NEVADA STATE MUSEUM & HISTORICAL SOCIETY LAS VEGAS, NEVADA THE LAS VEGAS I REMEMBER INTERVIEW WITH PAUL CHRISTENSEN 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. CHRISTENSEN: Well, I'm Paul Christensen. MR. WRIGHT: And how and when did the Christensens come to this city? MR. CHRISTENSEN: We originally moved here in 1939. My dad was the time inspector for the Union Pacific Railroad, and he had the territory from Lynndyl, Utah to Caliente, Nevada. And then they offered him the territory from Caliente, Nevada south to Yermo, California, and so he took that territory. And he had to come down here before school was out and set up a semblance of a jewelry store at 32 Fremont Street, where I believe Sassy Sally's is now, in the corner of the Ferrin Drug Store. MR. WRIGHT: Yeah, there was a hotel over the top, I think. MR. CHRISTENSEN: Uh-huh. And we set up shop in there, and he had to hire a watchmaker. And we came down here. It was kind of interesting because he was down here, I think, in April. We didn't get out of school until the end of May, and so the family came down later. And we lived at number 10 Bonneville, which is still there. A family of six children and the two parents in this one little, two-bedroom apartment. MR. WRIGHT: And how old were all the children, including yourself obviously? MR. CHRISTENSEN: Well, I'll have to reconstruct that TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 3 a little. I was seven. That would have made my older brother ten, and my sister probably 13 or 14. And my other brother is eight years older than I am, so he would have been 15. And my oldest brother would have been 17. I think my oldest brother had one year of high school here is all. And I came here and started in the second grade and stayed here clear through high school. MR. WRIGHT: And where was the school you went to? MR. CHRISTENSEN: Where the federal building is now. As a matter of fact, there were three buildings there. The kindergarten was on the north side of the yard in a low, single-story building. And two through four were in the two-story, brown stucco building. And then the fifth grade was in a building like the kindergarten on the south side of the building. And then the sixth, seventh and eighth were in the white building with the tile roof, which still stands, south of the -- MR. WRIGHT: What they called the Fifth Street School there? MR. CHRISTENSEN: Yeah, it was the Fifth Street Grammar School then. I was fortunate because by that time we had moved over on South Ninth just north of Charleston. And they opened the John S. Park school. And it was so crowded at Fifth Street. And they opened John S. Park up through the sixth grade, and then the next year they added the seventh, TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 4 and the next year they added the eighth. And they opened it the first year up through the sixth grade. And I was asked if I would transfer to that school because I was just outside the district, but only one block, and they were overcrowded downtown. So I moved to the John S. Park school. I was in the first class out of the John S. Park school. MR. WRIGHT: So Las Vegas was a good deal smaller then than it is now. You were seven years old. You spent your teen years here. What kind of place was Las Vegas to be a young person in? What was it like? Can you give us some kind of a feeling for it? MR. CHRISTENSEN: It was kind of different. It was a small town, but I came from a smaller town. I came out of Milford, Utah. So even though it was a small town, it was larger than Milford. But it was centered around the railroad and the upper part of Fremont Street where a few casinos were. I think the last thing going down the street was the old Apache, which is where the Horseshoe is now. And then beyond that, it was all businesses. There were service stations on those corners. I believe at Third and Fremont there was a service station on the northeast corner that was a Richfield station that belonged to Whittlesey, which was the beginning of the Whittlesey Cabs. And then further down, you got into the department stores and so forth. TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 5 We eventually moved off of 32 Fremont and down to 225 Fremont where we were for many, many years, until the Four Queens took that property and built on it. But we lived behind that store for a while. When we first bought that store, we moved in and lived in the apartment behind it in order to make enough money to pay for the store. MR. WRIGHT: Didn't your father soon after that buy another store a little further up Fremont? MR. CHRISTENSEN: No. That's the only place we were on Fremont Street. In fact, that's the only store we had. Right after World War II, we opened a little store in Henderson that didn't do well. It was on Army Street right across from the old Henderson theater, Basic Theater at the time. And then my older brother went to California, went in the jewelry business down there for about ten or twelve years. I had just gotten out of the Air Force when he came back, and we went into my dad's store on Fremont and began to expand. We went into Vegas Village North, and then the Charleston Plaza Mall. And then we built the store on Sahara Avenue, and then finally went into Vegas Village West, which was up on Oakey and Decatur. And then we bought a store in Salt Lake City, Utah. And then we ended up in all of the ZCMI department stores up there for a while. MR. WRIGHT: That's interesting. Salt Lake City is TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 6 my hometown. I didn't make the connection when I came down here. MR. CHRISTENSEN: That was my dad's hometown. MR. WRIGHT: So you went to Las Vegas High School then? MR. CHRISTENSEN: Sure did. MR. WRIGHT: You were a wildcat. MR. CHRISTENSEN: Uh-huh. I was a wild one, too. MR. WRIGHT: Who were some of your classmates, contemporary Las Vegans? MR. CHRISTENSEN: There's a dentist here in town named Darwin Lightfoot that was in our class. There was -- and I'm talking some of the athletes -- there was a Rodney Eming (phonetic). We called him Pete. His parents ran the grocery store. Sewell's Market was at Third and Fremont. And then we had Tex Peyton, who is since deceased. That was the railroad doctor's stepson. Jay Simon, who is a cousin to Peter Simon, I believe. MR. WRIGHT: And Pop Simon had one of those service stations down on Fremont Street, I think, that you mentioned. MR. CHRISTENSEN: Did he? You know, I didn't know who owned them at that time, all of them. I knew some of them. George Cromer is a very prominent attorney in town. He was in my class. There were a lot of people I see all the TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 7 time. Jimmy Scofield's wife, Billie Lee Scofield, was in my class in high school. It was a good group of people. When they have a reunion, it's really a good turnout from that class. A lot of them are still around. Sadly, a lot of them have departed. You know, we had a lot of fun. We did a lot of crazy things, but we weren't vicious and we weren't damaging. MR. WRIGHT: Can you let us in on one or two of the crazy things? MR. CHRISTENSEN: Oh, I remember one night. My junior year, it was kind of funny because they had tryouts for cheerleaders. And they didn't try out, it was an elective process. And I had a girlfriend that wanted to be a cheerleader, and so she signed up. And while she was at it, she signed me up to be on the ballot for cheerleader and told me so after the filing had closed at 5:00 o'clock. After 5:00 o'clock I was down at the jewelry store, and she told me I was running for cheerleader. And I thought she was nuts. Well, I got elected and she didn't. And there was two other guys that got elected cheerleader, and one of them couldn't function. I don't remember why. And the other one dropped out. And I was the only male cheerleader in that group, and they didn't much like me for that. But I took on the role of chauffeuring them around and leading the parades and stuff like that. TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 8 And I remember one night after a football game, we had a -- I forget what they call -- like a centipede dance down Fremont Street. And I took them all the way through the Golden Nugget. And it kind of startled folks to have all these high school kids filing through the Golden Nugget between the tables and stuff. We were in and out so fast that nothing happened. But you couldn't get away with that for anything today. MR. WRIGHT: I shouldn't thing so, no. MR. CHRISTENSEN: But we did good things like that. We rang the bell in the back of my pickup truck all down Fremont Street. We used to drag it all the time. And we did some nutty things to each other. Put firecrackers in pomegranates in the car so that it would spray pomegranate seeds in the car and stuff like that. MR. WRIGHT: Had they started the practice of cruising Fremont Street? MR. CHRISTENSEN: Oh, yes, long, long time before that. Cruised Fremont Street as long as I can remember. I think my older brothers cruised Fremont Street. So that was going on from about '40 on, I think. But they did a lot of that. I used to help a guy change the marquee. A classmate of mine, Keith Hayes, he and I changed the marquee at the El Portal Theater for a while. It was kind of interesting to TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 9 be on the 16-foot stepladder and see what went on in the automobiles going up Fremont Street. MR. WRIGHT: You might tell people where the El Portal was. MR. CHRISTENSEN: Well, the El Portal, the building is still there, I believe, isn't it? MR. WRIGHT: Yeah, it's still there. Looks something like it used to. MR. CHRISTENSEN: It's between Third and Fourth on the north side of Fremont Street. And it was where the air conditioning was. And they changed the movies every -- I think they ran one four days on the weekend and the other one three days at the beginning of the week, and that was the way the movie shifted. And we changed the marquees and popped the popcorn. MR. WRIGHT: Do you remember how much it cost to go to a movie in those days? MR. CHRISTENSEN: Well, you know, I didn't pay because I worked there. I don't really remember. I think we used to go to the Huntridge Theater on Saturday morning when I was in grade school, and I think it cost us a quarter, if I'm not mistaken. But it was very inexpensive. We had a good time. You know, it was kind of interesting because when you grew up here as a kid, there wasn't the danger. I could ride TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 10 my bicycle all the way across town and sit under the bridge on, well, we call it Fifth Street. It's Las Vegas Boulevard now. But Casino Center was Second and Las Vegas Boulevard was Fifth, and they always will be in my mind. But North Fifth, where the mortuary is now, where the creek used to come under the road, there was a bridge there. And I'd spend some summer afternoons down there on my bicycle fishing for crawdads in that creek underneath that bridge and never worry about it. My parents never worried about it. Well, my home was Seventh and Charleston at that time. And it was nothing. Nobody ever thought anything about it because everybody knew who everybody was, and everybody watched out for everybody. So you didn't have the danger the kids have now. You could walk home from the movie at 10:00 o'clock at night and never worry about being harassed, accosted, hurt or anything. MR. WRIGHT: I've heard a number of people that have grown up in Las Vegas talk about doing something very similar in Las Vegas Creek. One time, a former mayor, Ron Lurie, said he used to go out to the Big Springs site. Is that another site? Which is very much in the news these days because of the expressway and so forth. MR. CHRISTENSEN: Yeah, the Big Springs right there by the Meadows Mall. Sure, um-hm. MR. WRIGHT: And used to go out there to picnics and TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 11 just horsing around. MR. CHRISTENSEN: It was a great spot. You know, we spent a lot of time on that creek. It used to run under Main Street by the old Woitishek Lumber Company, which is on North Main. And I can't pinpoint that exactly now, but it was south of the Bonanza underpass, but north of Fremont Street. And it ran under there, and we used to follow that creek all the way down. And it was like a jungle to us, you know. That was out in the woods. We had a great time doing that. Sometimes we would even float it where we could. MR. WRIGHT: I had never thought of anybody floating Las Vegas Creek. I didn't think it ran that much. MR. CHRISTENSEN: Well, it doesn't really a lot. My brother Carl, and Myron Leavitt, and a couple of other guys, and I helped them fix up a tub, but I didn't get to go. Do you remember years ago they used to mix plaster in a trough, a long, flat, rounded up on both ends trough. And they used to mix it with a big hoe with holes in the middle of it. And they got one of those, and we patched it all up by putting roofing tar in a bucket and heating it over a fire, getting it soft, and patched all of the holes in it. And they navigated that all the way from the springs down to the Old Ranch. But I think they pulled it about as far as they floated it. MR. WRIGHT: That's a funny story. MR. CHRISTENSEN: You know, drug it across the TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 12 rocks. You know, we did a lot of things like that. I lived on Charleston and Seventh Street when they paved Charleston Boulevard. It was gravel. MR. WRIGHT: That was kind of out of town about that time. MR. CHRISTENSEN: Well, it was way out. Dr. Parks lived across the street, and the Wilsons lived across the street. They were the Shell dealer. And as a matter of fact, a lot of people may not know this, but Lloyd Douglas, the author of The Robe, used to live across the street on Charleston. I believe he was the father-in-law of Wilson's wife, and he lived there. MR. WRIGHT: There was another person who lived there, it may be a little later, that I didn't know about until fairly recently on Charleston was Norma Talmadge. MR. CHRISTENSEN: Yeah. MR. WRIGHT: But I guess she didn't mingle too much with local residents. MR. CHRISTENSEN: She was a customer of ours in the jewelry store. My older brother knew her well. She was married to a guy, a doctor somebody. And yeah, we did a lot of work for her. Jack Entratter lived in the house that Wilsons lived in. MR. WRIGHT: And he was at the Sands. TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 13 MR. CHRISTENSEN: Yeah. MR. WRIGHT: Entertainment director? MR. CHRISTENSEN: Something like that. You know, you're talking about the perks at the airport and things like that, it's kind of ironic because I don't think that amounts to a hill of beans. But my dad was in the Chamber of Commerce at the time. In fact, he was president in the '50s sometime. I don't remember the year. But they were so anxious to get people into The Strip hotels and so forth that we had passes. If you were anybody in town, you could get a pass that would let you swim in the hotel swimming pools. And we used to go swimming in the Thunderbird pool quite a bit because it was handy, and they didn't mind -- we'd go in the back way and slip into that pool -- as long as we didn't abuse it. We stayed away from it when the patrons were there. But if you wanted to slip in there and swim earlier in the day before they were all in there, you know, prior to noon and stuff like that, you could do that, and there wasn't a problem. So we did that on a regular basis all the time. And then, of course, we didn't have to worry about cars either because there wasn't any traffic on the streets. You could ride your bicycle anywhere before you could drive. And after you could drive, you could drive almost anywhere without a lot of hassle because there weren't that many cars. TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 14 MR. WRIGHT: Leave your car unlocked, windows down? MR. CHRISTENSEN: Never locked the car. Didn't even have the key most of the time, just a switch. So it was not uncommon to leave your car just wide open. And your house too, most people didn't ever lock their houses. It was uncommon to lock your home. People wonder, why? MR. WRIGHT: What were the young people's hangouts? Was there a particular drive-in? MR. CHRISTENSEN: When I was in high school, we used to hang out at what we called the Wildcat Lair, which was right behind where city hall is now, just a little west, I believe. And that was a USO club that was built during the war and turned over to the city after the war. And we used to have big dances there. And it was a great thing. The entertainers from The Strip would come over there on a Friday or Saturday night after a ball game when we were having a dance there, and they would do a mini floor show between their shows just for the community. And it was really great because we saw some great entertainment. And we had a lot of fun. They had a dance floor, a regular soda fountain in there, and Ping Pong tables and so forth. But when you were with your girlfriend and cruising Fremont Street and so forth, you either went to the Round-Up Drive In or Sill's. Sill's was at Fifth and Charleston, and the Round-Up was where Main and Fifth Street come together TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 15 south of town. I think there's a Denny's there or something right now, kind of in the area of the Stupak tower. MR. WRIGHT: Yeah. I was just doing a little research on Halloween, you know. I picked 50 years ago just for the heck of it, 1947. You might have been there. But it was just like you said. They had somebody from Our Gang Comedy and somebody from the Eastside Kids, and that was the entertainment. MR. CHRISTENSEN: Well, in 1947, I would have been a sophomore in high school, so I was probably there. That's true. That was the year before I was a junior. And I spent a lot of time there as a junior because, number one, I could drive. I was 16. And number two, I got an opportunity to introduce a lot of those acts as the cheerleader. For a uniform, the guys had the tailor downtown -- his son was in my class. But we took white corduroys and had them split in the middle and pegged and dyed one side black and the other side red. And then we wore a black sock under the red leg, and a red sock under the black leg, and then saddle shoes that we had painted red, and wore a red pullover sweater over either a black shirt or a white shirt. And that was our uniform. And it was kind of nice to have that to introduce the acts on the stage and so forth. I've got a picture somewhere of introducing Jenny Sims one night. MR. WRIGHT: It seems like Las Vegas and maybe also TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 16 North Las Vegas, Henderson, Boulder City might have taken a little more active role in providing activities for young people in those years. MR. CHRISTENSEN: It was easier to do, and you didn't have the safety factor. You see, the advantage in those years is that you could go to a park and feel safe at night. One of the things we used to do when I was a junior and senior in high school was we used to go swimming at Lake Mead. And there wasn't the enforcement out there, but there wasn't a need for the enforcement. We were all accomplished swimmers, and we didn't have a lot of problems. They used to have swimming rafts out in the swimming areas they'd swim out to and dive off of and so forth. We used to swim out there. Sometimes after a dance or something, we'd be out swimming at Lake Mead at midnight, and it was not a problem because you didn't have to worry about it. There weren't all of the, quote, "weirdos," unquote, around, so we didn't have those problems. MR. WRIGHT: I work in Lorenzi Park. Is that also a place that friends would go? MR. CHRISTENSEN: Lorenzi Park was a great place to go swimming. Three swimming pools we used to swim at. One was the old Mermaid pool. MR. WRIGHT: Where was the Mermaid? MR. CHRISTENSEN: Now, most people don't know about TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 17 the Mermaid pool, but the Mermaid pool was just north of Fremont Street on Fifth. MR. WRIGHT: Right downtown. MR. CHRISTENSEN: Right downtown, uh-huh. And then we used to swim at the Old Ranch. And the Old Ranch was down about where Cashman Field is now. And then we used to swim at Lorenzi. It had the biggest swimming pool with the fountain in the middle and everything. And if we couldn't get in the swimming pool, we'd swim in the lakes that you weren't supposed to swim in because they had a lot of mud and so forth in them. But we'd swim in them if we had to, no problem. And then a lot of us would swim in other places. There was a place in Warm Springs that we could swim in. It was on Warm Springs Road, I believe, east of the highway and sat just south of it. And I don't know what ever happened to that, but as I recall, that was an indoor pool because it was heated water in it. MR. WRIGHT: Was it out close to where Louie Prima's (phonetic) place was? MR. CHRISTENSEN: You know, I'd have to look at it from the air to tell you. It's kind of like things change and you don't go out there a lot. And then everybody used to go park at the frog pond, which was out Paradise Road a ways. This used to be the TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 18 largest artesian basin in the United States. You could put an eight-inch well in, and it would shoot water ten feet in the air. So they had these wells out in Paradise Valley and they were capped, and they always leaked a little where they capped them. And this one leaked out there and formed this little pond with cattails and so forth around it. And you could hear the frogs croaking in it. We used to call it the frog pond. You could go out there Saturday night after a ball game with your girlfriend, and there would be eight or ten other cars there and you knew them all. They were all your buddies. They were out there with their girlfriends. Everybody went to the frog pond. And then you'd say, "Well, let's go up to the Round-Up and get a soda." And we'd go up to the Round-Up and get a soda. We knew all the carhops. We'd position ourselves where we got the same carhop all the time. We'd find out what was going on around and so forth. You could do that then because there wasn't anybody here that would harass you. MR. WRIGHT: A Norman Rockwell kind of place to grow up it sounds like. MR. CHRISTENSEN: Oh, I think a lot of places in United States must have been like that. I think the times have changed more than the people. Just more people. The larger number of people, I think, the more -- the percentage TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 19 of problems are probably the same. But the percentage of problems with 35,000 people doesn't amount to very many units, where the same percentage with a million people amounts to a whole lot more units. MR. WRIGHT: You mentioned seeing it from the air. Did you have some early involvement in the areas of aviation? MR. CHRISTENSEN: Well, you know, I was always an aviation nut. I built model airplanes. In fact, I first started building model airplanes when I first moved here. There was a railroad engineer -- and you know, the railroad used to have some houses just off of Main Street about right close to where the Woitishek Lumber Company was and by an old wrecking yard that was up there on Main Street. And he used to help me build airplanes, and he was a master at it. And he'd lay over here on runs and build airplanes. And then I'd con my mother into taking us out in the car, and we'd go to the east part of town, about where we are now, and fly these airplanes, gas motors and everything. Free flight we called it. And they'd circle up, and the engine would quit, and they'd circle down. We'd have to have a car to chase them so that we could get the airplane back. And I was crazy about airplanes. And I got my first airplane ride at the D4C Ranch, which was in the area of the Frontier Hotel, a little further south, I believe. And for years you could see that strip from the air. I don't think TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 20 you can see it there anymore, but long after it closed, you could see that strip from the air. It belonged to Hoot Gibson. MR. WRIGHT: That was just off what's now Spring Mountain Road, I believe. MR. CHRISTENSEN: Somewhere in that area. That's very close, uh-huh. Actually, I've said this before, and I still think it's an interesting story. On December 7th, 1941, my brother and I were out to the grand opening of the new airport called Skyhaven, which is the North Las Vegas air terminal, because they had kicked them off of the commercial field, which is where Nellis is now because it was a joint-use field. And they didn't have room for the little airplanes. And one of these people is still alive, Bud Barrett -- and I forget the lady's name, and the lady is still alive -- built this airport. MR. WRIGHT: That was Florence Murphy. MR. CHRISTENSEN: Florence Murphy, that's correct. MR. WRIGHT: I'm not going to be doing the interview, but I believe she's going to be one of the people -- MR. CHRISTENSEN: Well, they built this airport, and the day it opened was December 7th. And we were all out at the airport, and they were doing stunt flying and all these demonstrations and so forth. And there were two brand new TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 21 shiny, AT-6 trainers that had come over from what's now called Nellis. And they'd been on static display. And they got ready to leave, and they took off and folded the gear and left. And one of them circled around and came back and landed. And they had run up to the makeshift tower, and they announced Pearl Harbor had been bombed and that all aircraft were grounded. And everybody else, servicemen were to report to their duty stations. And airplanes were grounded until further notice, because we didn't know if we were under attack, the west coast or what. And I was in line for my first ride in an airplane, which was a two-wing biplane. And I didn't get to the front of the line in time to get the ride. So I didn't fly again until I flew off the D4C Ranch in high school. MR. WRIGHT: Were you ever a pilot? MR. CHRISTENSEN: Oh, yes, yes. Then when I got out of college -- I went to Brigham Young University, and a lot of kids did, especially the Mormon kids all went to BYU. And I went into the ROTC program. It was during the Korean War. And when I got out of school, I went directly into pilot training and became a pilot. I flew with the Strategic Air Command for a while, flew a B-47 bomber. And then I flew ever since we got out. I learned to fly, actually, when I went to college. And I think I probably flew for, let's see, from '50, '60, TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 22 '70, '80 -- almost 40 years before I quit. So I've flown around this valley extensively. We've had several airplanes here. My brothers learned to fly, and both my kids fly. And we did a lot of it. When you get to the point where you don't need an airplane to fly somewhere, you're better off to quit flying. Because if you just fly around the PAX to stay current, you're going to get dangerous. You're not flying enough. So I just sacked up the bats and quit. MR. WRIGHT: Is there anything else we should know about Las Vegas before you go off to BYU? Anything else that would help so many hundreds of thousands of newer residents understand what Las Vegas was all about in those years? MR. CHRISTENSEN: It was a quiet town. The gaming was kind of interesting because the kids weren't supposed to be in there, but my playground was the alley behind Fremont Street. I knew every dealer, every pit boss up and down the alleys because that's where I played. And I knew them all. There were a few drunks. We knew who they were. We knew they were harmless. They were drunk. They you just needed another drink. They weren't a problem to us. And another thing people don't realize is the town ended pretty much at Charleston Boulevard and -- well, on the old, original Westside, Martin Luther King Drive was way out west. And then on the east end of town, where Charleston and Fremont came together was about it. And on the north side of TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 23 town, you went into North Las Vegas, but that was all rural. Now, you go into Paradise Valley and Paradise Valley was farms. I had an uncle by marriage, that's about as close as I can put it, that had a farm out there, and that's where we used to go on Saturdays when we first moved to town. To cool off, we'd go under his big shade trees out there and swim in his irrigation tank and eat his watermelons. And he grew things out there. There was blow sand all over out there, big hills of blow sand with mesquite brush on top of it. And that's where most of the landscaping material for the old, original town came from, from those piles of blow sand. It's kind of funny because when I was the chairman of the commission, we started building that new east-west runway that's south of the original one, and there was an old cement tank there that was going to have to be taken out with a dead cottonwood stump by it. That's where I learned to swim is in that tank. That was on my uncle's place. MR. WRIGHT: That was out close to the Hidden Well Ranch too, was it not? MR. CHRISTENSEN: The Hidden Well Ranch was a little further out, um-hm. This was right where the runway is, actually. Paradise School was way out of town. It was one of the first grade schools built way out there for those people. TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 24 But that was almost all rural. And there was nothing in Henderson until the war came. When the war came, they built the Henderson plant and that's what created Henderson. Before that there was nothing there. And that's how the highway got divided, incidentally, between Las Vegas and Henderson. There was so much traffic, people driving to Henderson to work from Las Vegas, that they had to divide the highway because it got to where it was killing too many people, head-ons and so forth. MR. WRIGHT: Yeah, a lot of over-exuberant people -- MR. CHRISTENSEN: Yeah. MR. WRIGHT: -- coming back from a night on the town in Las Vegas perhaps. MR. CHRISTENSEN: Well, they were coming back to work, a lot of them, coming home from work. But that's where we used to race cars. It was a great place to race cars. I made many trips to Henderson a hundred miles an hour, because a car would do that and there wasn't anybody else on the road. I'll tell you an interesting story about the plant. You know, this is how government works. We lived in a house on Ninth Street, and we needed a bigger house. So my dad bought the house on Seventh Street, Seventh and Charleston. I think he paid $17,000 for it, which was a pretty tidy sum in TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 25 those days. But it was a big home. It had enough bedrooms for the whole family. And it belonged to the guy that owned the Palace Theater. MR. WRIGHT: And the Palace Theater was on Second Street. MR. CHRISTENSEN: It was on Second Street, right, uh-huh. South Second. And he didn't live there, but he owned the home, and it was rented. So we bought it and gave the guy that rented it notice to move out because we wanted to take possession of the home. Well, he worked in a critical occupation at the Henderson plant. And so they notified us that we couldn't evict him because he was in a critical occupation. And furthermore, Office of Price Administration, the OPA, had rent controls on. They had charged him too much rent, and we had to reduce his rent. So we bought a house to live in and couldn't live in it and had to cut the rent after paying $37,000 (sic) for the house. MR. WRIGHT: I had read accounts that OPA was constantly complaining about rent gouging in Las Vegas during those years. MR. CHRISTENSEN: Yeah. Well, we got in trouble with that. But luckily, the man decided to find another place to live and moved out and cleared it all for us within about another 60, 90 days. And we moved into that house and it was TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 26 a great house. It was a wonderful place to grow up. There was nothing for a block between our house and the rest of town going north. It was all vacant lot. And of course, there were vacant lots all over town. We used to play in those vacant lots. We dug tunnels in them, built forts, threw clods at each other, played Run Sheepy Run, played Shinny, all those things. I learned to drive in that vacant lot. I had a car when I was only 15 and a half, and I drove it for six months in circles and figure eights in that vacant lot to learn to shift the gears and everything. It drove the neighbors nuts. But you know, it was no harm, no foul. It worked all right. I stayed within the law. MR. WRIGHT: So you went off to college, into the service. You were gone for quite a while. When did you come back to Las Vegas? MR. CHRISTENSEN: Not really too long. I was on a three-year tour in the Air Force. And when I got out, I came right back home, and that was in December of '57, I believe. So I went to college in 1950 and came back out of the Air Force in '57 and went right into business, into the jewelry business, and went back to work as a watchmaker. I learned to repair watches when I was 14 years old. And the guys that taught me, one of them was the county treasurer, Bill Galloway, and the other one was the father of the former state senator, Bob Robinson, his Dad, Larry. They TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 27 both worked for my dad and taught me how to fix watches when I was 14 years old. MR. WRIGHT: So I gather that you and your brothers each sort of were responsible for one of the outlets. MR. CHRISTENSEN: It got to that, yes. When we first went in together, my oldest brother is more of a bookkeeper, but they were both trained in watchmaker school. Now, I never went to watchmaker school. But they never went to college. They went to watchmaker school instead, and then into the Army and Navy respectively. But they were trained, and so my brother took care of mostly the bookkeeping duties, and my other brother and I repaired watches. And we used to bring in watches from all of the stores and repair them. We started the first mass production on watch repairing that we had ever done, my brother and I did. He was a master at that. He fixed so many watches at the air bases in California -- he had those contracts -- that we could tear watches down. I would tear the watch down, polish the case, polish the crystal, supply any parts that needed to be replaced, put them in the baskets, and run them through the cleaning machine. And he would take them out of the cleaning machine and reassemble that watch, never having seen it come apart, because he knew the various movements well enough that he could reassemble it without ever taking it apart. I never was that good. I had to take the TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 28 watch apart to remember where to put it back together. But he could do it all just from memory. MR. WRIGHT: This was before you opened the back, popped out a battery, and popped a new battery in. MR. CHRISTENSEN: Oh, yeah. We have to disassemble that watch and completely go through it, clean it piece by piece, take all the screws out, unwind the springs, rewind them, lubricate them, put it all together. We did it for six bucks. MR. WRIGHT: I think that I read that M.J. Christensen had it's own jewelry design section at a certain point. MR. CHRISTENSEN: Well, we went into that. We became one of the largest custom manufacturers in town. You know, I'm often asked about all the people coming to town, how it's good for business. I think every hundred people that came to Las Vegas brought another jeweler. At one time we were the only one of about two full-service jewelry stores in town, and there were a couple of other smaller ones. And now there's one every block. I mean, you look at the jewelers in the yellow pages and it's a whole section, almost as many as there are pornographers. So, it's gotten too many. Actually, you're cutting the pie with very thin slices. But we've lived on the idea that we do the work and we do it in our own shop, and we stand behind it. And that's TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 29 been our mainstay for years. MR. WRIGHT: When did you get into politics? MR. CHRISTENSEN: That was an odd thing. I was in the Chamber of Commerce on the board of directors, and I don't remember how I got there. I think somebody nominated me, and all of a sudden I was on the ballot, and I ended up in the Chamber of Commerce. It probably started from the fact that I was on the board of one of the merchants associations in the Charleston Plaza Mall, and I got on the retail merchants bureau of the chamber. And so I ended up on the Chamber of Commerce board of directors. And then I was on a committee, a legislative action committee. And a friend of mine, Al Levy, was on that same committee, and he was running for city council. Now at that time, they were called the City Commission. At that time, the City Commission had four commissioners, and they staggered the terms, but they all ran at large. You had a numbered seat, but you ran at large. And he was running for one of the seats. I don't remember the number. We were sitting in this legislative action committee meeting, and we got chastised for disrupting the meeting 'cause they wanted to start and we were chatting in the back too much. But the subject of our conversation was that I said, "Al, you're running for the wrong seat." And he says, "No, I can beat that guy." TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 30 I said, "Well, there's a guy also in the race that might beat you. You ought to jump over to number four because there's nobody in that race, and I think you can beat that guy." And he says, "No, I'm going in the other race. I know that's where I should be." And he says, "If you're so smart about it, why don't you run for the other seat?" I said, "Well, for two cents, I would." And then they hushed us up. We discussed the pending legislation we were going to go over for the chamber to give their input on it. And I heard nothing more of that until about a week later. A guy called up on the phone. And he's still around, and I'm not going to mention his name, but he was a very prominent person in town. And he said to me, "I've got two cents." And I said, "So, what's your point?" And he recalled my conversation to Al Levy. And I said, "Yes, I did say that." And he said, "Are you really interested?" And I said, "Mildly. Some day I'd like to do that." He says, "I'll come down and talk to you." So he came down and talked to me, and he brought another guy with him. And he said, "We'd like you to run for that seat if you want to." And I said, "Well, what's it cost?" TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 31 And he says, "It'll cost you about $25,000." I says, "Pass." I says, "The job pays, I think, 4,000 a year," and I said, "I'm not going to do that. I don't have the money, and if I did, I wouldn't squander it." He says, "I'll raise the money, and it won't be tainted." And so I said, "Oh, well, let's give it a shot." And so we filed. And he raised the money for me, true to his word. He used to call me, and he'd say, "You go see this guy, this guy, and this guy. And have you had anybody contact you?" And I'd say, "Yeah, so-and-so contacted me and so-and-so." And he'd say, "Well, the first one's okay, but don't take any money from the second guy because he's a crook. He'll want something." And he says, "Whenever you go talk to these guys for campaign contributions, you be sure and tell them that all that gets them is a straight look. There's no deals here." And I maintained that all the time I was in politics. In fact, I used to have people tell me that they didn't agree with me. But they knew I wasn't bought by anybody else, and that I might shoot them down, but I would at least do it. I wouldn't hang them out to dry and sit on it forever and so forth. They always didn't like it, but they TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 32 got a straight shot. Well, this guy did raise the money, and it was a hotly contested race, and I think it was about $26,000 I spent. And we raised it all, spent it all. And I came within 53 votes of winning it all in the primary with five people in the race. And if I'd spent a little more money campaigning in a couple of areas of town which I knew I was light in, I probably would have won that in the primary, and it wouldn't have cost near as much money. And the next year I was unopposed. I filed and went to Hawaii for a week before I started campaigning, and nobody ran. MR. WRIGHT: Do you recall what year it was you were first elected? MR. CHRISTENSEN: '73, June of '73. We took office in July of '73. And then in '77, I was unopposed. And '81, I ran again, didn't have much of a problem. And then Ronzone retired from the county, and I ran for his seat, which came open, and got elected and stayed there until this last election where I was defeated. But that's how it all started. MR. WRIGHT: When you were elected to the City Commission, was that still where each commissioner was in charge of a department of city government? TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 33 MR. CHRISTENSEN: No, no. The city manager formed the government, and we didn't have charge of any departments. No, it was strictly just like it is now. MR. WRIGHT: Were the issues in the early '70s significantly different from the present issues? MR. CHRISTENSEN: Well, it's gone 180 degrees. The issue then was to try and bring new people and new businesses and everything to the city. And now, the noisy part of the populace, I don't think it's all of them, but the noisy part of the populace wants to keep everything out and leave it exactly as it is. And that's a problem because most people don't realize that if you shut this town down completely on growth that you're going to have about 40 percent of the people out of a job. MR. WRIGHT: So not too many people back in the '70s were saying, "Let's take another look and slow down here"? It was all, "Let's go for it"? MR. CHRISTENSEN: No, no, that wasn't it at all. The issues were pretty much the same: More parks, better police. The police departments were merged in the legislature, and it took effect the day I took office. So consolidation was the big issue. The legislature tried to do it in '75, and it failed the court test. I don't think it ever went to court. I think the attorney general gave an opinion that it was unconstitutional law. And then we put it TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 34 on a ballot two years later, and it failed on that ballot. That would have been the time to do it. It was small enough. To do it now is difficult because you've got so many more people involved and it's so much bigger. When you put something together, you've got to put it together when it's small enough that it's manageable. MR. WRIGHT: What about ethics issues? Again, comparing then and now with the kinds of ethics allegations that were -- MR. CHRISTENSEN: You know, the ethics issues have always been there. You won elections based on ethics, or lost them. But the differences, that the campaigning didn't get as bitter and volatile as it does now. I don't think it did anyway. And you know, I don't think you can legislate integrity. You've either got it or you haven't. The law is pretty clear on that. I noticed in the newspaper the other day a professor at the university quoted what the state law was on ethics -- on conflict of interests was what it was. And basically it pointed out that you couldn't do any vote that would enhance your position, your income, or a relative's position. And then they've got a catchall at the end of it, "or anyone else." Well, you know, that's kind of impossible because every decision you make enhances somebody. The question is how close they're tied to you. It's kind of ironic. TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 35 I was declared in conflict of interest on an advisory opinion because I asked for it because I was accused of it in the old garbage company votes on the county when they went into recycling. I had a brother in the recycling business, and I couldn't understand why he had to pay you for your aluminum cans, but the garbage company was going to pick them up, and you were going to pay the garbage company for picking them up. And they were going to increase the rates to do that. Mathematically that just didn't work. I said, "Where's the fairness here?" The independent people without a contract with the city or the county have to buy the scrap and recycle it, and the citizens have to pay the county by law -- or pay the garbage company by law to recycle their stuff. It didn't make sense. And so I raised that issue in a meeting and created so much ruckus about the ordinance that I got taken off the vote. And the irony is the opinion didn't come back until the year after the ordinance was passed. So it was moot anyway. But that is one of those ethics situations where I was not in a position to help my brother or hurt him. It was a fairness issue that I happened to know about because of my brother being in the business. And so sometimes what it does is it stifles your ability to use the knowledge you have. See, nobody else knew anything about the recycling business. TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 36 MR. WRIGHT: Kind of a catch 22 there. MR. CHRISTENSEN: Yeah, you're beat no matter which way you turn. I knew how the recycling business worked. I knew what they paid for aluminum. I knew what happened to them. I knew how they bailed it, what they got for it per pound, very small margin. And yet, I saw that go down as something that to me was blatantly unfair that I and my brother, who is in the recycling business, now had to pay an extra fee on his garbage for recycling. And yet, if he wanted to recycle, he had to pay you for your cans. MR. WRIGHT: Yeah. I suppose one of the other differences might be that, going back a ways, the city was so much smaller, you couldn't make a decision as a city commissioner -- MR. CHRISTENSEN: Without conflicting somewhere. MR. WRIGHT: -- where you knew everybody in town practically. MR. CHRISTENSEN: You just had to be honest about it. And I think the key today is disclosure. I don't think all of these problems that people are looking at now would occur if they'd disclose. Well, what they do in court, you say, "My brother-in-law is an attorney that's done business with this guy before. Does that bother you Mr. Defendant?" If he says no, then okay, it's done, but it's disclosed. It's on the record. You won't get a mistrial. But if you don't TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 37 disclose it, you'll get a mistrial. And I still don't believe you can legislate ethics. I take that back. You can't legislate honesty and integrity. You can legislate ethics, but it's very, very difficult to define. MR. WRIGHT: Okay. What are we missing here? What haven't I asked you about? MR. CHRISTENSEN: Oh, I don't know. Maybe the early days in politics. I'll tell you another change now that I've noticed, and I noticed it my last term of office, it isn't fun anymore. MR. WRIGHT: I think that's an interesting point. MR. CHRISTENSEN: There was a time when it was fun, you know. We used to joke and laugh and still get the job done without any harm or foul to anybody, but enjoy what we were doing. It's easier to do the job and do it well if you enjoy it. If the job is a drudge and miserable, you don't enjoy it. I never was attacked on the city council. I was never threatened. But on the county, I've had my life threatened. I was attacked by a man who claimed I attacked him, and that was rampant in the newspapers and so forth. My wife got a call one day that there was a bomb in my car. Commissioner Bingham got a call that they knew where his kids were going to school. He had to leave the meeting, TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 38 go pick up his kids and put them in another school under assumed names. It makes it so that the field of viable candidates for public office has gotten extremely narrow because of the position they put you in where you're vilified on a daily basis for making a decision. You go into a zoning decision and no matter which way you go, somebody's sore at you. And they believe that if they're sore at you, you should dance and do it quick. And it's an impossible situation that I think it's changed. Now, in the old days we used to have a lot of fun. We didn't have an open meeting law, and I don't think we ever abused not having an open meeting law. MR. WRIGHT: You know, I'd heard stories that some of the commissioners, city, county or whatever, would adjourn to a local watering hole and a lot of decisions would be made there. MR. CHRISTENSEN: That was before my time, but they claim that happened at Bob Baskin's restaurant, that if it didn't take place in Bob Baskin's restaurant, it didn't take place. MR. WRIGHT: Or Poppa Gar's I think was -- MR. CHRISTENSEN: Well, Poppa Gar's is now. You know, I had lunch at Poppa Gar's today and it's a fine place. I think there were a lot more decisions that they thought were TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 39 made there than were actually made there. I remember one incident where the city had a picnic, and they were going on Willow Beach, and they decided to have a little fishing tournament. The mayor had a nice boat, Mayor Briare, and he didn't like to put it in the lake. It was a chore to him. And I said, "Well, I boat a lot out there. I'll launch the boat for you and retrieve it. And we'll go out there, and we'll go on this picnic." So the Mayor and Ronald Lurie and I were fishing in his boat. And the city clerk's husband was a chef, and she had packed us a lunch. And it was a nice, nice lunch. I mean, it was first class. Big ice chest. So we're out there in this boat on Willow Beach. And the next thing I saw in the newspaper the next day, that we'd been seen making decisions affecting the city in the middle of the river at Willow Beach. And the irony of that was the only decision we made out there was whether to use the red plug or the green plug, and what was on the sandwiches, was there any that didn't have mayonnaise. I mean, the last thing we wanted to discuss at that picnic was city business. It wasn't fun to discuss city business. And all we were doing was fishing out there, having a good time. And well, we didn't go on any picnics anymore, you couldn't. MR. WRIGHT: So the open meeting law has kind of put TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 40 maybe too many restrictions on -- MR. CHRISTENSEN: Well, the open meeting law was an attempt to legislate honesty again. And I think it was pushed through the legislature by primarily the press to make sure that the press didn't get left out of anything. I don't think the public ever figured in it. The irony is, with our form of government, people lose sight of this. And maybe I'm oversimplifying it, but that's what representative government is all about. I've said this many times, and I firmly believe it, that when you elect somebody to represent you, let them represent you. If you don't like the way they represent you, vote them out. But if you want to tell them what to vote on every issue, the average person in the public does not want to be bothered with that. If you've got 50 protesters at a meeting, that's a lot of people, 50 out of a million and a quarter. But nevertheless, they think their 50 votes should sway the issue. And that's part of the problem with representative government. If you've followed that theory, that they should make the decision, then you don't need representative government. What you need is you need every issue to be put on a ballot, and everybody every Friday push the buttons and vote what they want for that week's work. And you know, frankly, I, as a citizen and ex-commissioner, don't have time to call the commissioners and tell them what I want them to do TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 41 on every issue. I figure they'll do what's best. And if they don't, then maybe they should be replaced. If they do, we'll keep them in office. But that's overly simple. Too many people feel that when they win a popularity contest, which is all an election is, when you win that popularity contest, that somehow a mantle of knowledge descends upon your shoulders which is not there. And the average person does not realize how much knowledge and preparation goes into making a decision. It's real easy to sit in the audience and say, well, you should do this. But you haven't talked to the attorney. You don't know that that's illegal, that you can't do it that way. And you don't know from past experience that you can't force somebody to build homes on West Charleston Boulevard anymore because nobody would buy them. They're Pollyanna types. I get a tickle out of the speed bumps they've got around now. When I was with the city, we never used speed bumps because the attorneys told us we'd be liable for damage caused by a speed bump in a public street, and I believe that to be true. So now they've got speed bumps that they call humps, but the signs say bumps. And I asked the commissioner, I said, "Why do the signs say bumps and you call them humps?" He says, "'Cause we put signs up that said humps and everybody stole them." TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 42 MR. WRIGHT: That's getting pretty minute. MR. CHRISTENSEN: Yeah. So the problem is that when you start blocking off all these streets, then everybody has to use the same street to get to work, and there's not enough room on it. That's why we've got the problems with traffic we've got. There are no ways to get there other than the freeway anymore, because they want everybody to use the freeway. Those are the kind of issues that we've always had. I remember the first time I was on the city council, I asked why we've got that stupid pork chop island at Sixth and Charleston. Because I used to go out to the Sahara store from downtown, and you can't get there from downtown. And when I looked at it, I said, "This is not good for business. You can't get there from here." You either go down Maryland Parkway through a school zone for two blocks or you go on The Strip, which is crowded. Because there's no place between Fifth Street and 12th street that you can get through except on Sixth Street, and that's closed. MR. WRIGHT: Doesn't make a whole lot of sense. MR. CHRISTENSEN: No. So the theory with floods, and we use it with our detention basins, is that when you have flood waters, you spread the water out and slow it down. If you gather it together and speed it up, it cuts big channels. But with traffic, we gather it together and speed it up rather than spread it out and slow it down. So you know, that's my TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 43 personal philosophy, but I think it's been borne out in other cities. I don't know. We had a lot of fun discussing those things in those days, and you can't do that anymore, and that's unfortunate. MR. WRIGHT: You mentioned you can't please everybody in zoning kinds of issues. What would you say to those who as between, say, developers and slow-growth advocates saying that perhaps the developers get just a little bit of an edge in the political pie there? Do you think that's true? MR. CHRISTENSEN: Well, you know, that may be true in some instances, but I don't see that happening too much. Here's the balancing act you've got. Everybody wants to own a home. But if you make everybody buy a half an acre of ground, they can't afford to own a home. Every time you increase the price of a home a thousand dollars, you narrow down the number of people that can afford to qualify for a loan to buy a home. (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 ??