot on the river grew to be an unincorporated town housing more than 7,000 people in 2010. Today, Laughlin the man continues to promote and support Laughlin the town via flood control projects and infrastructure development. In this interview, Laughlin sits amid the antique slot machines in his office and enjoys the view as he recalls his childhood on the family farm in southern Minnesota, and talks about leaving the farm in the late 1940s for nearby Owatonna to do watchmaking and watch repairing while simultaneously running a slot machine and pinball parlor. After visiting Las Vegas on vacation, he arrived permanently in 1952 and bartended at the Thunderbird Hotel until he bought his own bar and restaurant in Downtown Las Vegas, which he named Laughlin’s Made Right Café. After selling the café, he bought the 101 Club in North Las Vegas. He began searching for a casino for a casino to buy, seeking only those located on the border of a state that did not allow gambling. When he found the small hotel/casino on the Colorado River he purchased it. He talks of building an airstrip across the street and making daily trips to Las Vegas to buy groceries, beer, and toilet paper-essentially, everything one would need to run a hotel, restaurant, and casino-sometimes making three trips in one day. He continues to own and manage his hotel/casino at the age of 85, and he is in his office every day, all day, seven days a week. He gave up flying last year because he claims he’s too old to pilot his own aircraft. So is especially advantageous that the town that bears his name can now supply almost everything that he and the Riverside Resort Hotel and Casino need.

Amber Allan grew up in West Virginia and moved to Las Vegas at the age of 16. She entered the gaming industry in 2000 as a change person at Arizona Charlie’s Boulder where she later held the positions of floorperson and assistant shift manager. Allan would eventually move to Santa Fe Station in 2005 as relief shift manager, later to the Texas Station as a shift manager, and then to Palace Station in 2008 into the slot operations and technical manager role. She then returned to Texas Station at the end of 2008 as director of slot operations and then moved to Aliante Station into the same role in 2009. Allan started at Konami Gaming, Inc. in 2012 where she has worked as an analyst, product specialist, and, currently, as technical sales executive. The interview with Allan begins with her discussion of moving to Las Vegas and the experiences and roles she held as she started in the gaming industry. She discusses the various responsibilities she had in those roles, the types of skills required for them, and the kinds of disputes that are handled in certain supervisory positions. Allan also mentions and discusses the topic of hold percentage as it relates to slot and video poker players. She later describes her philosophy on what makes a good slot floor and also what customers are looking for in slots. Allan then provides the details of her move to the manufacturing side of the slot industry, and she gives her thoughts on what makes both a good and bad slot manager. The interview then shifts to the discussion of free slot play; ticket-in, ticket-out; changes in slot management; and the future of slot machines. The interview concludes with Allan’s discussion of her personal gambling as well as her advice for young people who want to go into the slot industry.