NEVADA STATE MUSEUM & HISTORICAL SOCIETY LAS VEGAS, NEVADA THE LAS VEGAS I REMEMBER INTERVIEW WITH HAL G. CURTIS January 6, 1998 Taken At KNPR Studios 5151 Boulder Highway Las Vegas, Nevada TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 2 MR. ANDERSON: Today is January 6th, 1998. And this is for The Las Vegas I Remember. I'm Tim Anderson. And, Hal, if you'll introduce yourself. MR. CURTIS: I'm Hal G. Curtis. Been in Las Vegas off and on since 1930. My mother owned property here. And after her second husband died, she returned to Las Vegas from California, where I was born, and brought all us kids with her. And I think it was a good move, because at that time where there was scrip, and most of the country was in the depression, and Las Vegas had solid money. It had hard money. Boulder Dam was going on. MR. ANDERSON: Are you talking about scrip? The rest of the country was using scrip? MR. CURTIS: Most of the rest of the country was on scrip. They didn't have solid cash like we did in Nevada. I think the expression when I was a kid was that there was two jobs in the world at that time, construction jobs. One was the Siegfried Line in Germany, and the other was Boulder Dam, and the conditions were about the same. But that's the expression from the Wobblies. They tried to organize the dam, didn't do too good at it. MR. ANDERSON: Yeah. We can just start from the beginning. You could describe the town a little bit, your first memories of the town. Now, how old were you when you got here in 1930? TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 3 MR. CURTIS: About six years old. MR. ANDERSON: Okay. MR. CURTIS: And it was a very small town, I guess less than 5,000 people. First school I attended was the Westside school, which was the grammar school. And then we went to the school on Fourth Street because the one on Fifth Street had burnt down. The one on Fourth Street was condemned, but they didn't have any money to build a new one, so we went to that one anyway. And they finally built a new school where the one had burnt down there on Fifth Street, that was a grammar school. And then we only had one high school, which was the Vegas High. And I sold newspapers, Review-Journal. MR. ANDERSON: Do you know a guy named Ikie Bloom? Did you know Ikie Bloom? MR. CURTIS: No. MR. ANDERSON: He was, I guess, at one time the circulation manager for the paper and dealt with the kids that sold papers. You're not familiar with Isador Bloom? Ikie Bloom? MR. CURTIS: I could have known him but I've forgotten about it. MR. ANDERSON: Okay. MR. CURTIS: The Review-Journal was right there on South First Street across the alley from the Cinnabar. Us TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 4 kids used to line up in behind it there in the other alley that run behind the Safeway store, and then we'd pick up our papers. You got two papers for a nickel, and you sold them for a nickel apiece, you know. And that's how we made our spending money when we wasn't working for the bootleggers or passing out pamphlets for the politicians. MR. ANDERSON: Now, Prohibition was a good deal for you kids at times, huh? MR. CURTIS: Oh, yeah. MR. ANDERSON: Tell me about that. MR. CURTIS: They didn't have many Feds in here, but when the Feds did come in, the bootleggers would get us kids to make their deliveries, especially the small deliveries. And then we had to sneak by the bellhops in the hotels to get the bottle to the room, if that was where it was going, or better if it was one of the cabins or motels as they call them now. We'd make deliveries for the bootleggers. Also, we mixed that booze for the bootleggers. I think they was paying a dollar a gallon in them square, five-gallon tins for alcohol from the bootleggers. And that was the people that made it, that had the worm on the still. And the one guy I worked for, his name was Scotty. I can't remember his last name now. But he was behind downtown camp, which was off of North Main Street. And we'd mix it with distilled water in an old bathtub with a wooden paddle. TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 5 And it depended on whether he was going to make gin whether he put juniper berries in it; or whether he was going to make whiskey and he put wood chips in it for coloring, made different coloring; or if he was going to make brandy, and he put caramel in it and sweeten it up. They used all different things there to make different varieties of booze. It was all about the same. But it was good for us kids. I was heartbroken when the Volstead Act was repealed, you know, cut into what little earnings I was getting. MR. ANDERSON: Now, what would happen if the bellhops caught you? MR. CURTIS: Well, they'd take the booze away from us. They wanted a piece of the action. Everybody wanted a piece of the action. But I was caught a couple of times. I had them take a bottle away from me one time, and we pretty well took care of that bellhop. So every time we seen him, we'd hit him with a rock. It was a slingshot, you know. And slingshots were pretty good. The first job I had for honest employment was breaking windows for a glazier. We'd go out and pass out all these pamphlets they'd get printed up that they installed glass. And then we'd go out and break a few windows, and that way we got so much per window. Like my mother said, it's a good thing we didn't work for a mortician. But that's a TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 6 private joke. MR. ANDERSON: That's a good one. MR. CURTIS: Then there's one joke I'll tell you about employment with the railroad. There wasn't much work, you know, during those depression years. And this one guy had a friend who was up in Milford, Utah, and they sent him a penny postcard and said if he could get up to Milford, Utah by Thursday, he thought he had him a job. So the guy didn't have any money and he was trying to catch a freight train, and the railroad bulls was watching the freight train. So he tried to catch the blinds on a passenger train, and they was watching that. So in desperation he jumped on the cow catcher out in front of the engine. Well, it was a mail train. It was pretty high stepping, big wheel, fast moving train. And he was up in front of that engine, breaking the air in front of it off the cow catcher, and about to freeze to death. And just getting daylight and he was coming into Milford, Utah, and a mule stepped out in front of that train. Well, when he came to, he was in the Milford hospital there all casted up and been there about three days. And the agent from the Union Pacific Railroad came in and got him to sign a paper there and give him a check for $150. He thought he was riding that mule. But that's one of the jokes from back in those days. So what else do you want to talk about? TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 7 MR. ANDERSON: Being the depression years, your mother had to work to support the family and the kind of stuff she had to do to support the family. MR. CURTIS: Well, she rented rooms, and she done some ironing, and she done some housekeeping for people, you know. This was a pretty depressed town, but it did have hard money. We had our Hoovervilles. Down where Woodlawn Cemetery is, to the north of it, which is now a tract of homes, that was all what we called Hooverville. And it was cardboard shacks and everything. I went to school with a lot of kids from there. And Hoover wasn't very well liked. I think the reason the people resented him so much, he didn't try to do anything about that depression we was in. And then he had a farm, a big ranch over in California with a great big sign on each end of it as you went down Highway 5, "No White Help Wanted," which didn't set too well with the people. And then the Chamber of Commerce from California dropped pamphlets over the dust bowl back there in Oklahoma and Texas and all those depressed states asking those people to come west to pick fruits. And they got them out west, and they cut the salaries on them. And whether you've read In Dubious Battle by Steinbeck or not I don't know, but it gives you an idea of how close we come to going Communist under that TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 8 depression we went through. And it was hard times. But, hell, you can even have a good time in hard times. You know, you can find fun in anything, and we did. We had a pretty good time here. MR. ANDERSON: So what did a kid do for fun in a little town like Las Vegas? MR. CURTIS: Well, we did one evil thing one time. This old guy, he worked for the school district, I believe. And I don't know whether it was Halloween or not, but I think he was either driving an Essex or a Reo. And four of us jacked that car up, took the rear-end apart, and took the axle out and put it on the other side, put it back together. It took us half the night with a couple of candles underneath there for light. And when he got in that car the next morning -- we'd been up all night waiting for him to drive it -- put that thing in low gear, and it went backwards. He put it in second, and it went backwards. He put it in high, and it went backwards. The only gear he had to go forward was reverse, so there he was chugging along. It took him a couple of days, I guess, to get it fixed. Somebody finally told him what was wrong with it. Then another time, they had a tavern over on the Westside behind where I lived called the Westside Tavern. And I think there was about six or seven of us, maybe it was more TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 9 than that. But they had a men's outhouse and a women's outhouse. Everything was outhouses in those days. And we took that big two-holer outhouse and just moved it back of the hole. We done it, five of us. The rest of them all took off. They was scared. Five of us climbed up on the roof of the back of that Westside Tavern and was laying up there waiting for the first customer to come out for the outhouse. I'll never forget this guy. He had on a boater, one of them straw hats, little string tie. Nice, well dressed, you know. I think he was pretty well loaded. He came walking out and reached for that door, and in that hole he went, and a hollering and a cussing and a screaming. And I got to laughing up on that roof. And it was fall of the year and all them damn cottonwood leaves had fell on that damn shingled roof. And I got to laughing, and I slid off that roof head first. Wonder I didn't break my neck. But I never did tell anybody about that for the longest time because I figured that guy might still be alive, you know. But it was an awful thing to do. But we found amusement in a lot of things. When the lake was forming out there, well, we went out there one time, Harold Rochelle, and my brother, and myself. And I think Harold's mother drove us out there. We was going to spend the night out there by the lake. And the TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 10 lake was just forming in those days. And it was summertime, and we put our blankets right down by the sand, by the water's edge there, about eight or ten feet from the water, you know. And sometime during the night, one of them islands out there that had undermined, the earth caved in, and here came this big wave about 3:00 o'clock in the morning and got all of us. Swoosh, right over the top of us. So I never did stay that close to that water until that lake got up and dissolved all them islands out there. There was a sheep out on one of them islands, and somebody finally killed it. It got marooned out there. They used to take feed out there and feed the damn thing. And then somebody went out there and killed it, you know, trophy or something. Who the hell knows. MR. ANDERSON: Oh, you mean a bighorn sheep? MR. CURTIS: Yeah. And that's when they found Quehoe, his body, was after the lake formed. Somebody back there in a boat found that cave that the water had risen up enough so they could see it. And he had evidently died in there of a broken leg or -- MR. ANDERSON: Now, who was this? MR. CURTIS: Quehoe. He was an Indian that had killed some people. They had his body on display at the Helldorado for a long time. And I think when they got all these rights through that you couldn't display bones and TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 11 things like that, they made them take it off. But they chased him quite a while, never did catch him. MR. ANDERSON: I heard a story that even after they were displaying his bones that people had seen him alive. MR. CURTIS: Well, it could have been. It wasn't necessarily proven that it was Quehoe. He was halfway mummified back in that thing. But there was somebody there, you know. There was a dead body there that belonged to somebody. MR. ANDERSON: Now, how did Prohibition work here? The local police, did they pay much attention to the bootlegging activities? MR. CURTIS: Well, from what I gather, Nevada never voted for the 19th Amendment, although they had enough states to ratify it. And Nevada became known as "one door." We had the "One Door Law" in this state. Evidently the Feds mandated under federal law that the states would close one door of all of the bars in the state. That was the onus put onto the local law. Well, the local law didn't think any more of the Volstead Act than anybody else did, so they would close up one door. Well, some of them bars had three doors, you know. Some of them had two. Well, they'd close the front door this year, put a notice on it, and then they'd tell the Feds, "We TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 12 done our job, you do yours." Well, they didn't have enough Feds to man the whole state. And then the next year, they'd close the other door. So it put the Feds on the hot track for the Feds there. But it never did work in this state. It never worked in any of the states. It just created the gangs. But it was sure good for the bootleggers because, darn, there was good money in bootlegging. MR. ANDERSON: Now, as a delivery boy, what kind of money were you making to deliver? MR. CURTIS: Well, they'd give us from a quarter to 50 cents, depended on how much we had to stir a vat, which was about a half a day's wages for some people, other than the dam workers. And they give us a quarter for delivering, if we had to make a delivery. So we got one cent for a half pint bottle, two cents for a pint bottle, three cents for a quart, and a nickel for a gallon jug. But then after the Volstead Act was repealed, they embossed that federal stamp across that thing. Well, the bootleggers didn't want that because that was breaking a federal law if they used it. They wanted the old-time bottles that were smooth, you know. They were in demand back then, especially the half pints because it was easy to hide a half-pint bottle, you know. It was good. MR. ANDERSON: You made a delivery to a hotel one TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 13 time where, I guess, you were trying to avoid the bellhop. And how did you manage to do that? MR. CURTIS: That was down at the Overland Hotel. And I went up the drain pipe and through a window and went down to make the delivery. And that was a good delivery. I think that guy was in there was a gal. And I was supposed to get 75 cents for that half pint of whiskey, and he gave me a dollar and a half and told me, "Get it and leap." And I was out that window like a bird, you know. But that was a good run that day because I made a dollar. I got two bits for delivering it, and he gave me a 75 cent tip just to get rid of me. Get his bottle, get out of there. But it was good, you know, good times. MR. ANDERSON: Now Block 16 was active back then in the early '30s. Do you have any remembrances of Block 16? MR. CURTIS: Oh, yeah. I used to sell wood to them whores down there, sell sacks of wood. They each had their own little crib there, you know. And you'd sell them a sack of wood, and you'd get a dollar for a sack of mesquite wood. And they were good people. Them whores was good people. MR. ANDERSON: One of our former county commissioners here, Harley Harmon, told me a story about he used to run errands for them for a few days, before his Dad found out. Did you ever do anything like that? MR. CURTIS: Oh, yeah. See, they was only allowed TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 14 off the block one day a week. They had to stay there. There was a lot of restrictions put on them women. And most of their food was delivered from the Silver Cafe, which was down on North First, and the Chinaman run that. And you'd see them waiters taking the food down to the Block. But, yeah, anybody could run errands for them whores. If they needed something from town and they couldn't get off and they needed to tend, you'd go get it for them, you know. And they'd tip pretty good. They took care of the people that run errands for them. MR. ANDERSON: I guess Nevadans didn't care much about that. It was just pretty much par for the course. But did tourists? When tourists came to this town, was that a big tourist attraction? MR. CURTIS: Oh, yeah. It was an attraction for everybody. I guess you know where the red light district came from, don't you? MR. ANDERSON: Not exactly. MR. CURTIS: Well, there used to be these posts that the railroaders hung their lanterns on. And they had lanterns, and you had a red thing and a green thing for stop and go, and they usually hang them with the red exposed while they went in and got serviced. And they come back and picked their lantern up. That's how it got the name red light TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 15 district. That's where it came from. MR. ANDERSON: Okay. MR. CURTIS: Yeah, that was a good time then. That was a sorry thing when they took them whore lines out. MR. ANDERSON: How did the town feel about that back then? Was it pretty equally divided? Because I've heard that a lot of the women in town sort of resented that because then men began looking for prostitutes out on Fremont Street. MR. CURTIS: No. Where the big scam came was when the war started. When they opened McCarran Field out here, which is now Nellis Air Force Base, they opened McCarran Field there in preparation for us going into World War II. And the hue and the cry from the mothers of them kids from other states from all over the United States, the hue and the cry about open prostitution -- in fact, I think we had one sheriff quit. Frank Wade, I think he resigned rather than close the line. Because with the line closed, soldiers started trying to pick up the gals on the streets. And I think it was better if they'd have left the line open. And then as time went by, I think Washoe and Clark is the only two counties that don't have legalized prostitution now in this state. I think legalized prostitution is good. I think house whores are a lot better than these ones that's walking the street. MR. ANDERSON: Absolutely. TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 16 MR. CURTIS: Great deal of difference there. But you know, it's all a matter of how you look at it. MR. ANDERSON: Right. So you're getting a little older, you're getting into your teen years, and you didn't care much for school. Tell me a little bit about that. MR. CURTIS: It was boring. You know, we had people that was supposed to advise you of what to do. And I'd ask them, "What can I study for that I can get a decent job when I get out of school?" They couldn't answer you. Hell, you had every craft in the United States out there out of work. This was the '30s. And it's like compulsory to take Shakespeare. I don't mind reading. I'm an avid reader. But I asked the teacher, I said, "What in the world good is Shakespeare going to do me when I got to go out and go to work?" And they said, "Well, that's the criteria. That's the way we got to teach." Well, I figured I could read Shakespeare whenever I wanted to out of a public library. Other than ancient history and sports, school was boring to me. It was just a drag. And I finally quit when they started building this Basic Magnesium plant. When they created the town of Henderson out there, I went down and seen Murphy, who was the business agent for the Laborers Union. And I asked him, "Can TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 17 you get me a job?" He says, "Can you get a hold of $20?" I said, "I'll see." So I went down to a druggist, old Doc Jenkins, that owned the Overland Drug Store, and I borrowed $20 off of him and gave it to Murphy and got my union book. And he sent me out for Engineers Limited. And we was working on the pipeline from what is now Saddle Island to Henderson, which was a 44-inch pipeline that brought the water in for that Basic Magnesium plant. And I went to work for them, just quit school. Good job. MR. ANDERSON: What kind of money were you making? MR. CURTIS: Well, I was making 75 cents an hour when I first went out there. I guess I'd been working there about three months, and some guy in a suit showed up one day. There was me and this Mexican fellow that was hooking up these sections of pipe and unloading them off of these trucks. And I seen this guy down there talking to the boss, and he come over and talked to us. He asked me if I belonged to union and I told him, "Sure, Laborers Union." He said, "Well, this is Ironworkers' work, unloading these trucks." So whatever happened between him and the company, but we got a raise in pay. We went to a dollar and 12 and a half cents an hour for unloading them trucks instead of 75 cents. TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 18 I thought that guy was related to God, you know. That was the best money I'd ever seen in my life. But then I finally did join the Ironworkers years later. MR. ANDERSON: Now, this is late '30s, early '40s? This is the early '40s? MR. CURTIS: This was in the '40s, yeah, that they built that Henderson plant out there. And where you are now, there was cardboard shacks all along here. There wasn't enough housing for the amount of people that they brought in to build that place. And the first cat house that went in out there was a Silver Slipper. And then the Silver Slipper on the strip bought the name from Joni. She came in there. I know my older brother and myself stopped in there one time coming back from work out there at the Engineers Limited, and here was this wooden, newly put up shack with a bar, you know. And it was about 24 foot by 20 foot, I guess, built out of fresh-cut pine. So we stopped in there. And there this Joni was with two of her daughters. Well, she had a going business there, you know. I think it was way after the war. I know it was after I came back out of the service in '50 that she sold the name of Silver Slipper to the Silver Slipper. She had patented that damn thing. She had a little TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 19 bit of griff sense there. MR. ANDERSON: I'm trying to get an idea, how big was that Hooverville? You say it was near North Las Vegas there. How big was that? MR. CURTIS: Oh, I imagine there was 4 or 500 people in there. MR. ANDERSON: The housing conditions were like what, again? MR. CURTIS: Well, they was living in cardboard shacks, you know, and metal. Buildings that had burnt down, any metal that they could retrieve. Like, they retrieved a lot of metal from the school burned down. They had those two by four foot panels in the ceiling, embossed metal. A lot of the shacks was made of that, whatever they could get to build out of it. It was the same thing even after the dam started. They had a Hooverville out there at Boulder. And if it hadn't been for the burros around here, a lot of families here would have starved to death, because there was a lot of burros killed and eaten out there. MR. ANDERSON: Got to do what you got to do. MR. CURTIS: And I think every man that was working that was staying at Anderson's camp out there, which was the camp for the Boulder Dam workers, what you did, you had a shoe box, and you went through and filled your box for lunch, you TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 20 know. It was a set price. And I think every man that went through that line was feeding two families, because they'd cram it in their shirts and everything. There was a whole line of people as they came out to go to work. They was passing food out to them people. Times were tough. It was tough times if you get right down to the nitty-gritty of it. But it was better than the rest of the country. MR. ANDERSON: That's just so hard to imagine now. MR. CURTIS: Yeah. I had somebody tell me one time our country wouldn't let anybody starve to death. Well, that's bull. There was a lot of people starved to death in that depression. Yeah, that was a bad, bad scene there. MR. ANDERSON: So after FDR comes on the scene, how did people look at him compared to Hoover? MR. CURTIS: Well, like a messiah. What he did, he shook things up. He might have created deficit spending, but he sure as hell got this country back on its feet and kept it from going Communism. MR. ANDERSON: People were afraid. People, seem to me, were afraid. MR. CURTIS: They were afraid, yeah. Well, the banks would crash. The people would grab their money and run, you know. It was desperate times. People took desperate measures. Hell, look at Bonnie and Clyde. You look at the bank robberies then, and nobody really respected the TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 21 authorities because the authorities was big business, and big business was what caused the turmoil. And the wealthy people just locked their factories and locked their shops and moved to Europe. Europe had already been in a depression. I'll never forget, I was asking a Dane, when I was in Denmark in '58 -- this guy was 77 years old, and he had been an American citizen, had went back to visit Denmark when the Nazis moved in. And he was kept there over two years. And once he was kept there two years, his citizenship reverted to Danish, and he couldn't come back to the States. But I was talking to him. He was in Denmark when Denmark went through the depression after World War I. And I said, "How bad was the depression in Denmark?" "Oh," he said, "that was good times for me." He said, "I was working on a fishing boat." And he says, "We was making good money compared to the rest of the country." He says, "you could get two fish for a kronor and two lays for a fish." And he says, "Damn, them was good times." So you can't knock it. MR. ANDERSON: I guess they were. It's really hard to believe, looking back now, that Communism was looking pretty appealing to people back then. MR. CURTIS: Well, Reed, I think they made a movie about Reed. I think it was "Reds" or something like that. But if you read the story of Reed, when Communism first took TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 22 over, a lot of people thought it was the panacea for all the world's problems. And if you read Marxism, he left out all of the bad things, you know, envy and greed and all that. He took them and just dismissed them. Everything was to work platonic as hell, which it don't because you can't stop greed. But what Steinbeck wrote, Cannery Row and Grapes of Wrath and things like this, this country -- he's buried over there in the Kremlin, I think Reed is. But he went over there and witnessed that ten days that changed the world. I think he wrote a book about it. But he came back here and tried to instill it. And one of the things was the Wobblies, the International Workers of the World, and also in the shipping industry. In the woods up in north Oregon, Washington, and northern California, awful lot of Wobblies up there. Because the conditions were deplorable in them woods, and there was a lot of spiking the trees. What they do is take a trimming ax and peel the bark and drive a piece of steel like that back in them. They'd color them trees that was supposed to be cut for to go to the mills. Well, what they'd do, they'd go up there and surreptitiously peel that bark and drive a spike in there and spike those trees to be cut. And then they hit that big saw in there, that saw just exploded. And also, they used a lot of phosphorus. The TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 23 Wobblies used a lot of phosphorus. They'd get them trestles, catch them when they're wet and drill a whole in them and plant phosphorus in there. When they dried out, the bridge burned down. Do the same thing with trees, you know. Burn a lot of stuff down. But it was hard times. And then the law was on the side of the Chamber of Commerce and against unions. And there was a lot of resentment. There was an awful lot of resentment because Hoover did nothing when the bankers walked off with the money and just left depositors destitute. I think they got a movie out, that Wonderful Life is along those lines. And it was just bad times, you know. MR. ANDERSON: So people's faith in the country was shaken? MR. CURTIS: That's true, yeah. Not everybody. But when Roosevelt came along, he was a new hope. He created the WPA. He kept a lot of young men from going to prison when he created that CCCs. In fact, I think today, looking back in retrospect, looking at what we've got now with the jails full, if we had compulsory military training, I don't think we'd have near the crime we've got in this country. Because one thing about mixing people from all walks of life into a unit for, say, two years, it teaches you humility. And it teaches you that you're all basically the same, you know, because you all look TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 24 the same in there in a uniform. One guy isn't better dressed than the other. And I think it would be a good thing to have compulsory military training. I don't think we'll ever get it back, not with the people we've got in the country today. But who knows. MR. ANDERSON: So you went into the service and you came back. I don't know if there is anything in the military that you think is important to the story, but the test site, tell me about how you started working at the test site. MR. CURTIS: Well, I came back from my last hitch in the service in 1950, and there was no construction to speak of. I went down and seen, because I knew all of the labor leaders in the town at the time. And I went down to talk to them and wasn't nothing doing. So somebody told me they was hiring down at the UP Railroad. Well, my last hitch in the service I had been a railroad conductor for the United States Air Force up at Ladd Field and Eielson Field, Alaska. So I just had my physical. They give you a physical when they exit you out. So anyway, I went down to the railroad and applied for a job as a switchman down there. And at that time you had to make ten student trips. They didn't pay you for it, but you took ten student trips. And they're going to see if you worked out, and they'd give you a job. And I went down there, went right to work. I made two student trips, and the guy said, "Hell, you know what TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 25 you're doing. Go ahead and go to work." And I think I worked 22 months as a switchman in the yards here in Vegas. And that's when we went from the 40-hour week. I've always been a prolaborer all my life. And we was under federal law that we couldn't strike, so we sicked out on them. Chicago sicked out first, and we put a sick-out here in Vegas. And we was about 90 percent effective in pulling 90 percent of the help with a sick-out. And we got the 40-hour week. And then after that, I was interviewed by a couple of FBI agents over there one day, thought I was some kind of a labor instigator. But they didn't have enough facts to put anything together so... And I was instrumental in getting us into the Switchman's Union of North America, which was the Snakes. They called them the Snakes. Before that we belonged to the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen. And then when I found out about half of them old-timers that we had got into the Snakes was still double-heading, they was still keeping a book in the B of RT, you know, what they called (indiscernible), working both ends, I got pretty disgusted. And the minute that ironwork came up, I just quit that and went into the Ironworkers. And that's when the test started, just about that time, when they first started testing them atomic devices up TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 26 there. At that time it wasn't a permanent base up there. It was operations, they called it. They would come in and they'd put an operation in, and then they'd shut the place down and go off in the Pacific and do an operation there. And, hell, I was up there when the Tonopah highway was still a two-lane highway. We called it the widow maker, it killed so many people and that. The roads going into the test site was dirt, dirt and gravel. And I worked up there putting the reinforcing rod and the steel in for what is now Mercury. And then we built permanent buildings up at CP Hill, which is between Yucca and Frenchman's Flat. And then we put all the motels down there on Frenchman's Flat. And bridges, that was for that big atomic cannon. They wagged that thing in here. We put them motels up and put bridges, put boxcars on them, cut trees down from Mount Charleston and buried them out there on that dry lake to look like a forest. And then they shot this cannon down there and blew it all to pieces. It was quite something to see. I remember a guy, an ironworker named Ed Argust, and myself was up in Yucca putting in some small job up there for a subcontractor. And we was coming back down, and they stopped us at CP Hill, which is command post, and roadblocked us because we couldn't go down. They was shooting a shot at Frenchman. Frenchman was TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 27 between CP Hill and Mercury, which was the exit gate. And so there was a whole bunch of people at a little place called Newsmen's Nob, they called it then. It was just an outcropping of a lot of rocks over there and sagebrush with a four by four post with a loud speaker on it stuck up in the air. So we wandered over there. That was the only people around. Some of them had them great big radiation glasses, so they didn't have to cover their heads up. And we didn't have one of them. My buddy had a welding hood, and he was going to look at that thing through that welding hood. And I kept telling him I didn't think it was strong enough. But he was hard headed. But anyhow, we're over there and there's four or five women, I think. They must have been newspaper people or something, but none of us knew each other. And we're standing there listening to this loud speaker going, and it gets down there to about 15 seconds to detonation, why, this guy over the loud speaker tells us to turn around and face away from Frenchman's Flat. And everybody that didn't have them radiation goggles to take and wrap both of their arms around their eyes and close their eyes, wrap your arms around your head like that, and keep them closed until detonation went off. So at the count of about three, we all wrapped our arms around our heads, the ones that didn't have radiation TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 28 glasses, except my buddy, he had the welding hood on. And that blast went off, and honest to God, I could see the bones in my arms with my eyelids shut. That's the brightest light I'd ever seen in my life. And this guy's still talking on this speaker. And all of a sudden we're all on our butts. That blast came along and hit you in the back of your knees, and you're not expecting it and down you go. My buddy, he's in bad shape because he can't see. The welding hood wasn't dark enough. So anyhow, when the guy tells us we can turn around and look towards detonation, well, there's that mushroom cloud going up, and here's fire coming across that desert at a pretty good pace. Sagebrush is burning and telephone poles are on fire, and it's just creeping along there. It's a pretty good slope up to CP Hill there. Well, about that time, we're all on our butt again because that wind that had went out and caused a vacuum, it came back in and knocked us on our butts. And when the wind came whipping down across there again, it put the fire out. So I tell my blind friend there, I said, "If I watch any more of these, I'm going to sit down. No sense in getting knocked down twice." 'Cause some of them people was hurt because they lit on them rocks, you know. But that was the first one, and it terrorized me. And the last one terrorized me. There's something awesome about them detonations. TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 29 I see they've released them now on Plowshare. And what was the other one? MR. ANDERSON: Well, the very first one was in '51 -- MR. CURTIS: Yeah, '51. The first one was an air drop. MR. ANDERSON: Yeah. MR. CURTIS: They had an air drop up there, and then they had that cannon in. And then they started building towers, and some of them was wooden to start with. Some was a hundred feet and 200 feet. And then we started putting up 300-foot metal towers and 500-foot metal towers. And we put one 700 foot up. That was operation Smoky. That's the one that was dirty. It blew up and caught John Wayne's bunch shooting that Conqueror up in Saint George. They was shooting that movie, The Conqueror. And I heard later that just about all those people in that film crew, and the crew, and the actors and everything died of some form of cancer later on. Wayne died of cancer. Whether that done it or not, I don't know, but I don't imagine it helped things any. MR. ANDERSON: Tell me a little bit about maybe "twisting the dragon's tail." MR. CURTIS: That was a couple of doctors. One's name was Graves. I never did meet this Slocum. I think he's buried over in New Mexico somewhere. TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 30 But Graves used to give lectures up there at the test site. And I was one of the few ironworkers that ever went to them lectures. I was interested in knowing what I was messing with there, you know, because this stuff was deadly. In fact, it scared me so bad I went and got a vasectomy after I had worked up there about two years. But I listened to this Graves talk, and it seemed that him and Dr. Slocum -- I think this was at Los Alamos in a laboratory there. The way he described it, they had about an 18-inch square box built with two pieces of fissionable material down inside of them. And when visiting scientists would come into the laboratory there, they'd take two screwdrivers and push these pieces of material together, and I guess it set up a fusion, you know. I ain't too accurate on all the terminology there. But evidently, Slocum was pushing these two pieces together, and everybody was looking down in this box, and somebody bumped him, and they got too close together. And I guess he reached in with his hands and took them apart. Well, from what Dr. Graves said -- he was in the lab at the time, and I don't know who the other people were. I never heard any names mentioned there. But Slocum supposedly got a hundred LD, which is a hundred percent lethal dose to the population if you'd been exposed to it. And Graves took 50 LD. And his hair fell out, and he had all kinds of complications from it, TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 31 but he recovered. And then I think he later died of a heart attack. But Slocum, I think, lived nine days, and I think he was conscious and was describing what the symptoms were for about seven of those nine days before he went into a comma and couldn't talk anymore. But the last time I seen Graves, he looked as healthy as a horse, but then later on I heard he died. Of course, we had a lot of people up there that was healthy as horses that's dead now. Aren't too many of us left. MR. ANDERSON: What's the difference between a clean and a dirty shot? How does that work? MR. CURTIS: Well, as near as I can tell, and this is from just the people I worked around, it's what you explode and how much of the fallout goes with the air currents. And on operation Smoky, which was the 700-foot tower, they had all kinds of stuff. We built the first 200 feet of that 700-foot tower out of 8-inch solid bar stock, round bar stock. And then we set a regular 500-foot tower on top of that and went on up to the 700-feet level. For some reason, they put all of these charcoal briquettes in that shot, what for I don't know. But each different group of scientists got different stuff they attached to these towers to tell what it's going to do. And whether that was what caused it to be dirty or not, I don't TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 32 know. But it was classified as a dirty shot. When we was putting the 700-foot tower up, I wasn't working on the tower itself, I was working behind the tower. To the northwest, there was a mountain right up like this. And they put the laborers up this mountain in periodic positions to dig these holes down in the rock, blast these holes out of the rock, and these was for camera mounts. Well, we went down to Frenchman's Flat, which was the other end of the test site towards Mercury, and took a lot of the camera mounts that had been used in previous shots there that already were poured in concrete. We took a 50-ton crane and pulled them out of the lake bed there and loaded them on trucks to take them up and put them up behind the 700-foot tower. Well, in the meantime, where the 700-foot tower set over in Area 2, they had three 500-foot towers, and they shot them one right after the other. All of the fallout from them three 500-foot towers in Area 2 blew across the 700-foot tower site. So here we are with these. I think the biggest block of concrete we had was 50 tons and the rest were smaller, like 20 and 30. Well, we couldn't take them to the 700-foot tower because it was too hot. So we had to off-load them this side of that site because we only had so many trucks that could transport these things because of the weight. And I think we waited about two weeks before it cooled down, or they said it cooled down sufficient for us to go back in there and go to TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 33 work. Well, we had to go down to Frenchman, and I think we rolled up about two miles of three-quarter cable on a great big spool to take up behind the 700-foot tower. We had to go around the mountain and come up the back side was the only accessible way with a D-9 CAT. We took the D-9 CAT and put it on top of the mountain, took a 50-ton crane and set it down here, and then we took that cable and run an endless from the crane down, back up. And it's what you call a slack line. You take these things, and then the crane gets up on them, and you pick your weight up, and then you can transport it up the mountain. Well, these holes we had to set these camera mounts in, like I say, the laborers had blasted them and dug them there, and when we got the camera mounts in, we had to set them at a certain angle. Why, the laborers had to be there working with us because they had to form up the thing to pour the concrete in. And we're back up there. There's a five-man crew of us. Let's see. George Williams was pushing, and Blackie Anderson, Benton, and myself. I forget who else. But anyway, because the area was so hot, we had to check into CP Hill every day, go in there and get a new film badge. And they had your names listed on a bulletin board up there and your numbers. And I think the max you could get that year was 2.85. And after about four days of working up TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 34 on that hill, after we got back in there, we all got up to 2.75, and we never did go any higher. But we'd have laborers with us for about two days, and then there would be two different laborers. So I finally asked a guy that I knew that was in rad safe, and I said, "How come they're burning them laborers out there in about two days, and the ironworkers aren't getting burned out? We're working right together." He said, "They can replace laborers. They've got a hall full of laborers, but they don't have any more ironworkers in the hall in Los Angeles." So I was beginning to get the idea that rather than rats and hogs and burros that they was using us for guinea pigs along with everything else. So I didn't last up there much longer after that. I'm glad I got out of there when I did. MR. ANDERSON: Tell me about some of the old-timers who were up there with you. You used to go to the radiation lectures to find out because you were interested. How did those old-timers feel about radiation? MR. CURTIS: Well, the consensus of opinion with most of them was you couldn't see it, you couldn't taste it, couldn't feel it, it wasn't going to hurt you. MR. ANDERSON: So they went on and did what? They went on and played pool and drank beer? MR. CURTIS: Well, yeah. They didn't seem to be TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 35 interested in the lectures. Some of them were. There was a few there that were interested, but not many. I'd say the majority could care less. They was just interested in the paycheck and... In fact, a friend of mine and I -- he's dead now, died of cancer -- boosted a bunch of these posts you drive into the ground to put barbwire on. I was with him the day he loaded them up. We had a welding truck out there. I wouldn't help him because they was in what they call a bone pile. After the shots, everything that was radiated they'd pile in a big pile and then put a radiation tape around it and hang a sign off of it. And this bone pile read 300 mR. MR. ANDERSON: What's that? MR. CURTIS: Milliroentgen, roentgens or whatever it is. That's how much radiation that stuff was. MR. ANDERSON: And it was a lot? MR. CURTIS: Yeah, 300 is quite a bit. But anyway, he loaded a whole bunch of these stakes on that truck, and he was carrying them right across that right shoulder. And I'm sitting in the truck watching him, telling him what a damn fool he is. And later on, him and I were working on the Dunes Hotel out there when they built the Dunes, the one they imploded. And when he'd go to put that right hand up like that, it'd start shaking. And we would stop at Friendly TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 36 Fergie's there on Sahara to get a beer after work and, hell, he had to drink with his left hand. He was shaking so bad with his right, he was spilling half of his beer. So I finally talked him into going in and seeing a doctor, see what was wrong with that arm. He had a cancer laying right in here. And he lasted about five months. MR. ANDERSON: Right there where he had been carrying those rods? MR. CURTIS: Yeah. And then it got down in his whole system. Larry Johns, the attorney here in town, we had him on the radiation suit for us, which it didn't do much good, but we tried. I'd gone down to a meeting there at his office, and he'd gotten some stuff through the Freedom of Information Act. And he asked me when I walked in there, he said, "Did you ever know a Ted Travelli (phonetic)?" I said, "Good God, yes. I worked with the man for years off and on, different jobs." And he says, "Was you up there when he got radiated?" I said, "Yeah, I was up there when he got radiated. He got radiated in Area 3." And I said, "They borrowed him out of my crew to go over for this one day. That was the day that he got radiated." And they honked around with him two or three days up TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 37 there at CP Hill in radiation section. And then when we'd go to work, every time we went by CP Hill, he had to take a bottle of urine in and get another bottle. And this went on for about 30 days. And I asked him one day, I says, "What are they doing with all that urine?" He says, "I don't know." I says, "Have they ever told you anything?" He said, "No." So one day, he turned the bottle in and got a bottle, and he just threw the bottle out the window and said, "To hell with it. I ain't going to stop anymore." Nobody ever said anything. And he was supposed to have got 45 mR. And when Larry Johns, through the Freedom of Information Act -- this was years later after Ted was dead. He had retired and went to Arkansas, I think, and died there. But when Larry Johns got this Freedom of Information Act, Ted Travelli had received 45,000 mR. It was signed by some colonel. And it's like I used to tell them people, I said, "My God, you're an American citizen just like I am. Why do you cover this stuff up?" And they'd hide behind that national security, you know. MR. ANDERSON: Did you ever know a guy named Troy Wade by any chance? MR. CURTIS: Troy Wade. Name sounds familiar. Sheet TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 38 metal worker? MR. ANDERSON: Well, he started as a laborer out there, but then he had some schooling, and then he became a guy who was the controller of the underground shots out there later on. He came in '58. MR. CURTIS: Well, '58 was when the moratorium went on. We had the moratorium in '58. I think, the only above ground shots after that was balloon shots. MR. ANDERSON: Did you guys feel like you were doing something patriotic? MR. CURTIS: We did when we first started up there. We thought that, you know, sacrificing all the pigs, hogs and dogs -- I hated to see them kill them beagle dogs, put them out there -- and the rats. We thought we was adding something to national security. But in fact, them protesters that used to protest out at the gate, I had nothing but contempt for them. But after about, I think, the 700-foot tower shot, I think a lot of the scales fell off of my eyes then. I got a whole different viewpoint. And then when I found out how many young children in northeastern Nevada and eastern Nevada and southern Utah had had their throats cut because of thyroids and how many had died up there, and the animals that had died, I didn't think we was doing too good a thing for our country then. MR. ANDERSON: You got quite a dose of radiation TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 39 yourself one time. MR. CURTIS: Yeah, that was when we was on the 700-foot tower. I guess it was in September. We was staying in the bunk houses up there. I had been playing cards till about 9:00 o'clock, you know, poker game. And all of the sudden I got the chills. And hell, it was a nice, warm night, beautiful evening. And I guess I borrowed everybody's blanket in the place. We had two blankets. I borrowed everybody's extra blanket. And next morning I felt like hell. And we had a first aid station at CP Hill. So there was five of us riding in the carryall. And when we got up there, why, we pulled into that first aid station, and I went in and seen that first aid guy. I told him, "I ain't feeling too good." He stuck a thermometer in my mouth, and he said, "I don't know what the hell is wrong with you. Go on back to Mercury." So I caught a ride and went back into Mercury to the hospital in Mercury. And I guess something had happened. There was a carpenter they had to take -- the main doctor had went into Vegas in an ambulance with this injured person. And I'm sitting out there with seven or eight other guys, and this guy comes by and sticks a thermometer in my mouth. And 15 minutes later he came out and pulled it out. He says, "Well, we're going to quarantine you in a trailer up TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 40 here." I had heard about them quarantine trailers. I said "In a pig's butt, you are, buddy." I went and got in my car and came to town. I don't remember too much about driving in, but I did make it home. I couldn't hold anything on my stomach, sicker than a dog. My brother was staying with me, and he was working up in southern Utah on a road job. And he came in and finally got a doctor. Back then, I got Dr. Wixom to make a house call. He didn't know what the hell was wrong with me. He gave me a shot of penicillin. I finally got so I could hold brandy and tea down. And I subsided on them. My brother was going on a vacation. I told him, "Hell, go ahead. I'll either be dead or alive when you get back, one or the other. Ain't anything you can do about it." So he took off and left me a case of brandy. And, hell, I couldn't even pick up the newspaper I was so weak. I lost 28 pounds in two weeks. And then all of a sudden, I healed up, went back up there and went to work right at the same damn place. And never had any more ill effects of it. And Eddie Greenwald (phonetic), I guess he was working with us, Eddie was. And two days after I got sick, he started throwing up blood. And they took him into UNLV and kept him there for a couple of days, and the bleeding stopped TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 41 and he healed up. And we went back to work, you know. But I thought later, I said, "Just too much of that stuff," you know. MR. ANDERSON: Now that area where you were working was supposed to have cooled off. MR. CURTIS: Supposed to, yeah. But let's put it back this way. When we first made the tower shots, when they shot them first towers, down around the base of the tower where it had just been desert, you know, bushes and everything else, except for tearing it up, the area right immediately around the base of the tower where they tore it up during construction, the rest of it, other than the roads, was just natural desert out there. Well, when them shots went off, for a circle, oh, maybe 2,000, 2,500 feet across from the center of the tower out, everything that could be turned to glass was turned to glass, everything that would melt. And there was sort of a crust of just a black -- maybe the color of those chairs -- blackish-brown crust on the ground where everything had been fried there by that device. And the consensus was that we couldn't go back in there for so many hundred years, you know. So they set there for a couple of years. And the next thing you know, here the Operating Engineers were in there with motor graders pushing that dirt and putting it in rows. And we was right back in there building another tower on the same site. They also told TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 42 us that the vegetation would never grow again. Well, the vegetation grew, and it grew bigger than the vegetation that was natural, you know. So I began to think either these people don't know what the hell they're talking about or they're lying to us, one of the two. I think most of them didn't know any more than we did. They was just out of school, you know. A lot of these guys was younger than I was, and they had their degrees. But I think everything they had was theory. I know a few of them quit after that Eniwetok shot. A few of them got so damned scared they was going to set the atmosphere on fire that they quit, and it just terrorized them. But how many of them folks are alive today, I don't know. Because with the unions and our health and welfare, we could keep track of our deceased members, where these people weren't union. Some of them worked for Livermore Labs, some of them worked for Sandia, some of them worked for different users up there. And God only knows where they are today. MR. ANDERSON: Of the Union Ironworkers out there, how many of those guys are not around or died of cancer? MR. CURTIS: Well, I haven't kept track lately, but at the last count, I think Larry Johns had a better figure. Benny Levy was the instigator of it. He was an ironworker. He died last year. But I think we had about 200 and some death certificates. TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 43 Now Joe Naves, who was an ironworker, good friend of mine, living down in Phelan, California, I went down to visit him one time, and my God, he was there in his pajamas, just skin and bones, you know. And he was suing the government because he was with cancer, and he said he got it from the Smoky shot. And he said, "You worked up there on the Smoky shot, didn't you, Curtis?" MR. CURTIS: I said, "Hell, yeah." I said, "Let me make a deposition. I'll give the government a deposition." 'Cause I said, "I'm busy but," I says, "Joe, I don't think you're ever going to make it to ever sue them people." He says, "The one thing I got, the lawyer that's working for the government was one of the men from Desert Rock. He was one of the soldiers that marched in on that stuff." He said, "I told him, I said, 'Son, you see what I look like? That's what you're going to look like in a few more years.'" Well, I telephoned this toll free number in Washington, D.C., to make a deposition out for Joe about working with him up there at the place. And they called me back, and they sent me a questionnaire. Well, the questionnaire was all filled out except for my social security number. And there was no place to write on it, you know, just waiting for my signature. So I put my social security number in there. And in the small margin at the bottom I wrote, TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 44 "What questionnaire?" with a big question mark. And I called them again and they said, "We're going to send an investigator out to talk to you." I'm still waiting. I've never seen, never heard no more from them so... MR. ANDERSON: How long ago was that? MR. CURTIS: Oh, my God, this had to be in 1979 or '80. So maybe he got lost on the way. MR. ANDERSON: Now, what was this Camp Desert Rock? What was that all about? MR. CURTIS: Well, Camp Desert Rock was outside of Mercury, going towards Beatty to the west or southwest of Mercury. And it was where they brought the Army in that they brought in to put in the trenches to get up and march in after the blast to see what effect it had on them. And what they did to them guys wasn't nice, you know. They put them in them trenches right close to that blast. And then when the thing went off, they got them up out and marched them towards ground zero. That's the Atomic Veterans. They had a lawsuit going. I gave them all of the information I had. Sometime, if you get a chance, I'll dig it out up there at the house. I think it's good up until '78. It's a list of all of the shots that went off in the entire world and which were clean and which were dirty. Now, this is the ones the French set off, the Chinese set off, the ones the Russians TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 45 set off, the ones we set off. And it's just interesting to look at. MR. ANDERSON: I can imagine. MR. CURTIS: At the time, it was pretty well classified that we got a hold of it. But I sent a copy to the Atomic Vets and maybe thought I'd help their lawsuit. But what the government is going to do is wait until everybody dies. I went up and went through that Yucca Mountain and heard an awful lot of different opinions there. And when we came back, we went through this one building, and it shows all the nuke sites in the United States, and I think all but about 17 are east of the Mississippi River. And they assure you how safe these containers are. And I said, "Well, if those people created the spent fuel rods and these containers are so safe, why are they wanting to spend millions of dollars to ship them and millions of dollars to lay it off on us Westerners? Why don't they just keep them at home?" If the thing was absolutely safe, I wouldn't waste all that money on transportation and sending it out here. But it's a political football there. It's politics. MR. ANDERSON: Absolutely. I went out there, too. I took a look at them. MR. CURTIS: Well, when you get up on that ridge and you look towards Beatty, you see all them little cinder cones TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 46 out there; that's all created by volcanic. This whole state's volcanic. That's why we got so much thermal in it. And if that's a safe place to store something, forget it, you know. MR. ANDERSON: Yeah, a lot of people feel that way. One of the other things I thought was interesting, too, you're talking about these old-timers and their attitudes towards the radiation. You guys were out there when you heard about Sputnik. MR. CURTIS: Oh, we was working at Apex, and we heard when the Russians put the Sputnik up. And that was an eye-opener for me. Because this one fellow, Tom Harris, he had been in the Navy. He was probably old enough to be my father. Nice man. And there was five of us riding in the car pool out there, you know. And I said, "Boy, that's a hell of a thing them Russians did putting that Sputnik up in space." And a couple of the guys was talking about it. And Tom was real quiet there for a while. And he says, "There ain't no Sputnik up there." I says, "What do you mean, Tom, there ain't a Sputnik up there?" I said, "It's all over the world press. And it's all over the radio and everything." And he said, "God wouldn't allow them to put a Sputnik up there." Now, this is some of the opinions you got from those people. And these are the same people that, you know, didn't TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 47 believe in radiation. They couldn't see it, couldn't taste it, couldn't feel it, couldn't kick it around, so it wasn't there. It wasn't going to hurt you. And it's a mind set. I worked hard to get the apprentice program for the Ironworkers into Nevada. I finally had to go through a United States senator, Senator Alan Bible, and a man who's judge now, Judge Joe Pavlikowski. And in 1962, they okayed an apprentice program in Southern Nevada. They used every excuse in the world, you know, not to put it in here. Well, the old-timers didn't want it because they didn't want those people to take the job. Hell, some of them couldn't read or write, you know. And I figured, my God, the better educated the man is, the safer he's going to work and the better buildings we're going to put up. Because as an ironworker, we put the skeleton up for the building, and if the damn skeleton ain't strong, you got a bad building. And so we got an apprentice program. And my God, them old-timers fought me on that. They made me the instructor, and here I didn't even get a high school diploma. So they doctored everything up with the school district to make me an instructor, so I wound up instructing the ironworkers. And now they've got their own building here. They've got 13 or 14 instructors, a whole bunch of them. It's a big deal now, but it wasn't back then. TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 48 You see, when you belong to a union, it's like belonging to a democracy. You've got to try to do what's good for the majority of the people. I helped a kid running for the assembly one time. He was just out of the university out here. And we damn near got him elected. But he said to me, he says, "Curtis, if I get elected," he said, "how am I going to tell a good bill from a bad bill?" I said, "Kid, you read it. If it's good for the majority of the population, it's a good bill; if it's not, throw it in file 13." I said, "Just get rid of it." And if more politicians would do that, we might have a better country here. MR. ANDERSON: Well, I think we've covered everything on the list here. If there's anything else that I should have asked but I didn't... MR. CURTIS: I don't know what it would be. I can think of a lot of things, but... MR. ANDERSON: Anything that you think is important? MR. CURTIS: I can't think of anything right offhand. MR. ANDERSON: Okay. MR. CURTIS: I lost a good friend there. They're going to bury him, Otto McFarland. Did you ever hear of him? MR. ANDERSON: No. TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 49 MR. CURTIS: His brother and I went in the Marine Corps together back in World War II. He just died. He was a fire chief here. A good man. Only 67 I think. MR. ANDERSON: That's too young. MR. CURTIS: Yeah, but there's not too many of us natives that are left around here. MR. ANDERSON: Right. Oh, yeah, I had a note on here about the Teamsters and O'Gard (phonetic) and the radiation. MR. CURTIS: Oh, yeah, you ought to get a hold of him. Larry O'Gard's his name. You ought to get a hold of Larry and try to interview him. I think the guy with Larry died. And I think Larry took 50 LD. 'Cause he finished up as the shop foreman up there. He had a permanent job up there. Now what happened to the Teamster, I don't know, but that took place in Area 11. And why they ever sent them guys back in there after that shot, I don't know, unless they was just plain using them for guinea pigs. Because it didn't make any fundamental sense to send them in there to turn a motor off. It would have run out of fuel eventually anyway. But they did a lot of strange things up there. MR. ANDERSON: They used to put the bombs on top of the towers that you guys built; is that right? MR. CURTIS: Yeah, they went up at the 500-foot level or 300, whatever it was. They called them devices. They TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 50 didn't like us to call them bombs. MR. ANDERSON: Well, hell, that's what they were; right? MR. CURTIS: Well, the scientists want to call them devices, you know. And it's like the Bureau of Land Management, you don't pour concrete, you place it. You know, this is the terminology them people use. It's like when we put one 500-foot tower up in 2, this was just the ones they shot just before it got contaminated, the 700-foot tower. This one site was down, and they had a big 50-foot trailer that was their headquarters at the base of the tower, off a ways. All this free time, he was out digging up little cactuses and flowers and stuff and planting them around the trailer. I told him one day, I said, "In about six or seven days, they're going to shoot this stuff." "I never thought of that, yeah." These was the fellows that you was depending on to keep you safe. MR. ANDERSON: Wasn't too comforting, was it? MR. CURTIS: And then another time we had to stop a shot. We was on recovery, me and another ironworker. And this was after they broke a few windows. Well, they waited until the atmosphere was just right and the wind currents was right before they shot a shot so they didn't shatter glass TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 51 here in Vegas or, you know, contaminate something that was with a lot of people in it. They didn't mind contaminating where there were just a few people. Anyhow, why, they check you in and check you out. We got it all buttoned up for the shot and checked out, and one of the scientists was missing. He was back up there in an underground bunker reading a book, just oblivious to time. I don't know how much that cost the taxpayers. MR. ANDERSON: They had to delay a shot to go get his dumb ass, huh? MR. CURTIS: We had another one. We had an inspector that was tracking deer up on the mesa and got lost, and they had to postpone a shot over that. This is where your money goes, you know. MR. ANDERSON: Yeah. MR. CURTIS: We cleared everything out in front of a tunnel shot one time with a Bucyrus 40-ton crawler crane, took everything out so that if that shot blew the door out and came out and, you know, blew out the entranceway, which a lot of them did, they wouldn't contaminate anything. And they left the 40-ton crane sitting there right in front of the tunnel entrance, and the shot blew out and blew the crane down a canyon. They spent about 20, $30,000 repairing it. MR. ANDERSON: Oh, they could repair it? MR. CURTIS: Oh, yeah. They fished it out of there TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 52 and repaired it. MR. ANDERSON: I didn't think it would be worth repairing after that. MR. CURTIS: Well, some things they did, and some things they didn't, you know. I watched them put a Kellogg 23, 400 drill rig right down on theirself one night up there in Area 3. They was running four-foot casing. And I guess one of the drillers in that four-foot hole, it got a little heavy on the weight when he was drilling it, and it wasn't quite straight. And they was casing the hole, and they was pouring in the -- they used bentonite, that drill mud, to float that casing down in there, you know. And you get about 900-feet of that three-quarter-inch, four-wall casing, you know, four-foot diameter casing, you got a lot of weight. So you're floating it in that drill mud. Well, I went by there about 7:00 o'clock in the evening. I was working a swing shift. And I was steward. I went by to take a steward report because we had some ironworkers tailing in casing. And they was picking that casing up and dropping it with that 16-laced line, you know. I said, "What's the trouble? Why are they dropping the casing for?" He said, "Well, the hole's a little crooked. They're trying to cut it through." And so I took a short report and left. I had been TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 53 gone about 30 minutes. And I had the net radio on up there, and I get a call that Kellogg 23 has pulled theirself in herself. So I shot back over there to see if they had any men hurt. What they done, they got that casing up and down dropping it, and it finally got through, and it just kept going. It just pulled that drill rig right in on itself. And when it did, they had all that drill steel laying up there. And it was just shooting them 40-foot pieces of drill steel out there like match sticks. One of them went right down through the boom of that crane we was using. And the only guy that got hurt was a driller, and he got his ankle hurt jumping over a compressor getting in the clear. But I don't know how much that drill rig cost. It was a 400-ton drill rig, a beautiful -- called a Kellogg rig. MR. ANDERSON: It must have cost plenty. MR. CURTIS: Pretty expensive. MR. ANDERSON: I guess so. MR. CURTIS: You know, a nip out of the taxpayers' pockets there. But that was a small item compared to the stuff they wasted up there. If you had even one-tenth of one percent of what the copper cost that's buried under the ground there in copper wiring, you'd be a multimillionaire. MR. ANDERSON: I suppose so. TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 54 Well, I think we've got it all. MR. CURTIS: Okay. MR. ANDERSON: It's been great stuff. (End of tape.) * * * * * ATTEST: The foregoing transcript of the interview was transcribed fully and accurately from the audio tape provided by KNPR Radio. Eunice G. Jones, Transcriptionist TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030