1 NEVADA STATE MUSEUM & HISTORICAL SOCIETY LAS VEGAS, NEVADA THE LAS VEGAS I REMEMBER INTERVIEW WITH ED VON TOBEL, JR., AND GEORGE VON TOBEL Taken At KNPR Studios 5151 Boulder Highway Las Vegas, Nevada 2 MR. WRIGHT: I'm Frank Wright with the Nevada State Museum and Historical Society, and I'm here with two gentlemen in the KNPR Studios. And I would like you, first, to introduce yourselves. MR. ED VON TOBEL: I'm Ed Von Tobel, Junior. MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: I'm George Von Tobel, four years the junior to Ed, Junior. MR. WRIGHT: And one thing that people, I think, most of whom will be listening, will not be very familiar with Las Vegas and certainly not as far back as you two gentlemen. So I think they will be interested in how you came to be in Las Vegas, and maybe I could ask that question of both of you. How did the Von Tobel family come to Las Vegas? MR. ED VON TOBEL: Well, no question in my mind. Dad came up here on kind of a lark. He was working in Los Angeles in 1905, and he and his buddy, Jake Beckley, read the ad in the Los Angeles Times that they were opening up a new town in Las Vegas and they were auctioning off lots, and you could take a round trip to Las Vegas and stay overnight for $23 or whatever it was. And so they thought, well, that would be a nice couple of days to go up there and see what was happening. And they came up here and they were auctioning off these lots, and the second day they made an offer to sell the lots at a discount and with a small down payment. So at that 3 time, they bought up some property here and then in future weeks decided to start on a lumber yard and came back. And they were both bachelors, and they built a little building to start their lumber yard. And later they got married and raised their families here. And of course, George and I are part of the Von Tobel family. My older brother Jake and sister Elizabeth, the four of us, were raised from the beginning. And Jake Beckley had a daughter who was raised here also and some of the other -- MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: Also, Ed, our father's first trip here from Los Angeles, I think at that time the railroad said if you buy a lot, you get your return trip for free. So that idea has persisted with some of the gaming casinos up and down the state I've heard. MR. WRIGHT: And so what was the town like when your father came here? MR. ED VON TOBEL: Well, of course, all we know is what our dad told us and what we read about. But George can probably tell you. MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: The railroad made this a turnaround point because of the springs, the water, availability of water. And they built the roundhouse here and the ice plant before anything else. The ice plant made these hundred-pound blocks of ice which went in the old-fashioned railroad cars to preserve the perishables that were shipped 4 from California or from Utah. And this was a point midway, in Las Vegas, where the railroad stopped to load the box cars with ice so that the perishables would be preserved. At the same time, there was a sort of a repair shop which was where -- what would it be, a great uncle or uncle worked? MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: Oh, our uncle, yes, uh-huh. MR. ED VON TOBEL: Because that's why our future mother came to visit her sister, who was married to this railroad shop repairman. MR. WRIGHT: So your parents met each other in Las Vegas, then. Your mother was visiting in Las Vegas. How did she meet your father? MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: At an Elks dance, I understand. MR. ED VON TOBEL: Right. MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: Because they could both speak German. Because my dad could speak German from his parents, which he'd learned, who had come from Switzerland. I imagine immediately my mother was attracted to him because of his language ability because she hadn't been in the United States very long. I don't think she knew much English. MR. WRIGHT: So your father started a lumber yard. Can you tell us where that lumber yard was? MR. ED VON TOBEL: Well, the original purchase was on 5 South Main Street in about the 500 block. They bought two or perhaps four little 25-foot lots, or at least made the down payments on them, and that's where they started their business. The lots were not selling very well down along the railroad tracks, and it was not a residential area, but a little kind of a business area; so that's where they built their first little building and started their business. But it was only a few months before that was too far out of town, and they moved up to the 200 block of South First Street, which is just two blocks from where the Golden Nugget now stands. And, in fact, the Golden Nugget has taken over that property where my dad's first business was. But to get back to my mother. It was 1908 when my mother came up here, and by that time there was a little community established here. They had houses and hotels and stores and other facilities. And George mentioned the Elks Lodge, which was the second floor of a building in the 200 block of Fremont Street, about where the Golden Nugget Casino now is. On the second floor of a commercial building was the Elks Lodge, and that's, of course, where they had the Elks dance and where Mother met my father. And they eventually married in October of 1908 and then they got themselves established in an apartment and later bought a little house on North Third Street. And eventually my brother was born in 1909 and then the rest of us kids came 6 along. MR. WRIGHT: Can you give us the dates of the family members? You were the second son; is that correct? MR. ED VON TOBEL: No, my brother Jake was the first son. He was born in 1909. And then my sister was born 1911; and I was born in 1913; and George, as he mentioned, is much younger than I. He didn't come along until 1918. So he was the youngster of the family. MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: Well, the very early days Ed recalls much better than myself, the early days in Las Vegas. MR. ED VON TOBEL: Well, early 1920, and in the first ten years of the town, of course, I don't remember too much. But I was old enough starting in 1920 to remember happenings. Railroad strikes and different things like that happened in town that George, not having been born until after the war, why, he doesn't perhaps recall as much of that early-day Las Vegas as I would. So if you have questions regarding those early days, why, maybe I could fill that in better. MR. WRIGHT: One thing occurs to me: Right at the end of the war, you would have been very young, but there was quite an influenza epidemic. Do you recall anything about that? Any effect in Las Vegas? MR. ED VON TOBEL: Oh, I don't recall the actual incident, but I know we had a very severe epidemic and a lot of people passed away. But fortunately, none of us children 7 had serious attacks anyway, or my mother and dad did not, but other people did. It was a very, very serious problem. MR. WRIGHT: Now, you mentioned the family home was on North Third Street. Of course, we tend to think of that as right downtown now. But I'm wondering if you can sort of describe the area where you lived, what North Third Street and that area was like when you were very young. MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: I can remember the fruit trees. We had many kinds of fruit. We had a grape arbor, had apricots, cherries, figs. What else, Ed? MR. ED VON TOBEL: Pears, a sour cherry tree that Mother made wonderful pies out of, and apples. The worms got into the apples, so they didn't do too well; and the peaches didn't do all that well. Just a little bit too hot here for good peaches. MR. WRIGHT: It's hard to imagine now peaches and cherries and apples growing on Third Street, so it's quite a change. Who were some of your neighbors, do you recall, when you were very young? MR. ED VON TOBEL: Well, of course, actually we were all neighbors and the town was so small. North Third street was just two blocks deep and it was lined with, in the later years, the war years and like that, why, it was lined with 8 several houses, either residences or rentals, small houses that were rented out. And so then we all went to one school together, and there was only about three churches here. So if you went to church at all, why, you knew everybody in town. And the business community was just two blocks long. At the head of the street on the west end of Fremont Street was the depot where the Union Plaza Hotel now stands; that was the railroad depot. And then two blocks east of there was virtually the entire business community. We had two or three small little grocery stores along the first two blocks, and we had the post office right at the corner of Second and Fremont Street. We had a couple, two or three restaurants in there, a butcher shop. And several of the buildings were two stories so that lawyers and the dentist, and it was sort of professional people, had offices upstairs. But beyond that, from Second Street east, there was a couple of garages and a furniture store or something like that. And then from Third Street to Fifth Street were some of the better residences of the town. And pictures from that area will show the nice mulberry trees that lined the street and the nice big brick homes that were there, the concrete block homes. But North Third were the more modest homes and then also on South Second and South First and Second and Third Street. And of course, the school was at Fourth and Bridger. Between Bridger and Lewis, they had the high school and the 9 elementary school. MR. WRIGHT: Right there where the Foley Federal Building is now. MR. ED VON TOBEL: Yes. MR. WRIGHT: Right. MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: Well, it was two stories high of the entire grammar school, all eight grades. The high school was a separate building. MR. WRIGHT: And you both went to the same school and then you went to the high school which was right next door? MR. ED VON TOBEL: Yes. MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: I went to the new high school. MR. ED VON TOBEL: George went to the Seventh Street. MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: South Eighth Street. That building is still there, still used as some sort of a special school by the Clark County School District. MR. WRIGHT: But you, Ed, went to the original high school that was right there on Fifth Street? MR. ED VON TOBEL: Right. I'm not too sure -- in the early days we had a high school. It might have been all in the same two-story building. And then perhaps in later years as the population increased, I don't know for sure just when, perhaps you know when they built the high school as a separate 10 building. MR. WRIGHT: Yeah, 1917 was when they built what was called Clark County High School. And when they built the new high school that George went to, they turned the other one into the upper elementary grades until that wouldn't work. MR. ED VON TOBEL: Yeah, and I was in the last class that graduated from the fourth street high school; that was 1930. We had about 35 in our senior class and not more than 200 in the whole high school. And then this next year, in the fall of 1930, is when they started classes at the seventh street high school. MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: I graduated in 1935 from high school. I think we had about 92 students, which was the entire graduating class, and maybe there might have been 400 in the entire high school. That was even quite a bit compared to Ed's class. MR. WRIGHT: Were you involved in athletics at all at the high school? I was thinking particularly of Frank Butcher, who was quite a hero in those years at the high school, the football coach. MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: I remember him quite well. But I didn't play athletics, no. MR. ED VON TOBEL: Frank Butcher was, I guess, our first football coach. I don't think we played football. But of course, when I was going to high school, why, it was 11 primarily basketball. We had a good basketball team, but it was pretty hard to get any competition. We'd have to play Bunkerville and Moapa, and they would quite frequently beat us, and then Kingman and Needles and, oh, maybe Tonopah. They might have had state championship basketball games in those days. We had some good teams and some good players, but of course, when you only need five players, it's easy. But in later years then they had enough to make up football teams, but none of the kids knew much about football. They had to pretty much learn from Coach Butcher. But he was a very popular coach; he came from Texas. MR. WRIGHT: Las Vegas was very small when you were both young. What was it like growing up? Aside from school, what did young people do? How did young people entertain themselves? What were their activities during those years? MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: When I got old enough to drive a car and had a car, or borrow my father's, we used to cruise Fremont Street. I think that's still an activity, isn't it, for the youngsters? MR. WRIGHT: It's probably an activity, but not any longer on Fremont Street. MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: Now they go to The Strip? MR. WRIGHT: They don't allow cars anymore on Fremont Street. 12 MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: Oh, that's right. MR. WRIGHT: It's probably The Strip these days. MR. ED VON TOBEL: Bicycles were popular, especially with boys, in those early days, like they are today. We could go bicycling down to the old ranch. Where the Stewart Ranch was and back was a nice bicycle ride, or there are a lot of trails out through the desert. But burros ran throughout this whole valley, so there was paths going all over. George and his pal created -- tell them about the first dune buggy, George. You and Jack Tisdale -- MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: It was a 1917 Model T, put double tires on the rear so it was like, in effect, balloon tires and had a Rukstell rear end which gave me several gears down. I used to ride across the desert. Probably the town's first dune buggy. MR. WRIGHT: That's wonderful, a 1917 dune buggy. You were about 30 years ahead of your time there in creating the dune buggy. MR. ED VON TOBEL: But George tells the stories how he and Jack would take off and go up in the hills and, of course, there were a lot of prospects. In the early days, why, they'd prospect all these hills around here looking for gold, I suppose, as much as anything. And George and his pal would find and seek out all those places just to nose around and have something to do. 13 I know they found one place where there was actually a tunnel that had been drilled, wasn't it, George? And they had a railroad car or ore cars. And the ore cars and the little rails were still there, weren't they, at that time? MR. WRIGHT: Was that up at Mount Potosi, maybe? MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: Yeah, it's on the side of Potosi. MR. WRIGHT: That tunnel, I think, has long been covered over, and I think people have scrounged the cable car some years not too long ago. MR. ED VON TOBEL: And that was, of course, back in probably 1930. Those places had been abandoned. Most of the mines in this county were abandoned during the war because there was no men available to work the properties. We had gold mines, of course, in Eldorado Canyon, then Goodsprings was a big mining town. At one time Goodsprings and Searchlight were bigger population-wise than Las Vegas, weren't they? MR. WRIGHT: I think they both were at least in the running for the biggest town in southern Nevada. MR. ED VON TOBEL: Right, uh-huh. Which wasn't very big, but might have had a couple of thousand people, which was a big town. MR. WRIGHT: Even had a nice hotel down at Goodsprings; didn't they? 14 MR. ED VON TOBEL: Oh, sure they did, yeah. That hotel was still standing a few years ago. Is it still there? MR. WRIGHT: No. It's been gone for quite some time. But the old saloon is still there that was right close to it. MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: Is that still operating? MR. WRIGHT: I think it's still operating, yeah, the old Pioneer Saloon. It goes back 1912, 1914, something like that. What about the area right around Las Vegas? I know there were a number of small farms and ranch operations. Didn't your father have a small farming operation or ranch? MR. ED VON TOBEL: How many acres did they have out there, George? MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: My dad had title, I think, to 160 acres or more, what is now called the area of the Jap Ranch. MR. WRIGHT: That's the Tomiyasu Ranch? MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: Well, in that vicinity. I don't know if it's the same property or not. But he held it for many, many years. And finally he sold it, I think, for not much more than he had paid. I remember one time him remarking, "How long are you supposed to hold something before you sell it?" MR. WRIGHT: For newcomers to Las Vegas, do you know 15 what's there now or what the streets would be where that ranch was? MR. ED VON TOBEL: Tomiyasu Lane and Sierra Vista subdivision. MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: Sierra Vista Rancho. MR. WRIGHT: So that's all subdivision; that's all part of -- MR. ED VON TOBEL: Oh, yes. MR. WRIGHT: -- a metropolitan area now. MR. ED VON TOBEL: The Jap Tomiyasu Ranch was just across the road and that's quite a trucking farm that he operated, he and his family. And they raised crops that were right for this area, and he didn't try to sell them too much locally, but he could ship them probably north to Salt Lake and so on because our crops came on sooner, tomatoes and melons and peppers. Well, he had just about anything you wanted. And he could sell it, put it on the railroad and ship it north and then get much more than he could by selling it locally. My dad and his partner, Jake, leased out part of their property one time to a different Jap who didn't raise crops like that. And he would come into town with a little one-horse wagon with his produce on there and then go around house to house. And Mother and all the other housewives would go out and get fresh produce. 16 MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: That was our first house on North Third Street. The Jap man would ring a bell, I think. MR. ED VON TOBEL: Right. MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: Mother would go out into the street and shop the wagon. The wagon would go on to the next house and further on down. MR. WRIGHT: Did you two go out to that property a lot or was it -- MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: No. MR. WRIGHT: You didn't go out and play out there or go into the swimming pool or -- MR. ED VON TOBEL: Oh, I think we did in the earlier days. And when George was growing up, why, it was a little later, and I don't think that there was anything much there. But Jake Beckley, my dad's partner, liked to do gardening, so they drilled a well and developed a little reservoir where it was kind of a swimming hole, and then they could also divert the water to -- the wells didn't have to be all that deep, probably not much more than a hundred feet and you'd get flowing water which was suitable to water crops with and you could drink it. It was a hard water, but you could drink it; it wouldn't be very tasty, but it was pure enough. But you could raise crops and good melons and that sort of thing. So Jake Beckley would supply the immediate family members with what he raised out there, and that was in the 17 earlier days. But we could go out there. And then the Millers, Mr. Miller from the Nevada Hotel and his family, had where Sunset Park now stands. He had that whole area in alfalfa, and he used to raise hay. And so we'd go quite often with some of that family and others, the Graglia family and many others that were here at the time, mostly Italians. And he had three reservoirs on the Sunset Park area. And so we had plenty of places to swim. He had a haystack where we could play in the hay. And he didn't have any horses to ride or anything that I remember, but he did have cattle sometimes and sheep. And he tried to raise hay to sell to the railroad, but he was always complaining that it really didn't pay because the railroad wouldn't pay enough for his hay. They could buy it cheaper probably coming down from Idaho and Utah. MR. WRIGHT: Just to sort of pin that down a bit, the John Miller that you mentioned owned the Nevada Hotel, that's now the Golden Gate Hotel; isn't that correct? MR. ED VON TOBEL: Yes. And he was a very ambitious man, John Miller. He loved to ranch which, as you say, he acquired all that property, which was at least 160 acres, I think, where Sunset Park is, and had four or five wells and at least three reservoirs to my recollection. And he would have to irrigate to raise alfalfa. So we'd divert the water from the flowing well into these reservoirs. Then when he was 18 ready to water, he just opened the floodgates and let the water run out to irrigate the alfalfa. And then he had a nice little house out there. He didn't live there because he was running the Nevada Hotel. But he was ambitious enough that he'd get up at daybreak and go out to work the ranch until about noon, and then he'd come into town and have a nap and lunch. In those days he had gambling, and gambling was legal, so he'd run the faro bank or the roulette table -- and he had a bar in there -- and do that as long as there were any customers around, and then get a little sleep and go back out to the ranch the same morning. My best friend was Abe Miller, who was in my class in high school, and we went all through school together, and then Helen Miller was younger than Abe. And she went through the eighth grade -- or twelfth grades in Las Vegas as well. But they had to work. Mrs. Miller was the clerk at the hotel, and Abe always had his chores. I know we didn't get to play all that much because by the time he was eight or ten years old, his dad always had chores lined up for him to do. And my brother Jake and I, as we got old enough, we had to work on Saturdays and summers for my dad in his lumber yard. MR. WRIGHT: There's another farmer that had a ranch that's of particular concern to me because I work at that place. Do you remember David Lorenzi's Resort and what kinds 19 of things happened out there? MR. ED VON TOBEL: Maybe George wouldn't remember him, but he was a stonemason. He was very expert. He could lay bricks and cement blocks, if we had any, and those sort of things. But he could also take raw rock that they could bring in from the mountains and build fireplaces and fountains of all assortives. Lorenzi was an Italian but he had a family, and he started that. Lorenzi, I suppose, when he first came to town, he probably just made his living doing bricklaying and stonework, but then he acquired that land out there. And he was a very ambitious man, and he built a huge swimming pool. It was a great place to go swimming. And then he added a lake because he had artesian water there and plenty of water. So he had the lake, and then he put in an island, and then he put in a dance hall on the island, and it was a really great place to go. George would probably remember us going dancing out there; don't you? MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: You bet. It was open air, had a roof, but open air. It was a large dance floor and had live music one or two nights a week, something you can't find today in Las Vegas. MR. WRIGHT: I think he even had a little casino there, or I think he leased a little part of that for a casino 20 once upon a time. MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: I don't remember about a casino, but that was the place to go for several years. MR. WRIGHT: And for a while, in the early 1930's, there was a radio station in Las Vegas, KGIX. And I think they even broadcast from some of the live music -- MR. ED VON TOBEL: Oh, did they? MR. WRIGHT: -- from Lorenzi's Resort out there. MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: KGIX, right. I remember KGIX. MR. ED VON TOBEL: Who owned it? MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: Located about North Tenth Street, North 12th Street. And myself and a fellow student played a trumpet duet over at KGIX. That was my one and only ever appearance on radio. MR. WRIGHT: And where was that? Was that from the high school or from the station itself? MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: We went to the station. MR. ED VON TOBEL: George, I didn't know you had that musical talent. Who's the owner of that? Who started that? MR. WRIGHT: Oh, I can't remember the name. It'll come to me probably. MR. ED VON TOBEL: Uh-huh, because I knew that man and his wife. MR. WRIGHT: He had been a railroad man, and he 21 retired from the railroad. MR. ED VON TOBEL: But then later, did he sell to Max Kelch after that? MR. WRIGHT: No. Well, he went belly up and tried to reestablish it in Boulder City. And that didn't work and then just folded up, and so Max Kelch came in -- MR. ED VON TOBEL: Oh, that was it. MR. WRIGHT: -- and started KENO, KENO. MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: We had some radio reception, but you had to have a very good radio and a very high antenna to get anything other than KFI in Los Angeles. MR. ED VON TOBEL: And I know I made what they called a crystal set with a little earpiece. And I'd fool around and stay up till midnight trying to get a radio station. MR. WRIGHT: Probably got KSL out of Salt Lake City occasionally; wouldn't it? MR. ED VON TOBEL: Yeah, but that was about the extent of it. And then, of course, gradually as the radios got better and the station got stronger, then we could pick up other stations, maybe Denver and San Francisco. And then when we had our own radio station, why then we were really doing great. MR. WRIGHT: Before we leave that early period, we've a little bit about what young people did during that time. What about families? You mentioned dances at the Elks Hall. 22 Were there other places like that? This is the '20s. It's prohibition, and theoretically there's no gambling going on; it's supposedly illegal. What did the older generation do for night life and entertainment? MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: The older generation? MR. WRIGHT: Your parents' generation. MR. ED VON TOBEL: Oh, the town was active. We didn't call them speakeasies, but we had several of those places around. And so if any of the couples wanted to go out Saturday night to have a beer or something or a drink, there were popular places around the town. MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: The Green Shack. The Green Shack was there, and it's still there. I remember going to the Green Shack when I was in high school and having a drink. MR. WRIGHT: Now, didn't they even have a hitching post out there? People could sort of hitch their horses? MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: This one, they had automobiles. MR. ED VON TOBEL: But Las Vegas was never much of a cow town. There might have been some grazing back up in the mountains someplace, but it wasn't a ranch town where you had a bunch of cowboys. The men weren't dressed like you'd see them in Montana or those places. They didn't wear cowboy boots or western clothes all that much. The reason for the town, of course, was the 23 establishment of the railroad division point here, and there were people that worked on the railroad. They either worked in the shops or they worked on the train. They were brakemen and engineers and that sort of thing. They changed the crews here. And then you had the merchants who were supplying those people. But the principal payroll was the railroad. When they opened up the shops, why, then they had four or five hundred employees. This might be interesting: They brought the cattle down from the north in Utah or further north, and they had to take them off to water them. And this was the watering place so they would take them off. They had kind of a stockyard. Right now, where the big county building is, were corrals and places where they'd run the cattle in there and feed them and water them, and then load up the cattle from the previous days and ship them on down to California. And then as George mentioned, the ice plant, when the railroad cars taking produce from California going east, why, they'd have to ice those cars; and so that was quite a big operation to manufacture that ice and dump those big cakes of ice in those railroad cars because they had no refrigerated cars. And in fact, we didn't have refrigerators. Around town every housewife had to have an icebox, which was just a kind of an insulated box, where you'd buy a 25- or 50-pound 24 block of ice. If you had a big kitchen, you'd get a 50-pound ice block, and that would last about two days. But every day the ice man would come around, and he knew exactly who needed ice and would put it in the icebox. But you could just keep stuff cold. You couldn't really keep meat more than a few hours because it never got that cold. You could put the meat right on the ice and hold it overnight; but because of that, the meat market would solicit, not by telephone but by walking around all the neighborhoods and knocking at certain people's back door he knew might order some meat, and then they would deliver it later in the day in time for the dinner hour. MR. WRIGHT: Was that meat guy Harry Blanding by any chance? MR. ED VON TOBEL: I think Blanding butchered meat and maybe delivered it to the -- there were butcher shops downtown. There were meat markets they called them. Grocery stores didn't have meat because they didn't have any refrigeration to keep the meat, or they didn't have the butchers there. So you had separate. And also the grocery store, maybe twice a week, would send somebody around to the housewife's back door and then take orders for what groceries you needed, and those would be delivered the same day. MR. WRIGHT: We tend to forget that some of the things about the old days were not so bad. You had milk 25 delivered to your front doorstep every morning too; right? MR. ED VON TOBEL: That's right. Yeah, we had a pretty big dairy here. MR. WRIGHT: The thing about ice raises something else that I think people would be interested to hear about. There wasn't any air conditioning in those years. How did Las Vegans exist in this desert community with no air conditioning? MR. ED VON TOBEL: Well, I think you put the handle on it. They did barely exist; they survived. When you had no electric stove or -- Mother had to boil water in a boiler on the top of a wood stove to wash the clothes. And in summertime, now that's pretty hot when you have no air conditioning. And winter, of course, you enjoy a nice warm wood stove in your kitchen. And we had a wood stove that Mother cooked on and a nice oven. She made beautiful pies and cakes. She thought that was better than the later years. When she had a gas oven, she still wanted her old wood stove. So in her new house she had a basement, and she put the old wood stove down in the basement because it had the best oven to make the pies and the cakes. But other than that, we had a small little potbellied stove in the living room of our house. And as for winter, we had heat from that stove as well as the heat from the kitchen stove. 26 MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: That's where we kept cool in the summer was in the basement. My dad built the first basement and maybe still it's the only basement. It was at least ten to 15 degrees cooler down in that basement than on the first floor. So that's where we spent most of the summer. MR. WRIGHT: I've been told, and maybe you can confirm it, that a lot of people just slept outdoors in the summertime. MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: Well, that's true, or screened porches. We had screened porches, screens on three sides. MR. WRIGHT: And I gather, too, a lot of people simply escaped for the summer. And I believe the Von Tobel family had a means of escape in the summer at Mount Charleston; am I right? MR. ED VON TOBEL: Well, my dad leased a cabin up there for ten years in the '20s, late '20s. About the first of June, Dad would load up the family and take us all up there and get us all established in that mountain cabin right there at Mount Charleston. MR. WRIGHT: Was that at Kyle Canyon? MR. ED VON TOBEL: Oh, yes. Then he'd come back, early Monday morning come down to Vegas to work. It'd take him probably a couple of hours' drive. It was just a rocky road. And then Saturday he'd come back up with a washtub in 27 the back of the car with ice and groceries for the next week. MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: We'd get so bored spending all summer up there, we almost looked forward to going down to Las Vegas to see the dentist. MR. ED VON TOBEL: Yeah, it would be an excuse to stay out of town. MR. WRIGHT: Did any of your friends do the same thing so you had friends up there to hang out with? MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: Well, we didn't see anybody at my age. MR. ED VON TOBEL: It was minimal. There were very few cabins there. Wingerts was the banker here. He had a cabin right close to ours, but his wife probably went to the beach during the summer and took the family with her, and so they were very seldom there. Sometimes Dad would bring up one of our friends. My sister would have one of her girlfriends come up and stay a week, and I don't recall whether I did or not, but George was the hiker. He was only about nine, ten years old. And he'd take off every morning almost and hike the hills. But Mother never worried about him because she found out in a few days that he just knew how to take care of himself. In later years how many times did you hike up to the peak, George? Charleston Peak, that was a -- MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: Several, several times. 28 MR. WRIGHT: Just by yourself, huh? MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: No, usually with somebody. MR. WRIGHT: I gather it was also fairly common for the women of the family and the smaller children just to go to California during the summertime. MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: Right. MR. ED VON TOBEL: Oh, yeah, it was so miserable here. Dad was fortunate. In those first years we was so poor in the summer that he and his partner would alternate, and this was when we were smaller then, before we started going to Mount Charleston. They would alternate taking a month off because there wasn't enough work to do to keep them busy. So Dad would probably take the month of July or maybe Mr. Beckley would take the month of July off, and then he'd go back to Illinois where they were both raised or visit their families. And of course, when they had their own family, in the opposite month, my mother would perhaps go back ahead of time and go to Buffalo, New York, where her sister lived and take one or two of her babies along with her; and then she'd come back to Illinois, and Dad would join her there. And he'd stay at least two or three weeks visiting his friend and his brothers and sisters and parents in Illinois. So even though Illinois wasn't all that cold, as I remember going back there as a kid, talk about sleeping in the yard, we slept on the floor because it was so hot and humid 29 where they lived in Fairbury, Illinois, about central Illinois, that -- MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: Things got better here when evaporator coolers came. That was a big, big change. MR. WRIGHT: About when was that? Do you recall when the town started using those? MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: The date, no. MR. ED VON TOBEL: Oh, I suppose '28, along in there. We had electric fans, so the first thing they started converting, making swamp coolers with the electric fan and putting it in a window and a sheet of plywood with a hole in it. And then they'd build a cage for the aspen and salt. MR. WRIGHT: Well, I know the El Portal Theater opened in 1928. And I think they advertised that as the first air-conditioned building. MR. ED VON TOBEL: I recall that, right. Oh, boy, that was wonderful. Couldn't believe it. Couldn't believe how they could do it. I think the Nevada Hotel had a substitute air conditioning prior to that however. I remember seeing the installation that Mr. Miller put up on the roof of his hotel and it was washed air. It was actually just a big vent, and in that vent he installed sprayers that would spray water and then some kind of blowers that would blow the air down through ducts into the hotel rooms. 30 MR. WRIGHT: Well, I think the Fremont Street Experience just picked up on that idea again. They've got those misters right out on Fremont Street. It's the same idea -- MR. ED VON TOBEL: Oh, yeah? MR. WRIGHT: -- quite a few years later. MR. ED VON TOBEL: Anytime you get a little evaporation, why, it cools the air. MR. WRIGHT: Speaking of movie theaters, there were several in town, were there not? Two or three? And wasn't one of them outdoors? Do you recall that one? Was it still operating? MR. ED VON TOBEL: Well, I do. Maybe by the time George came along, maybe we had the indoor. But we lived in the -- MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: You and your friend Bill Elwell, Ed, at that outdoor theater. MR. ED VON TOBEL: My buddy, Bill Elwell, in later years had an outdoor theater, believe it or not, at First and Carson Street. But the only theater in the early days was right in the Golden Nugget block, very narrow little 25-foot store and full depth, but they had to close that in the summer. So within that corner of Third, the northeast corner of Third and Fremont, they put up a wall around an outdoor 31 theater. It was just a corrugated tin wall on posts that surrounded an area. And they had some outdoor seats there, hard, no cushions, and a little building that housed the projector overhead, and a place to buy tickets and go watch the outdoor movie. We lived on North Third Street and there were some mulberry trees along North Third Street. And if we wanted just to see what the movie was like, we could climb that mulberry tree and look over the fence. And of course, there was no sound, but it was silent movies, but you could read. And if you had good eyesight, you could read the captions on the movies. Admission wasn't all that much if you wanted to see the whole movie. MR. WRIGHT: So if you wanted to, you could catch a free movie just by climbing up the mulberry trees there. MR. ED VON TOBEL: Right. But that was our first theater. And then of course, as you mentioned, in '28 they built the -- of course, the town was starting to grow by then. They were getting ready to build the dam. And so the Huntridge Theater was in that 300 block there. It was a nice building, air-conditioned; and so that was the end of that outdoor movie. But then George mentioned Bill Elwell, who was in my class in high school and went to the University of Nevada, and at one time became a projectionist in the theaters. And when 32 his Dad had that corner, First and Carson, Bill came back to Vegas and put up an outdoor movie. And it was quite successful because it was just someplace different to go rather than to go to the Huntridge. MR. WRIGHT: So these were talkies by this time? MR. ED VON TOBEL: Yeah. The Huntridge or the Guild Theater. Of course, in later years we had the Huntridge out on Charleston, which was a popular place. MR. WRIGHT: Didn't Mr. Elwell also have a hotel or was that -- MR. ED VON TOBEL: Well, on that corner then, in later years, he built a hotel there, huh? MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: In fact, it was three stories high. From the top of that hotel is were we watched the first atomic blast, a whole bunch of people up there. We could see the whole thing. MR. WRIGHT: In 1951 that would have been, then. MR. ED VON TOBEL: Yeah. MR. WRIGHT: I'll be darned. And I want to talk just a little bit about the Von Tobel Lumber Company. You had mentioned Fairbury, Illinois. I understand there's a Von Tobel Lumber Company in that part of the country and maybe more than one. Can you sort of tell us that story a little bit? MR. ED VON TOBEL: Well, my dad worked for his father 33 until 1900. Dad was born in 1873 and he was still a bachelor, 27 years old in 1900, and had been working for his father. And his father had a lumber yard there in this small farming community of Fairbury, Illinois, in Livingston County. And his father was getting up in his 60s at that time, and he had an opportunity to sell the property where the lumber yard was to the City of Fairbury, wanted to put in a city park. And so his father decided to go out of business. So then my dad was free to leave home. He didn't like the cold and so he started moving West, and he eventually ended up in 1905, maybe 1904, in Los Angeles working at a lumber yard there, and that's before he came here. But other members of the family then had started a -- my dad's sister married a man by the name of J. N. Bach who had a lumber yard. So that was the lumber yard. My dad's brother, Paul, came to Las Vegas with Dad, not at the same immediate time, but during that period came to visit Dad in Las Vegas. And he could have joined Dad in the little lumber business they had here or done something in California, but Paul didn't like the heat. And Paul's remark that Dad repeated many, many times was that Paul didn't think even if beer was only five cents a glass, he wasn't about to stay in Las Vegas. It was too hot for him. So he went back to Illinois and eventually Indiana, and he started a lumber 34 yard there. So there's still Von Tobel Lumber Companies in Indiana that were started by my Uncle Paul. But other than that, Dad loved his family and he loved to visit there, and as I mentioned earlier, that it was an annual trip back on the train in those days. Mother would load us kids up in there with a big basket of food and take us back on the train to Illinois to spend two or three weeks at least in the summer visiting his relatives in Indiana and Illinois. MR. WRIGHT: Von Tobel Lumber Company here in Las Vegas, would it be safe to say that much of the lumber and building materials that went into early Las Vegas were purchased from Von Tobel Lumber Company? MR. ED VON TOBEL: No, not really, not commercially. A lot of the homes, of course, had lumber that they purchased from Von Tobels. But in the early days when Dad came here and it was going to be a big boom town, the railroad had pushed it a lot, so he had six competitors in the lumber business. But of course, there were nothing here but tent houses. So there's lots of lumber to be sold. So they could ship it in here in bulk and then parcel it out to the job. So Dad sold his share of the commercial business. The railroad built 40 or 50 little cottages for the railroad workers. And then, of course, the individual people had to build. MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: Some of those houses are still 35 in existence along South Third, South Fourth Street. MR. WRIGHT: Yeah, there's one block of them on what used to be Second Street. There's still seven of the original eight cottages there, which is pretty remarkable. MR. ED VON TOBEL: Too bad. I think it would be -- that downtown redevelopment could perhaps buy those seven houses and convert them into little office facilities with nice gardens around them, and so forth, and then lease those out to some of the charitable organizations. It would make a great downtown facility. Put some nice trees in and gardens. But of course, with the price of downtown land today, I don't know whether Redevelopment Authority -- when they pay 2 or $3 million for a little corner down there on South Second and Third Street, it's getting pretty ridiculous. MR. WRIGHT: Yeah, I think many of them have become million dollars parking lots for downtown law offices and so forth. MR. ED VON TOBEL: Pending the development of the downtown area, that's a good holding use for that property. MR. WRIGHT: So the lumber business was actually a pretty difficult business then in Las Vegas, a lot of competition. MR. ED VON TOBEL: Oh, sure it was, yeah. And it got down within a few years that Dad was the only lumber yard left. And the others, there was just not enough business, so 36 they folded their tent and went someplace where there was some business to be had. Once the business district was built up and the homes were built for the people that operated the businesses, and the railroad supplied the housing for the railroad workers, there was not all that much construction going on. MR. WRIGHT: Did that change right around the time of Boulder Dam or was that still -- MR. ED VON TOBEL: Well, it was tough during the war years. There was nothing going on. The mines were all closed and the railroad was running, but very little construction. But Dad eked out a living, and he couldn't leave because he said he had his family here and his home and his business. So he stuck it out, and most of the other merchants as well. The pharmacy and lawyers and the doctors or whoever was here had to -- until in the late '20s, then the town did start to improve. The dam started construction in the '30s so then the town was really booming. Prior to that, the town was starting to come alive and the roads were better. We had better roads coming in here from the north and from California. Although the original road to California, you'd have to go to Searchlight and down to Needles to join the 66 Highway. And we had some ambitious men in town in those early days. They were always trying to do something. Dad and some 37 of his friends at one time acquired a bunch of land out about where the Last Frontier Hotel is, in that area, and kind of like subdivided into maybe five-acre tracts, and then they were advertising, "Drill for water and raise crops in Las Vegas." They wanted to make an agricultural area out of this. They couldn't think of anything else to get things going, but it never developed. It was a poor area to do that anyway. This area gets too hot to grow most crops. So the land finally went back to whoever. It may have went back to BLM land or whoever they had in those days. But they wanted to improve the roads to get more people in here other than those people that might come and stay a half hour while the train was here. MR. WRIGHT: So you're talking about property now where the Las Vegas Strip is expanding, I guess? MR. ED VON TOBEL: Right. MR. WRIGHT: Millions of dollars for a few running feet. MR. ED VON TOBEL: Oh, sure. A million dollars an acre or more now. But that was just desert for many years. They had a little airport out there at one time. The Rockwell brothers went out and scraped the sagebrush off the ground out there about where the Sahara Hotel is, and that was, I think, our first airport. Do you remember that, George? 38 MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: Oh, yeah. MR. ED VON TOBEL: Those airplanes coming in? MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: My memory was refreshed by seeing, about a week ago, some segment on television of early Las Vegas airports, and that revived memories of some that I'd completely forgotten about. In fact, there was one airport right about where the Sahara Hotel sits. MR. ED VON TOBEL: I think they called that Rockwell Field. MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: That might have been Rockwell. MR. WRIGHT: That was Rockwell Field. Did either of you fly on those planes or go -- I'm sure you must have gone out and seen them land and take off, but did you fly on any of those little planes? MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: I flew in one of them. MR. ED VON TOBEL: George might. George was -- MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: One was that wealthy man who came and stayed. Was that during War II? No, it was when I was in college. It was a man came to Las Vegas for a divorce, and he somehow ended up meeting my mother. And she rented him my room in the house, which was okay with me, especially when I found out he was a wealthy man. He was having this airplane come to get him when he finished his time in Las Vegas. And he said, "I'm going to give you a ride." So I've got the picture today of myself and Jack Tisdale, my longtime buddy, 39 standing beside that biplane waiting for the ride. MR. WRIGHT: That's amazing. MR. ED VON TOBEL: In fact, not much earlier than that, business got so poor that Dad bought out his brother or his partner, Jake Beckley. And Jake and his brother, Bill, had a clothing store in Las Vegas at First and Fremont. But business was so poor here, and there was a boom going on down in Blythe, California. First, they tried a second men's store in Goodsprings, but that folded. And so then Jake Beckley went to Blythe, California, and started a men's store there because that was a boom town, an agricultural area. And the first airplane to ever land in Las Vegas had Jake Beckley as a passenger. I don't know what kind of plane it would be, but there's a picture -- you might have it out to the museum -- a picture of that first plane and Jake Beckley standing alongside of it. And he came. And of course, my dad had been corresponding with him and knew that he was coming and so forth. And in fact, one time they, the Beckleys, had a car of some kind, and they took Dad down to Blythe to see their store in Blythe, California, and show him that area, which is not too far from Needles. You go south through Searchlight and on down into that area. Blythe is still an agricultural area in that town. But that store was not successful, so Jake Beckley came back to Las Vegas. But he did at one time fly 40 into Las Vegas and then land. I don't know where they landed. Of course, there was desert all around here. They could land almost anyplace. MR. WRIGHT: That was 1920, I believe. MR. ED VON TOBEL: Was it? MR. WRIGHT: An old World War I Surplus Jenny, as I recall, biplane. MR. ED VON TOBEL: It was a historic event for Las Vegas. MR. WRIGHT: I'm told even down near where the city hall is now that there used to be a little airstrip down there. Do you recall that? MR. ED VON TOBEL: Could be. MR. WRIGHT: The old Squires' Park in that area, the city park? Maybe not for very long. MR. ED VON TOBEL: Oh, it could be. I think there was a baseball field at one time down in there. There was a race track. They threw up a temporary race track for horse races. And, oh, that property was open and available for all kinds of things. One time there was even, in about 1930, there was a miniature golf course there. That's just north of where -- (End of tape, side one.) MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: Later that moved to Second and Bridger, the miniature golf course. 41 MR. ED VON TOBEL: Was there, George? MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: Second and Carson or Second and Bridger. MR. ED VON TOBEL: Is that right? MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: Yeah. MR. WRIGHT: Just a little par three miniature course, huh? I think I know the answer, but where was Las Vegas's first actual golf course? MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: Actual golf course? MR. WRIGHT: Yeah, and I think it was a desert course; wasn't it? MR. ED VON TOBEL: Well, presently there's Cragin & Pike Insurance agency here, one of the largest. And Mr. Pike was an insurance man and Cragin had the theater. And so Cragin and Pike had started jointly that. But Pike, he had a crippled arm or something. I think he was in the service, but anyway he still was a golfer. And so he got some other men, I guess, that knew the sport a little bit. Then they went out someplace in the desert, perhaps out where the Rockwell Field was -- it's probably in the paper someplace. But they just went out and scraped off green areas where they could do putting, and then they put a cup in the ground, I guess. And they'd have to putt on the sand. They used to tell stories about how they'd have a little board there on each green where 42 you'd create a path for your putt so you could putt your golf ball. MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: The present municipal course has been there as long as I can remember. MR. WRIGHT: Yeah, it's been there a long time. MR. ED VON TOBEL: The WPA Project was to put in projects around town and to create employment. And so they put in a fish hatchery, of all things, out where the municipal golf course presently is. And they planted trees and that and so on around there. And in connection with that, as I recall, why, they decided they would put in a golf course. It probably started with a nine-hole course of some kind. And it was level land and it wasn't too hard to do that. And they had water. They drilled wells there for the fish hatchery, so the water was available there to irrigate. So they were able to have green fairways. Doc Woodbury was one of the early-day golfers. And if Mr. Pike was around, I'm sure he was involved. And for several years there was just a kind of a catch as catch can. I don't think they even had a pro. They had no golf clubhouse. They had nothing there except the land and the fairways and the greens. And if you played golf there, you'd have to usually promise to devote one afternoon a week to working on the fairways and the greens because they had no maintenance. 43 MR. WRIGHT: So this was all volunteer work just to keep -- MR. ED VON TOBEL: All volunteers. If they wanted to play golf, they had to maintain their own course. And John Conway was a good friend of mine. He still lives here and he's 94 years old. But he tells about the days when he'd go out there with several of the prominent men, Jerry Crow, who had Standard Wholesale, and I think maybe -- oh, there would be several of the prominent men that played golf that would devote a certain afternoon each week to go out there and bring their rakes and shovels and work on the course and probably helped with irrigating the fairways and so forth from the ponds that were there. MR. WRIGHT: Before we leave the subject of airplanes, I wanted to ask you if you knew the Homans, and in particular Ted Homan. MR. ED VON TOBEL: He was one of George's best buddies, I think. Wasn't he, George? Ted Homan? MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: Yeah. MR. ED VON TOBEL: Wasn't he about your age? MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: Yeah. He had a plane. MR. ED VON TOBEL: I think he was a pilot on Western Airlines. MR. WRIGHT: Yeah, I understand that he used to go 44 out to Rockwell Field and just kind of hang around and help fuel the airplanes and eventually bought his own plane, I think, and became a Western Airlines pilot eventually. MR. ED VON TOBEL: Um-hm. I think his parents lived on South Seventh Street. That Homan -- that might be part of your historical area down there. MR. WRIGHT: Yeah, his father Walter did build a house or lived in a house there. MR. ED VON TOBEL: Was he a railroad man? MR. WRIGHT: He was the railroad man, right. MR. ED VON TOBEL: Right. I knew him and his mother. Ted was younger than myself but -- MR. WRIGHT: And there's one puzzle that I just thought I'd ask about briefly that I've been pondering for a long time. Did you know the Lundy family, any of the Lundys? MR. ED VON TOBEL: Sure. MR. WRIGHT: I know Ray and Martha were both pilots. MR. ED VON TOBEL: Ray Lundy was a pilot. Was she a pilot also? MR. WRIGHT: And Martha was a pilot as well. MR. ED VON TOBEL: Is she still alive? MR. WRIGHT: I met her several years ago and haven't had any contact with her for a while. But there was a young Lundy that was in the war. He was their nephew. And I can't remember, but there was some 45 story about his wartime heroism and then maybe it wasn't. MR. ED VON TOBEL: Wasn't Ray in the service? MR. WRIGHT: Ray, I think, trained pilots during the war if I'm not mistaken. MR. ED VON TOBEL: Well, he was in the service then, yeah. MR. WRIGHT: And Martha was one of the women pilots -- MR. ED VON TOBEL: Is that right? MR. WRIGHT: -- that ferried planes from place to place. Ed, you and your older brother went to work for the lumber company fairly early, didn't you? MR. ED VON TOBEL: Oh, sure, Dad needed us. In fact, Jake was nine years old. And I was reading some of my dad's correspondence and he was writing his parents, and he said that Jakie was helping him during the summer because business was so slow that they didn't even have a hired man. And when Dad had to make a delivery or go to the bank or the post office or someplace, why Jakie would spend all day there at the business with him and could watch the place of business. And if somebody came around and wanted to buy something, he'd say, "Well, my dad just went to make a delivery, and he'll be right back." So Dad used Jake. And he also said in that letter that Mary, that's my 46 mother -- he's talking to his parents -- he says, "Mary enjoys that too because then she only has two to watch at the house." George was not born at that time apparently. So my mother only had my sister and myself to watch because we were babies. And Jake was nine years old so he could go work in the lumber. Even in grammar school, nine and ten and twelve, we had things to do that Dad would give us. We went down there on Saturday. Or during the summers we'd hang around there. We'd put up turpentine and linseed oil and, oh, all kinds of chores. And as we got older, why, we'd just work ourselves into the business. When George came along later, why, he kind of got in on that also. But our business was bigger at that time. But I don't know. Did you work much in the store during high school? MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: Not too much. MR. WRIGHT: When you built the new Von Tobels out on Maryland Parkway -- weren't you involved in, partly I think, in the building of that new store? MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: I was very much involved. MR. WRIGHT: And tell us a little bit because Von Tobels, I think, was a little innovative in the lumber business, was it not? MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: Well, we were downtown, and the family decided we should move out of town because we could 47 see the business was moving out of town. So knowing that the Sears and the new shopping center was going to be built on Maryland Parkway south of our location, why, we did buy seven-and-a-half acres then on Maryland Parkway and built the store which now is an athletic club. MR. WRIGHT: I was sorry to see that close because that was one of my landmarks when I came to town. You could see that large Von Tobels sign standing way up there, and I knew where Karen and Sahara were. MR. ED VON TOBEL: That's right. MR. WRIGHT: Now I get lost; that sign isn't there anymore. MR. ED VON TOBEL: Well, our store was very popular with families. We had just about everything in there, home improvements such as a Home Depot would have today. We had a similar store in 1965 and '66. MR. WRIGHT: So wasn't that a fairly new idea, the kind of do-it-yourself home repair idea? MR. ED VON TOBEL: To put lumber and cement and plywood under a roof inside of a building and to carry it out and put it on your car or your truck was an innovative thing. Of course, it's common today with the Home Depots throughout the country. MR. WRIGHT: Sort of moving forward just a little bit, I know you all went off to college. And I think the 48 three brothers, didn't you all go to the same university? MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: Right. University of Santa Clara. MR. WRIGHT: University of Santa Clara. MR. ED VON TOBEL: Right. MR. WRIGHT: And your sister went to University of Nevada and then University of Utah -- MR. ED VON TOBEL: Right. MR. WRIGHT: -- which is my old alma mater. MR. ED VON TOBEL: Oh yeah? MR. WRIGHT: University of Utah. MR. ED VON TOBEL: Yeah, I think she got her degree there. And she had a teaching degree when she came back to Vegas, but she couldn't get a job in the schools. The town had quit growing and they weren't hiring teachers, so I don't guess my sister ever did teach school. MR. WRIGHT: I don't know whether we've mentioned her name or not. What was your sister's name? MR. ED VON TOBEL: Elizabeth. She didn't like that. When she started school, they called her Liz, so she changed her name to Betty. MR. WRIGHT: So she never did teach. Roughly when was that? Would that have been in the 19 -- MR. ED VON TOBEL: Well, she probably graduated in '30 -- I graduated in '34. She graduated about that time. 49 MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: You graduated at '34? '34 from where? MR. ED VON TOBEL: From Santa Clara. MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: Oh. Okay. MR. ED VON TOBEL: Yeah, I graduated from high school in 1930, and I stayed out of college one year; so I graduated in 1935. And she graduated about 1934 from Utah. And she worked for my dad, and she worked various places. And she must have gotten married in the late 30's. MR. WRIGHT: What year did you graduate from Santa Clara, George? MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: '41. MR. WRIGHT: So you came back to town for a while -- MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: Just in time. MR. WRIGHT: -- and there was a new air -- MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: Then came home just in time to get drafted. MR. WRIGHT: And weren't you involved with the new air base out there a little bit, I believe? MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: Well, it was the air base then. I worked there for a few months before I was drafted. It was after college. It was called Las Vegas Flexible Gunnery School, and they trained the gunners to fly in the bombers. They had a triangular track -- in fact, I think the rails are still there -- triangular railroad track that they 50 would put a moving target on there and run it past these gunners who would learn to fire whatever guns they were using in bombers those days. MR. WRIGHT: Big 50 caliber machine guns, right? MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: Yeah, Las Vegas Flexible Gunnery School. It didn't become known as a different name until later. MR. WRIGHT: It became Nellis, I think, well after the war. MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: Bill Nellis was in my class in high school and went on to become a very young fighter pilot and died in War II in a P-47. So then they named the field after him, as I think they've done all across the country, name local military installations after some local hero. MR. WRIGHT: Um-hm. Yeah, he was a young man from Searchlight that went to Las Vegas High School and went into the service. Was your degree in engineering or something? MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: I got a degree in civil engineering. MR. WRIGHT: Civil engineering. So in your service years, wasn't that part of your building air fields as I recall? MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: Well, I joined an outfit called Aviation Engineer Battalion attached to the Air Force, 51 Army engineers attached to the Air Force. I went to the Pacific and built -- well, my main time was spent on the island of Iwo Jima building the runway upon which -- the first official landing on that runway was the Japanese surrender plane in route from Tokyo to MacArthur down in Manila to surrender. MR. WRIGHT: I'll be darned. MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: That was our first official landing on that strip. We got it finished just in time to be of use. We used to work two eleven-hour shifts, seven days a week. There was nothing else to do, worked night and day. MR. WRIGHT: Talk about heat, it must have been hot and pretty difficult working conditions there, right? MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: It wasn't too unpleasant, just pretty boring. MR. WRIGHT: And what was Las Vegas like during the war years? MR. ED VON TOBEL: Can we take a little break, Frank? MR. WRIGHT: Oh, sure. (A short break was taken.) MR. ED VON TOBEL: Where are his bones? I don't know. MR. WRIGHT: Well, that's my question because -- MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: They were exhibited at the 52 Elks Helldorado for years. MR. WRIGHT: Okay. We're talking about an episode in very early Las Vegas history with an Indian by the name of Quehoe, and he was thought to have killed a number of people. And you were saying, George, that your father was part of the search party. MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: Under Sheriff Sam Gay, who was a longtime sheriff here and led the group to search to try and find Quehoe. I really don't know what happened. The Elks Lodge claimed they had his bones, and they used to exhibit Quehoe's bones at the Las Vegas Helldorado for years and years. I don't know if they still do or not. MR. WRIGHT: Well, I think they used to parade them up and down Fremont Street for Helldorado parade, I think, don't they? MR. ED VON TOBEL: They may have. MR. WRIGHT: Well, I think it's quite a story about those wandering bones. They were stolen from the Elks Lodge, and then somebody found them sometime later on a trash dump. And the fellow that ended up with them was Roland Wiley, and he had that piece of property out west of town at Cathedral Canyon. And my understanding is that he buried those bones out there on his property in Cathedral Canyon near Pahrump. You mentioned, Ed, that you weren't too sure necessarily that those were his bones. I actually talked to a 53 woman in Eldorado Canyon a few years ago whose father was a good friend of Quehoe, and she told the story about seeing Quehoe downtown. Her father pointed him out. And this was long after Quehoe was supposed to have -- MR. ED VON TOBEL: Oh, really? MR. WRIGHT: -- long after his bones were supposed to have been found. There was one thing you and I were talking about, Ed, during the break, that land was inexpensive throughout much of Las Vegas's history, and of course, that land is worth many millions of dollars now. People might wonder why people just didn't buy a whole bunch of land and hold onto it. MR. ED VON TOBEL: Well, I guess, if somebody had the money at that time, why, they might have purchased the land. You could buy it cheap. I don't suppose you'd have to pay more than $100 an acre for almost anything surrounding the town, but you'd had to have held it from the 1920s to the 1960s almost before it really came into its own. And any particular piece would have to sit for many, many years. And so in our previous discussion we were talking about the property that my dad and his partner, Jake Beckley, took up under the Desert Land Act that you could acquire for about maybe a dollar an acre or something from the government back when they first came to Las Vegas in 1905. And they drilled a well to prove up on it and built a little cabin on 54 it, and then they got the title to the property. But they sat on that land, and then they used it just for recreational purposes. They had a swimming hole there, and Jake Beckley did a little gardening there. And in later years they leased out part of it to a Japanese man who did a little truck gardening there, but he never made enough to even pay any rent. And so we're going through the '20s and we're going into the '30s. And Jake Beckley, my dad's partner, passed away. And then Mrs. Beckley needed a little money, so she was after my dad to sell the property that they had left there. It was 40 acres or whatever it was. I think they might have sold it for $4,000. And the guy built a little house on there, but he never could pay the $4,000; so they finally took it back, and then they sold it again for 4,000. They got cash but within probably two or three years, why, that man sold it for like $40,000; and eventually it sold for $400,000. But there's a lot of time in between there when somebody had to pay taxes and those sort of things. My dad bought property in 1910 probably on North Third Street, which was one of the best properties because it had gambling and liquor on North First Street. And he held onto it for three or four years and paid taxes, and then he sold it for what he paid for it. So those were the stories. MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: My dad bought Second and 55 Fremont, that was up at a sheriff's sale at the courthouse. I don't exactly remember when this was. MR. ED VON TOBEL: That was during the depression. MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: It was during the -- well, it was before. MR. WRIGHT: Is that where the Fremont is now, that property? MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: Right, yeah. MR. WRIGHT: That property was owned by George Wingfield, the copper man from Goldfield, and banker and rancher. And during the depression his banks went bankrupt, and so I guess that's probably about the point that your father bought that. MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: It was put up for auction at the courthouse. My dad was there, and he raised the bid over what the bankers had bid, the people that came as representatives of the banks, so they had to run back to the bank to get instructions. Before they could return, it was sold to my dad, Second and Fremont. And there was a service station there for a long, long time, a Shell station. It finally then sold, and within a couple of years the Fremont Hotel was built there. MR. WRIGHT: Yeah, I think that service station you're referring to was Pop Simon's Station, wasn't it? MR. ED VON TOBEL: No, it was a Shell station. Pop 56 Simon's had a station at Third and Fremont. MR. WRIGHT: Oh, Third and Fremont. MR. ED VON TOBEL: This was Second and Fremont. But talk about other property, this was the northeast corner. On the northwest corner somebody had started a building in the early days and just got the basement dug and the joists down, and then they had to put a fence around it. And it sat there for at least 20 years with nothing ever happening to that corner. Now, that's the corner of Second and Fremont Street, which is now the Horseshoe Club. So buying property in early-day Las Vegas didn't always pay off immediately. The Shell service station must have been there for 20 years. And Dad only got very modest rent for the corner of Second and Fremont. MR. WRIGHT: You mentioned the Horseshoe. The hotel that was built there in 1932 was the Apache, and a very interesting man operated the Apache. I'm wondering if you knew him very well. MR. ED VON TOBEL: We knew him quite well. MR. WRIGHT: Bob Russell. Could you tell us -- MR. ED VON TOBEL: No, no, P. O. Silvagni came here from Price, Utah, and built the hotel. But he was not a hotel operator. Whether Colonel Bob Russell was the manager or the owner, I'm not quite sure. MR. WRIGHT: I think he was the manager, yeah. 57 MR. ED VON TOBEL: He might have been just the manager. MR. WRIGHT: Right. MR. ED VON TOBEL: But it was one of the most popular corners in town. It had a nice restaurant and a nice bar. It has the Kiva Club downstairs which was -- MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: Downstairs. In fact, we had a junior prom dance down there from high school. MR. ED VON TOBEL: Yeah. MR. WRIGHT: It was a pretty fancy place, wasn't it, the Kiva Club? MR. ED VON TOBEL: Downstairs -- MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: We thought so. MR. ED VON TOBEL: -- we had the Lions, and I was a charter member of the Lions; and that's where we had our meetings, downstairs there. If we were ever short of a speaker, why, we'd call on Colonel Bob Russell to come down from the lobby upstairs, and he always had a good story to tell. MR. WRIGHT: You call him Colonel Bob Russell. Would you describe him a little bit? MR. ED VON TOBEL: Oh, he just dressed western and talked western, and he was a very outgoing man. But I mentioned earlier, Frank, that Las Vegas had energetic businessmen in town from the very beginning. They 58 were always anxious to try to build the town and do things for the community. We had Doctor Roy Martin, who was a very good physician and medical doctor, family doctor, had his wife and two girls raised right next door to the little hospital there on Second and Fremont -- very active in chamber of commerce. Oh, we had so many people who were working hard at all times to try to build the community. There were no roads in here. We were always trying to get roads and working for ten years to try to get the dam built. And so many people were active in the community running their own business. And Jim Cashman came over from Searchlight. He was active over there in that community. And when that community folded, why, he loaded up his equipment and so forth. He ran a garage over there and a ferry across the river and came to Las Vegas and started all over again. Of course, everybody knows of Cashman Field and how he and his sons have really been community leaders from way back in 1910 or whenever Cashman first came here. MR. WRIGHT: So Las Vegas was, you would say, a very community-minded place in the '20s and '30s and '40s. MR. ED VON TOBEL: Well, in those early years if they wanted the town to survive -- it was just a little railroad town which it didn't amount to anything because you had four or five hundred employees in the railroad, and they weren't going to stay forever. And so it was just practically dying 59 on the vine for many years and then we went through the war years which were tough. But basically, without the government, we wouldn't have Las Vegas today probably. The first thing, of course, was the building of the dam, which was government money; but it was built in Hoover's time when it had to repay itself. So the papers were full of the fact that in 50 years the dam would pay itself off, and it did. And so the government got all this money back from construction of the dam based on the sale of the power to Los Angeles utilities and others. And in sequence, of course, you had the Nellis Air Force Base, which hired a lot of civilian employees, which was a big boost to the town. And during the later years, you had the magnesium plant that came in, and that was all government money and other things. And then of course the dam. The dam itself brought hundreds of thousands of people to town, who brought money and needed a place to stay, so that was the beginning of the hotels really. Without the dam and the tourists coming to view the dam and the good roads that were eventually built, why, Las Vegas probably wouldn't have had the beginning of the casinos because they wouldn't have had the hotels to support them. MR. WRIGHT: So without the Federal Government and all of these projects, Las Vegas probably would not be 60 anywhere near the size of importance that it is. MR. ED VON TOBEL: So many of those things could have gone elsewhere. They could have gone to Reno or they could have gone to anywhere, to Salt Lake City, might have gone to Utah. MR. WRIGHT: A man by the name of Bob Griffith, whom you might know, I think was partly responsible for getting the Air Force to -- MR. ED VON TOBEL: Could be. Bob Griffith was very energetic. He's one of the first young men from Las Vegas to go to UNR Reno and graduated and came back to Las Vegas. And he was head of the chamber of commerce, the secretary for the chamber of commerce for many years. His father settled the Kyle Canyon where Charleston Park is, Charleston Mountain. MR. WRIGHT: Now, there's even a good story that you're perhaps familiar with. When they started to drill a well out at the gunnery school that wasn't flowing enough water, and so Bob Griffith and, I think, some others actually went out and bought a ranch which had water rights and let the Air Force use the -- MR. ED VON TOBEL: Oh, is that right? MR. WRIGHT: -- so that they could even start operating at the air base. George, you were talking a little while ago about the subject of prostitution in Las Vegas, and the coming of the 61 air base had something of an impact on that. MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: Yes, at the start of War II, the military came to town and told the town fathers, "You must close Block 16." MR. WRIGHT: And Block 16 was where? MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: That was just one block north of Fremont Street. And that's where the prostitutes were, so that was closed in deference to the military. But then, the town mothers, the housewives complained because then those men sought prostitutes on Fremont Street. It caused trouble on Fremont Street just as the prostitutes are causing trouble on The Strip today. There's been no change in that relationship in all these years. So if it was put to a vote of the town mothers, the housewives, at that time they would have voted to retain Block 16 or the red light district. MR. WRIGHT: That's an interesting observation. I think the Review Journal once mentioned that next to Boulder Dam, Block 16 was the town's second most popular tourist site. Along about this time, during the years of World War II and immediately after, Las Vegas began getting a new kind of businessman. People had started running race books on Fremont Street, some people with New York connections. Do either of you have any observations about this new breed of 62 gambler that Las Vegas was getting? I'm referring specifically to people like Siegel and some of the others there. MR. ED VON TOBEL: Really, the gambling was reopened in 1932 or '33, along in there. MR. WRIGHT: '31. MR. ED VON TOBEL: Along in there. And they had opened up the sale of liquor and so on, so that gave Las Vegas a little shot in the arm. We had always had some card rooms and that remained from the early-day Las Vegas, and then they closed it down for a few years, that is the table games. But then when they reopened it, those facilities were kind of available again. And we had people come from, oh, I don't know exactly where, but not so much from the East, but they were maybe from California or from the gambling boats or wherever they came, and they opened the Boulder Club downtown. Goumond was a very stable man and opened the Boulder Club. You had Kell Houssels that opened the Las Vegas Club and Johnny Horton who had been here for forever. And those people were stable businessmen and they ran a good game. They didn't cheat people. They wouldn't let people drink too much. They didn't let people gamble too much. If a guy was overdoing it, why, they'd kind of gently move him off to the side until he came to his senses and come back another day and 63 play, and so it went for many years. But those people, sure, they had backgrounds in gambling, but so it was now legitimate business. MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: I don't think people really started coming here from California until the highway was finished. I can't remember when that was. MR. WRIGHT: I'm not sure either. It was several stages, I guess. It was quite a while before it got paved. MR. ED VON TOBEL: Well, 91 Highway, I guess, they started building the clubs out on 91 Highway, the Frontier and the El Rancho and those. But those were in later years. But the beginning, maybe at least ten years, it was strictly small clubs downtown. Guy McAfee came to town and took over the Golden Nugget or maybe started it. I don't know. But that was -- MR. WRIGHT: I think his first place downtown was called the Frontier, wasn't it? MR. ED VON TOBEL: Might have been, yeah. MR. WRIGHT: Which is where the Golden Nugget is now. MR. ED VON TOBEL: But then you had other people, Farmer Page and some of those people came. They all started downtown. MR. WRIGHT: Were they part of this kind of community spirit, just came right into that? MR. ED VON TOBEL: Well, they were cooperative, but 64 they weren't the leaders. The leaders still came from the prior businessmen of the community. And newcomers that came in -- Bob Russell is a virtual newcomer really at the Apache Hotel, but he was a leader in the chamber of commerce and a good businessman. But the card games -- you didn't call them a casino -- they were just gambling halls, I guess, small, little 25-foot by 100-foot deep stores that had -- you didn't have baccarat in those days. You had craps, and you had the 21 table and you had faro bank. Faro bank was the old time gambler's game. And they had a bar on one side of the room and that was about the extent of it. But then of course, the Nugget on Second and Fremont was more elaborate and bigger. And then of course, you had the Pioneer was remodeled and opened up bigger. And you had the Vegas Club, of course, at Main and Fremont Street. But those men all came to town for the specific purpose of opening, working, taking over the gambling halls. MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: The El Rancho was built before the war. MR. WRIGHT: Yeah. I've heard several stories about how Tommy Hull came to build the El Rancho. How did that come about; do you know? MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: As far as I know, he saw that the highway was there, that's where the people would be coming 65 from, so he naturally went to that spot. MR. WRIGHT: And it was just outside the city limits too which -- MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: Which is now, of course, The Strip, but it existed through the war. In fact, the air base colonel lived there for a few months at the El Rancho Vegas as it was then called. Of course the El Rancho Vegas has gone to another place. MR. WRIGHT: And I think a fellow by the name of Howard Hughes used to hang out there from time to time, too. MR. ED VON TOBEL: That's what they say. MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: That's quite a bit later. MR. WRIGHT: Yeah, a decade or so later, right. MR. ED VON TOBEL: The El Cortez was built, I think, just prior to the war. And I don't know whether that was local businessmen or Jackie Gaughn. But Jackie Gaughn, of course, came from Omaha, I think. MR. WRIGHT: I think it was Marion Hicks and another partner, whose name I can't remember. MR. ED VON TOBEL: Marion Hicks, right. And of course, he later built the Thunderbird out on The Strip. MR. WRIGHT: And I think for a while right after the war, the El Cortez was owned by Gus Greenbaum and Moe Sedway and a few of those people -- MR. ED VON TOBEL: Perhaps it was; right. 66 MR. WRIGHT: -- for just a short time there. MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: But now there's a 3,000-room hotel starts to be built and we don't even think about it. But in those days when Marion Hicks had a hundred rooms; he built another hundred rooms and everybody says, "My God, where are all the people going to come from?" MR. WRIGHT: Well, when they built the second hotel, the Last Frontier out on The Strip, I guess people said the same thing, didn't they? MR. ED VON TOBEL: I think so. MR. WRIGHT: "Where in heaven's name are they going to get people to fill up all those hotel rooms?" I wanted to ask you a bit after you came back after the war, George, you decided politics might be interesting to go into. And you got elected to the Nevada Assembly. MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: Yeah. MR. WRIGHT: How did you happen to get into electoral politics? MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: Well, my father was active in politics. And I had always been a Conservative, so naturally it was the Republican party that I went to. In fact, my father was active in the Republican party back in the early years. And so I was elected three times to the assembly, and then I ran for Congress; and at that time the state had only 67 one congressman. And I won the primary, but I lost it in the general; so I never got to Washington. MR. WRIGHT: Who was your opponent in the general election? MR. ED VON TOBEL: Walter Baring? MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: You know, I can't remember. MR. ED VON TOBEL: Was it Walter Baring? MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: Well, of course, Baring was the incumbent. MR. ED VON TOBEL: Yeah. MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: Walter Baring was the incumbent. MR. WRIGHT: And he had a long, long career in the House of Representatives. MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: Yeah. MR. WRIGHT: It's interesting -- correct me if I'm wrong -- but Las Vegas was a strongly Democrat town, was it not? MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: You bet. MR. WRIGHT: And you got elected as a Republican. How did that happen? MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: Well, I don't know. The assembly district used to contain the whole county. It had to go all the way to Moapa, to Boulder City, to Blue Diamond, wherever there was any people that was part of the district. 68 But I got very strong support from those smaller towns on the outskirts more so than from Las Vegas itself. But I did, as I say, win the assembly seat. In fact, I was the first Republican ever elected to the assembly from Clark County. MR. WRIGHT: You served three terms, I guess. MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: Three terms. MR. WRIGHT: And this would have been in the 1950s. What were the real important issues of those years? MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: Sales tax, that's when sales tax started. I have in my files today a telegram from my father who sent me the telegram when that vote was up. And he said, "The people won't forget." He says, "Don't vote for the sales tax." MR. WRIGHT: And was that the one that was earmarked for education originally, or was that later? MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: It started out as 3 percent; I remember that. MR. WRIGHT: What else were some of the issues in those years? The sales tax certainly. MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: Well, of course, the thing was reassembled. And in those days every county in the state of Nevada sent one senator to serve. So there were 17 senators from 17 counties. And the assemblymen were based strictly on the population. Clark County had maybe six assemblymen. Washoe County, with Reno, had maybe nine assemblymen. But 69 then we made a major change, and so all together there were 17; so that the Senate is now divided and putting several small counties together to get one senator. MR. WRIGHT: So in those years, even though Las Vegas was probably the biggest city in the state at that point, we still only had one senator in the state senate. MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: That's right. MR. WRIGHT: It's a little different now. Just kind of maybe wrapping things up a little bit here, Von Tobel Lumber doesn't exist anymore; am I correct? MR. ED VON TOBEL: No, we sold out in '77. And we sold out to a company that was a family-run corporation out of Seattle. And they had the Ernst Hardwares up there, and they were expanding, and they wanted to come to Las Vegas. And it was an opportune time for us. We had no management coming within the family to take over our business, so we thought that they would continue to operate the three stores under our name. And it went along fairly well for about ten years, but then the Home Depots came in and so forth, so the Ole's and the stores such as ours had to take a back seat. MR. WRIGHT: So it was partly the large national home improvement stores that made it difficult? MR. ED VON TOBEL: I think so, sure, yeah. MR. WRIGHT: What kind of thing would you all like to 70 talk about that I haven't talked about? There must be a thousand things. We might have to do another session sometime soon, but -- MR. ED VON TOBEL: Oh, I think perhaps so, Frank. You're going to produce what, some tapes? These interviews that you're conducting now will be tapes of Las Vegas from then until now? MR. WRIGHT: Yeah, from many different aspects. This is really only the second interview that we've done. Laura Belle Kelch, for example. You mentioned Max Kelch earlier. MR. ED VON TOBEL: Right, uh-huh. MR. WRIGHT: So we've talked with Laura Belle Kelch, and we're going to be talking with a number of other people: R. Guild Gray, who's been around town for a long time, and people like that. MR. ED VON TOBEL: My experience is that the people are really interested in what was here before the gambling started, before the casinos. And I think there's books galore all over the magazine racks and tapes galore about the casinos and what's happening now. But we've got some old pictures in our offices there, and people come in and -- the mailman or delivery people of any kind -- and they're just amazed that this was really just a jerk-water town in those first few years. How did people survive? No air conditioning, and all we had was water. 71 Without water we wouldn't have had a town, but the early wagon trains came through here. And I think it's interesting from your standpoint, the Historical Society, to bring out what you have done. The Indians were here, and the pioneers came through going from Utah to San Bernardino, California, and there was water. MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: The Mormans came first of all, didn't they, Ed? MR. ED VON TOBEL: Well, no, there was wagon -- MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: The Mormon pioneers? MR. ED VON TOBEL: There was a trail through here, but the Mormons settled in 1855. They came, one, to settle here because there was water and there was farming, but it didn't work out for them. So then it became the Stewart Ranch and, Frank, the Historical Society can tell that story very well. But I don't think they realize that it was really just a small railroad town. The reason for the railroad coming through was that it followed the trail of the wagon trains and there was water here for the steam engines and the cattle. And so they built a little town which would have never amounted to anything much more than Caliente except they built the dam, and then the dam brought more people. But that interim period from 1905 to 1930 were really 72 rough times. We had railroad strikes. The railroad was washed out for a period of time. And those stories, I think, are going to be very interesting to people who would like to see about it or hear about it. And so your program here will be very worthwhile I think. MR. WRIGHT: Well, like you, I've talked to a lot of people. They're always amazed to find out that Las Vegas does have a history before the gambling casinos and mobsters. MR. ED VON TOBEL: Yeah. And the gambling started in the 1930s, but it was a very minor thing. And when the dam started, why, that brought the people; and then the people brought the larger hotels; and of course, with the larger hotels, you had more people play the slots, and so you had more money coming in. In later years, of course, why, they got big enough and they got the financing. And so now they just go out and borrow 5, $6 hundred million to build another 3,000 room hotel and nothing to it. In the 30's you couldn't even borrow a dime. It was hard times during the depression. And the banks weren't loaning anything. My dad was in the lumber business and if somebody wanted to build a house, why, he'd have to give them credit for the lumber and take back the mortgage on a 10- or 20-year payment plan so they could build a house. The banks weren't loaning anything to anybody. So those were tough times we 73 went through. And we had the war, of course, in 1918; and the second war. The second war, of course, the town was busy because of the air base and the activity in connection with the war. MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: How much impact has the test site made? That's an unknown quantity, too, over the years. Millions and millions spent up there. All of the workers based out of there live here. That's been a big, big factor in the growth of Las Vegas. MR. WRIGHT: Yeah. I think, if I'm not mistaken, the test site was the state's largest single employer, I think, for quite some time. It's interesting that you mentioned you witnessed the first blast. Is it true that the hotels used to organize picnics and take people out into the mountains to sort of watch those blasts go off? I've heard that but -- MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: One time we went up to Indian Springs. We saw a blast from Indian Springs, which was almost there where it was conducted. MR. ED VON TOBEL: But they wouldn't let you get too close. They had observation where the people could be. Some of the press and other people that wanted to could go up there and wait it out through the night until the blast is usually taking off first thing in the morning. 74 But you really didn't have to go. We'd go out in the early morning. We'd know exactly when the cloud was coming over the town of Las Vegas. My wife and I would go out in the backyard on South Seventh Street and watch the cloud coming exactly when it was timed to go over Las Vegas. MR. WRIGHT: Yeah. That thing is still sort of having its impact, just recent revelations about iodine in milk as far as the East Coast. MR. ED VON TOBEL: Well, I think, no question, some of those centers up north probably in Caliente and Pioche and southern Utah -- I think some places that cloud did come down, and they had cattle and sheep. MR. WRIGHT: Yeah. My uncle was a sheep rancher in southern Utah, and so he told me some stories about that. MR. ED VON TOBEL: Yeah. MR. WRIGHT: And this is 1997. They're predicting something probably close to two million people in this valley not too far into the next century. I think if you were to look back to when you were young men, what in your wildest dreams would you have expected Las Vegas to become? MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: Well, Cahlan, who ran the Las Vegas Review Journal, always predicted that Las Vegas and Henderson would grow together. I think, in effect, that has happened. MR. WRIGHT: That's certainly true. 75 What about you, Ed, anything remotely dreaming of two million people in this valley when you were a young man? MR. ED VON TOBEL: No, I actually could not imagine it. I thought the town would grow very gradually, and we'd have a nice little town of a hundred thousand people someday maybe and a good place to live. MR. WRIGHT: Time's better now or time's worse, or a little bit of both? MR. ED VON TOBEL: Economics are great for this time right now. I think everybody's working that wants to work. And those people who stayed that came here have certainly become very wealthy that worked at it, and deservedly so. The men that came here to work with their hands, to do construction work and so forth, they've started their own companies over the years, and so now they're employing four or five hundred people in their businesses. MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: I'm thinking of Tiberti, J.A. Tiberti, who was employed along with me at the base, at the then Las Vegas Gunnery School together; and that's where I was drafted out of. But Tiberti stayed on here and, of course, has become a big builder. So he's an example of what Ed is talking about, of people that came here early in their youth and stayed and worked. MR. WRIGHT: So you're not two that would look back and say how much better times were back in the old days? 76 Las Vegas is still a pretty good place to live, then? MR. ED VON TOBEL: I think it certainly is. You make of it what it is. There's the crime, and the crime's everywhere. It may be a little worse here than it could be or should be. But they're working at it, and I think they'll get that more under control than what it is. And of course, the traffic. What can you do? No matter where you go, the traffic is terrible in the West. You can always go back to Kansas. We ran into somebody the other day that had been living here for 25 years, and she and her husband retired. They're going back to Oklahoma where they can get some fresh air and drive without being afraid somebody's going to run over them or get shot or something. Those things happen, but that's throughout the country. But this is a great town, going to continue to be. We're going to have some problems in some of the hotels. They're not all going to be successful. The newer ones, of course, are going to take the business away from the old ones. You've got the Thunderbird sitting out there vacant for many years. MR. WRIGHT: That's the place that's been the El Rancho that has been closed for quite some years. MR. ED VON TOBEL: Right, uh-huh. MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: El Rancho. MR. ED VON TOBEL: Yeah. And you've got the Aladdin, 77 and now they're going to tear the Aladdin down; it hasn't been successful for several years. So they don't all make it, Frank. MR. WRIGHT: A lot of change. MR. ED VON TOBEL: You have to know what you're doing and work at it. But basically, treat the people right and that's the proof of success, I think, when they keep coming back. MR. WRIGHT: Well, I want to thank you both very much. I've enjoyed this enormously. I hope you -- MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: We have enjoyed it, Frank. MR. ED VON TOBEL: Yeah. We appreciate the opportunity. But we keep running into so many people who are genuinely interested in early-day Las Vegas. What was here? They can't believe that this was just a little town, and now it's grown into a million people. And the New York-New York, you look at that and it's just fabulous and it started from nothing. MR. WRIGHT: Yeah. I talked to a novelist from England several months ago. He was writing a novel about the West, and he was having his characters take a gambling vacation to Las Vegas in 1914. And I sort of suggested to him that he might want to rewrite his script a little bit. MR. ED VON TOBEL: Why, yeah, there wasn't much here 78 in 1914, that's for sure. MR. WRIGHT: What do you think, Tim? Should we call that a wrap? MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: Call it a wrap. MR. ANDERSON: Yeah. I've only been in radio for two days and I'm using all these fancy words. MR. ED VON TOBEL: You know, there's the problems that everyday people had with no air conditioning, or my mother had with raising a family, and dust and dirt and gravel streets; and this wind comes up in the spring, my gosh. A little German girl came from an immaculate country over there in Bavaria where they wash the windows every week and everything's so clean and neat. And then she walks into Las Vegas, and you have to dust the dining room table every evening before dinner. MR. WRIGHT: Well, even I remember -- I came to town in '68 -- and there was still a lot of open desert, and cars had carburetors in those years. MR. ED VON TOBEL: Yeah. MR. WRIGHT: Very often a car would just die right in the middle of the street. MR. ED VON TOBEL: Right. MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: It will be 30 years. MR. WRIGHT: Yeah, it's almost 30 years. And I still feel like a newcomer. 79 MR. ED VON TOBEL: Well, we'll be happy to meet with you again and maybe you'll want to bring up some of those other things to fit into your story. MR. WRIGHT: There's some particular kinds of things I want to have. I asked you specifically about the Lundy family because there's some very mysterious things about that and so -- MR. ED VON TOBEL: Which family? MR. WRIGHT: Lundy. MR. ED VON TOBEL: Oh, Lundy. MR. WRIGHT: Yeah. MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: Lundy. MR. WRIGHT: Yeah. MR. ED VON TOBEL: I knew both of them quite well. MR. WRIGHT: Well, one side of the family had a garage on Main Street, and I can't remember what his name was. MR. ED VON TOBEL: That was Ray. MR. WRIGHT: Well, Ray had a brother, and I can't remember -- was it Charles? MR. ED VON TOBEL: I may have forgotten that but -- MR. WRIGHT: And he had a son. MR. ED VON TOBEL: Ray and his wife were more outgoing. You see them more at different affairs, so that's one reason I perhaps got to know them quite well. MR. WRIGHT: I met them both briefly about five years 80 ago, six years ago and -- MR. ED VON TOBEL: I wouldn't be surprised if one or both of them are still here. MR. WRIGHT: But there was one young fellow that was their nephew. There was a story in the RJ about he was a war hero and had captured a Japanese zero, and then it turns out that there was a hoax. But then there's all sorts of weird information. He was supposedly a good friend of Ted Homan's. And Ted Homan left some stuff when he died that seemed to indicate that there was more to the story than met the eye. MR. ED VON TOBEL: Is that right? MR. WRIGHT: But it's just a mysterious story. MR. GEORGE VON TOBEL: I haven't heard about either of them for years. MR. ED VON TOBEL: Did Ted Homan have a family? MR. WRIGHT: He was married. In fact, last I heard, which was several years ago, they were going to try to create a little museum to him somewhere in Southern California. MR. ED VON TOBEL: He was short stature. MR. WRIGHT: Yeah. He was too short to be a pilot, but I think he had a special dispensation to be a pilot. MR. ED VON TOBEL: Well, self-taught maybe. Yeah, and flying Western Airlines, why, he got himself there some way. Was he in the service? MR. WRIGHT: I think he was in the service. 81 MR. ED VON TOBEL: Yeah. MR. WRIGHT: I'm not sure. (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 ??