A Las Vegas historian and local television legend, Bob Stoldal is our guest this week on Nevada Week In Person.

♪♪♪ Support for Nevada Week In Person is provided by Senator William H. Hernstadt.

A Las Vegas High School graduate, he'd sweep the floors of the Las Vegas Review-Journal before embarking on a 40-year journalism career.

And with a passion for protecting history, he serves on numerous Boards, including as Chair of the City of Las Vegas Historical Preservation Commission.

Bob Stoldal, thank you for joining Nevada Week In Person.

-Thank you.

-If I spent all that time listing the Boards that you serve on currently, we wouldn't have much time to talk about your personal history, which is what I really want to focus on.

And so I went down to the Special Collections at UNLV, listened to your Oral History with Claytee White, and among all your accomplishments and contributions to Las Vegas, one story stood out to me.

Will you tell our viewers how you paid your senior dues at Las Vegas High School?

(Bob Stoldal) Okay.

You want that story out of all the wonderful things?

Well, my family moved to Las Vegas in the late '50s, and my stepfather went to work at the Nevada Test Site and I went to Las Vegas High School.

And, well, let's just say that I have 12 toes on each foot, and I didn't-- -Six toes on each foot.

-Excuse me, six.

I don't want to get too-- six toes on each foot.

You got me going there.

And people didn't believe that.

And I didn't have money for my senior dues, so I said, Okay, I'll show you my toes if you give me $5.

And they said, Well, how about a buck, and I said okay.

And so I earned my senior dues and was able to pay my senior dues and graduate.

-Now, I did ask if you would take your shoe off on camera.

You declined, but you said you're going to give us a picture that we can air.

I'm counting on that.

-All right.

-Other ways that you earned money back then, as a busboy at the Riviera and Dunes.

You were also a bartender at the Mt.

Charleston Lodge.

-I was a bartender in training.

I learned the difference between a rum and coke and a Cuba libre.

-Which is?

-$1.50.

If somebody orders a Cuba libre, you could charge them $1.50.

If it's rum and coke, you know, it's-- give them a break.

-A little fancier?

-Yeah.

-You worked at a local gas station, then sweeping the floors at the Review-Journal.

And I just can't understand how that ends up as a career in journalism.

-Well, I went for one of the jobs at the Review-Journal sweeping the floor.

You swept the lead off the floor, because we recycled the lead.

We would remelt it.

And that was the Linotype machines, and that was how it was printed in those days.

But also one of the job's description was you hand-set the headlines.

So the editor of the paper would come back and say, Here's the headlines.

And we would look at that, and I would just sort of set it and learn that an M and a W generally were too wide for things and would occasionally suggest a headline.

One time, and I don't remember what it was, he said, Oh, we'll put that in the headline.

So there was one headline in the RJ that I wrote.

But then the Review-Journal had a career day, and there was a gentleman from a local radio station, KLAS, that was there.

And they had decided to go on one day a week more.

They were on 24 hours a day, except Sunday night, Monday morning when they did their transmitter work.

But they figured out how to do that.

And I happened to sit next to him, and I said, Well, I would be interested in that job.

And I got it and went to work for one day a week, and it morphed into five days a week, then six days a week, and went from there.

The station said, Well, we're gonna start doing newscasts, and do you want to get involved in that?

And I said yes.

And it went from there to a job at Channel 8.

-While reporting at Channel 8, in that interview with Claytee White, you talked about an issue you had to report on but it also impacted you and your family personally with school busing.

What was going on?

How did your family choose to react?

-Las Vegas, there's no nice way to say it, was Jim Crow.

Las Vegas was a segregated community.

The Westside was over there, the black community was over there, Hispanic community was also over there.

And it was a-- it was a point that reckoning had to be taken care of.

The community had to grow up.

The country had to grow up.

And part of that growing up was our educational system.

And there was court battles, and the Clark County School District came with a variety of plans to do the Sixth Grade Center.

Then they tried voluntary busing where the communities would-- black kids would come out and white kids would would go in, and our family decided that we would be part of that.

Oddly, that brings back an emotion.

It was a time of where there were disturbances and people were upset and arguments.

And finally the School District said, Okay, we're going to do busing.

And that was a path forward.

Not a perfect path forward, but it was a path forward.

And then the town began to change, and the employment of black people beyond the cooks, and that expanded.

And by the way, at that same time, women were now allowed to be dealers.

They weren't allowed to be dealers.

You know why?

Because that would take jobs away from men.

That was the kind of thought process that was going on during that period of time.

And it was exciting, but it was also a challenging time to cover the news because it just, all parts of the community had different points of view, and you needed to make sure that that was on a newscast.

And so what we did personally as a family was one thing.

Coverage of news is another.

-What is it that makes you emotional?

That things improved after that, or that they were so bad at the time?

-No.

I just, how we treated people.

I mean, how-- the thought process that led up to saying, The black community lives over there, you can't get any job.

We don't even want you in our showrooms to see these shows.

What is that thinking?

Where did-- where does that come from?

And then, you know, being somebody that enjoys our history, you could trace it back, and you see how that developed.

It was beyond the South and slavery.

It also permeated the railroad industry.

And that's how Las Vegas was primarily built, because of the railroad.

If you worked in the railroad and you were black, you had two places.

You were a porter or you were a cook.

You clearly weren't an engineer, or you clearly were not a conductor.

You were a cook or you were a porter, and that was sort of the built-in beginning of Las Vegas.

We're still a young town.

I mean, we just had our 100th birthday not too many years ago.

And so that gave us the opportunity, in many ways, to change quicker because we didn't have all of that hundreds of years' history that the South had, that they had to overcome.

-You and your wife chose to voluntarily bus your son.

-Yes.

-He got on a bus and went to a different school?

-In those days, the rule was neighborhood schools.

And so in the black community, the schools were built in the neighborhood.

But that also fostered segregation.

And so, yes, Tony was bused over there.

My wife also volunteered as a teacher's aide.

So anyway.

Anyway, we've moved past that.

We moved, and there are other challenges that we face in our community, and we'll move forward with all those as well.

-You would go on to report on the welfare rights movement with the great Ruby Duncan leading it.

You had told Claytee White that when she held your hand, there was some sort of like energy that you felt, and-- -Now you're going to get me going again.

I'm gonna have lunch with Ruby this week.

-Oh, good.

It made me think of last week when we had you on to talk about the Tropicana closing.

And you talked about shaking the hand of Frank Rosenthal and the difference between the two.

-Well, there was a couple of handshakes.

Ella Fitzgerald was a great handshake.

Ruby, Ruby has a bit of a magic quality about her.

Her personality was out here and, Oh, well, this is really a nice human being, and she's energetic and exciting.

And then once you got to know her, you knew what was cooking in her brain.

And all these things were part of a real personality, but she had this leadership quality that changed Las Vegas in a very positive way.

-You did a lot of reporting on the mob.

-Right.

-You've gone on to launch The Mob Museum.

-Well, that's Oscar's.

I was on the team that was there at the beginning and still serve on the Board.

And it was a battle.

It was a battle because the community, not all the community, they'd say, We don't want to talk about that part of our history, let alone a museum.

And a lot of folks, even though they weren't part of the mob, they were friends or got their job because they knew somebody.

The operative word in Las Vegas for a long time was "juice."

And that meant you knew somebody who knew somebody who could get you a job.

So it was a lot of pushback on why you're doing-- and who's going to come?

Who's going to come to see The Mob Museum?

Well, Oscar, the mayor at that time, pushed it.

We saved the Federal Building downtown.

It was built in 1933.

It's a beautiful building.

-Which is so much of the work that you've done is to also preserve historic buildings.

At what point did that become important to you?

-Well, now you want to touch another button.

It is I enjoy collecting the images of our community in the early days, 1905 and so forth.

I'd show them to the kids, and they'd say, Oh, that's nice, Dad.

But then when you take them to a place like the Springs Preserve or to a building where they can touch it, they can see it, it's a different emotion.

Yes, we need to preserve through photography and video and all the history of our community, but to be able to be in a building and to touch it and see the architecture, it takes you back and you get that feeling.

And so we're a new town.

We're a town that's always booming.

And we're just-- Steve Wynn once told me that we have to reinvent ourselves every five years.

And so that means we're going to be losing things.

We're losing the Tropicana, or we've lost the Tropicana.

And so it's, again, it came from the family.

But then also part of it is the fact that I really got interested in our history because I was tired of lazy journalists and lazy historians parachuting into our community and leaving and saying, Bugsy Siegel invented Las Vegas.

Well, obviously, he didn't invent Las Vegas, but that's still out there, that he was the one that, Oh, here's a desert.

I think I'm-- -Who would you nail it down as to who invented Las Vegas?

-Well, you'd have to go all the way back to 1905 or you can go to Helen Stewart in the late 1800s or you can go back to the Southern Paiutes.

-Exactly.

That's why I asked Because that's a hard question to answer.

We're running out of time.

-Okay.

-Big part of your journalism career, you led the fight in getting news cameras into Nevada courtrooms.

-Not only news cameras.

Well, yes, news cameras.

But it wasn't just video cameras, film cameras, it was also still cameras.

And it was District Judge Paul Goldman who gave us-- he said, Okay, if you do these following 15 things, I'll let you try it.

And it was a variety of-- we had to get permission from every human being that was connected, the DA, the defendant, all the witnesses, all the jurors.

And we finally got that after about a year and a half.

We did it and put it in primetime on Channel 8, and the world didn't come to an end.

People wanted to see how justice took place.

And so we then got some legislation changed, and then we started covering inquests and we covered the first Supreme Court.

We did that live out of Carson City.

So it just, it brings the justice system to people who can see it inside, and I really feel good about that one.

-Bob Stoldal, thank you so much for joining Nevada Week In Person.

-Thank you for having me.