Soul to Soul

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The following is special programming sponsored by Public Radio KUNV 91.5. The content of Soul to Soul does not reflect the views or opinions of 91.5 Jazz & More, the University of Nevada Las Vegas, or the Board of Regents of the Nevada System of Higher Education.

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for ideas for a brighter tomorrow.

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This show is a free-for-all of positive energy that will include book discussions, music, politics, books, food, COVID-19, oral interviews, books, and Las Vegas history. Today my show is with Aaron Mayes. Aaron Mayes is this wonderful, amazing, creative person who works in special collections and archives in the Leed Library. Aaron, how are you today? I'm doing well, thank you. Thanks for having me here. Oh, thank you so much. So Aaron, your job is so different from any, I don't even know how to usually describe it to people. Tell us what you do in Special Collections.

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My job has three parts. First of all, the title is Curator of Visual Materials, and that really doesn't tell people much. So I usually break it down this way. It has three parts. There's a gathering part where I go out and gather photographs from other people, different photographers who've been in Las Vegas for years, maybe their family members have photos that they've taken, or just family pictures and different items from their histories. There's a technical part where I help with our digitization process. We have some very high-end equipment, some technical hurdles to get over, and it really helps to have a photographer in-house to be able just to walk up and say, oh, yeah, you know, this is exactly what the problem is and make that happen. And that's about another third of the job. And then my final third is kind of what I call like the cake in the whole mix. It's where I get to go out and do my own collections, where I take my own photographs and build collections for future generations to learn about Las Vegas in a more of a contemporary way for us now, but always with that, as I take them, I always have that eye on about 100 to 200 years from now, what might be interesting to somebody looking through the pictures there.

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That's wonderful. So, Aaron, how did you become a photographer? How did it happen?

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So, I started as a writer, actually, at a paper that no longer exists called the Henderson Home News out in Henderson. They had the Henderson Home News and the Green Valley News. They also owned the Boulder City News at the time, called HBC Publications and it was owned by former governor Michael Callahan. And I started as a writer there, first doing just little sports stories, I mean as small as it gets. And then I moved into covering the Henderson Planning Commission and the City Council and just kind of kept moving up. And all the while there was this need to have pictures taken and the photographer that they had was expensive and couldn't do everything. So, you know, when that really bad picture was needed of what the new supermarket looks like, then I would go out and do that. And that's kind of where I started. And it really took off from there as far as just my my desire to, to do that instead of writing. So that's where I started. And then from there, I moved to Las Vegas Sun for about a decade before I joined the staff at UNLV. So what was the first job at UNLV? So the first job at UNLV was I was the university's photographer. There were two of us, Ms. J. Cody and I. We would cover everything from events and sports, athletics, any portraits that were needed, you name it, we did it and tried to keep it in-house to keep it reasonable for the university cost-wise. That was a great, great thing. We were a pretty good team and did some really great work over about 12 years, 13 years.

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Wow. So, looking back over those years, not special collections, but prior, what is the most memorable event that you've done?

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So, you know, it's hard to, I get asked this question all the time, what's your favorite photograph? What do you remember the most? It's really hard to do that because photography really is an awful lot for photographers who are working in it and making their living at it and doing it every day. It's kind of like breathing. You know, you're constantly looking for pictures. I mean, before the mic turned on, I'm taking pictures of you sitting here in this setting just because I knew that I could do something nice. So I'm always constantly looking. So it's kind of hard. It's like, you know, what are your favorite moments of your life. There were things I really enjoyed. Certainly the connection to the students was was highest on the list and that's probably what I miss most about not being there. I just don't have that same connection with the students whether it's teaching them or photographing them, participating in their events. You know, Premier UNLV was a great great fun evening as hard as it was to get through because it's a long day. It was just it was wonderful. There's such good energy and it just had a great vibe. So you said teaching, what do you mean? Did you teach photography? It's more mentoring. I wouldn't, you know, I don't do classes, although I will go and lecture at times to be, when I'm invited to go lecture, but it's mostly mentoring. And I still do that a little bit, but I don't get as much opportunity as I used to. You know, when you're out and about every day. There's, you know, 10 or 15 students a semester saying, hey, you know, what what do I need to do? And right now I don't, I only get maybe one or two a year. I see. You had an opportunity that COVID destroyed and you were going to take some students, you and some other faculty, were going to take some students around the state. Tell us about that. So that was a program through the, you know, the Honors College where they had a grant from, I believe it's Barrick Mining. The grant was, you know, please bring us some students. We want to show them the mines, we want to show them the rural lifestyle, but we want you to go all over the state. We get them for a day, but you have, you know, here's enough money to do seven days. And the trip was planned. I think there were 20 students that were selected and they did a little bit of research on Nevada history and some of the places they were going to see. And we were doing everything from, you know, going on a hike at Great Basin National Park to CBD farm up towards and between Ely and Elko to the mines in Elko to over to, in Winnemucca, we were going to be looking at some ranches, all the way through Reno, up into Tahoe, down to Genoa, and then back through Tonopah. I mean, it was just this really, really wonderful trip. And not one of the students had ever really been outside of Las Vegas inside of Nevada. I mean, there are people who go to California and different things, but they had not, I believe there might have been one of them had even been to Reno Sparks area. So to be able to show them what this state has and the expansiveness of it and where some of these issues come to collide in Carson City. It was a real great opportunity. And unfortunately, there was a very strategic COVID happening and we just couldn't make it go. So hopefully we'll be able to put it together for this summer, but we'll see. Summer? Yeah, we'll see.

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OK. I don't know.

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I haven't been asked.

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We haven't approached that yet, but I'm really hoping that we get to do this for those students because it's important that our kids, the students that grow up in big cities, understand that there's a whole world out there that is not freeways and off-ramps and convenience stores.

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I love that. I hope it happens. So your job in Special Collections at UNLV is just an amazing job. When you are, tell us about collecting, let's say there's a person with this photograph collection, how do you go about getting that collection? How do you

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have that person donate those kinds of collections to the university? What happens? Sure, so a lot of things start with what's left over. Now I will target photographers that I know of, people who worked in the industries that I participated in, people that I've met, people I've rubbed elbows with as we're photographing in scrums. It's just all different kinds of people like that, but those are more targeted where I'll go to family members or to them, some of them are still living, and talk with them directly. Unfortunately, some pass away unexpectedly, like we lost a great photojournalist, Bill Hughes here recently, who passed away, and reached out to his family through a mutual friend, and they donated his materials to our collection, and we'll be adding his materials as we go along in the process of winding down his career. But a lot of times it's really, somebody's going through mom and dad's stuff and they find a carousel or two of slides from 1950s and they think, gosh, I don't know what to do with these. And then they call the university and I'll go out and take a look. And if they are worthy, or worthy is not the right word, if there's good content there that can add to our understanding visually of what Las Vegas was like to make sure that it fits, then we bring those in through a process. They basically donate them to the university, and then we go from there. And there's a whole process, as you know, of sessioning and processing and making available.

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So if I am a person in the public, I work as a clerk for my church and we're doing an event. Can I use those images?

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Yes, you can go to our website or web portal which is special.library.unlv.edu and you can go to that and search whatever you're looking for. Now it depends on what it is. Some materials are still copywritten and have certain restrictions to them, but we can help you at least understand what those are and gauge risk depending on what it is that you're using for. But there are some other materials that are clearly out of copyright, early Las Vegas images, pre-1929 I believe it is, that you can use freely. They're all available there on the website. Oh great. Now there is a photographer that you were able to collect some of his images. His name was Clinton, right? Tell me more about Clinton, right? Well Clinton writes not just a photographer. He's really he's a wonderful wonderful Gentleman, he lives in Texas, Texas now with his family and he's Getting up there in age, but he was a photographer that he he moved to the west side of Las Vegas in the 1950s I believe and then started picking up photography in the early 60s and the collection that we have is his black and white work from basically 64 through, blanking on the end date, but it's into the 80s. And his work is, he was just a working photographer in town. He wasn't just a photojournalist, he wasn't doing just sports, he wasn't doing just news, he was doing weddings and church goings and community events and debutante balls. He did this wonderful job on the first debutante ball. It's just absolutely gorgeous to look at his black and white images and to see what he captured there. It just shines a light on an area of town that didn't get press in the R.J. or the Sun, that didn't get in the local magazines. And it absolutely should have. It was beautiful, and Clinton's work shows exactly what that community was.

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Right. So thank you for that. You've done something recently that I want people to know about because they should come into the library to see this. But we have an exhibit up.

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Tell us about this exhibit called Voices was kind of just a product that came out of everyone's desire in the building to address diversity and equity issues that we have within our collections, to make sure that we're looking at them correctly with a variety of eyes, not just the ones that we were born with. It was a chance to give staff members the opportunity to jump in and research individuals that they may have never heard of. So Clayte, you put together the list of names of prominent African-Americans in our community that we have oral histories for and may have papers on. And then the different staff members were able to pick and choose who they wanted to do, and then they would just go off and research. I would gather the text and all the images and all the documentation that they wanted to use for the piece and put it all together and came up with a graphic design scheme that works in an exhibit and it's called Voices. And the reason it's called Voices is one of the things that I really wanted to do and the staff totally hopped on board with was to make sure that everybody, that you could actually hear their voice. So each of the people that were selected had a small audio snippet from their oral histories that you could listen to. So when we just put a QR code in the graphic design, we work that in. So you can actually stand in front of, say, Anna Bailey's, you know, this beautiful dancing stuff from Moulin Rouge with the Life magazine cover that they had in the 1950s on opening, that was at 55, on opening night. And you can QR code her voice and just hear her talk about what it was like to get to Las Vegas in that year and to get at the airport and you're putting a limousine and you're driving down the strip and you're thinking, oh my gosh, I've really made it. And then you go a little bit further and then you pass downtown and then she talks about how she goes over the railroad tracks and thinks, oh my gosh, what have I gotten into? And then she saw the Moulin Rouge, and it was all OK. And I mean, it's just such a beautiful story. So it was important to me and to the staff to make sure that the people, the individuals that we're talking about, also had their moment. You just hear their voice. It's not just their words written by other people or pictures taken out of a big box of photographs that we have of them.

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And so you were sort of a real taskmaster on this exhibit. So explain what you had in mind when you thought of voices, because you wanted each of those entries written in a certain way.

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Explain that. So, you know, all of our, most of our staff, with the exception of Clay Tee and Sue Kim and Peter Michelle who Sue Kim Chung and Peter Michelle are the curators and Most of the rest of our staff are more technical in their in their work So they describe things very you know when they describe a photograph It is you know John Smith on left talks to Joe Smith on right and that's about all you're going to get There's not there's nothing you know that's and it's done purposely. They're not trying to input themselves. So to give them a task that was to take a name like maybe Barbara Kirkland and and look at their life and to tell a little story about it. It was a real challenge for that for that individual to to write something that wasn't just descriptive, but it was also storytelling. And so with most of the staff, we kind of went back and forth and we talked about what was needed to to make it more of a story format, but yet still really just get the heck out of the way and let these people talk for themselves. And that was really, really important. It's a very, very fine line that you're walking when you're doing this.

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So give me an example of one of the entries that you did.

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So I did, let's see, I did, oh, let's do Joe Neal. So first of all, all the people were not necessarily as famous as Joe Joe was the first african-american Senator and longest-serving senator in our state's history And Joe and I actually I know no Joe from years and years of covering him from Las Vegas Sun and other places So I know him from that constituent standpoint and watching him and so I knew exactly what I wanted to say to Joe But I I also wanted to make sure that I needed to get out of the way and make sure that Joe was telling his own story. So I read his oral history, and he's got a very long one. He has like four volumes, and it was wonderful. And he really talks right about what I was thinking. He cherishes that rebel kind of mentality where I didn't care if the vote was 19 to 1 out of 20 senators. I was going to be that one because it wasn't right. And, and it was important that Joe's story was told from that perspective. So I really, really enjoyed being able to kind of go back and use that part of the brain and, and, uh, you know, tell it in, in kind of a story format. Wonderful. So Joe's interview was probably one of the longest ones that I've ever done. So, yeah, so he's very, you know, he, he's been, he's been had a career of talking so he knew how to do it. Yes, well, but yeah, and it flowed from one conversation to the next to the next. And it is just, I mean, for anybody who wants to understand Nevada politics in general, it's a great thing to read.

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And if you wanted to understand Joe Neal in particular, it's a book about him written by John L. Smith. That's right. So, so we have a lot of material on him. So tell us how, if we had the opportunity right now, how would we get his papers? So Special Collections collects manuscript collections.

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So what would we do? So I would imagine that and I don't know if with Joe's particular history I don't know if we have talked to his family and you know they may be waiting and not sure what to do with them. It's probably easier for me to talk to talk about let's say let's say you know Michael Callahan because he's actually somebody that I have collected his papers but in particular I knew that Mike's Michael Callahan his papers were not in any archive. And so I reached out to his son, Tim, and said, hey, you know, whatever happened to your dad's materials? And then I found out what has happened, and I talked with Tim in particular about the materials that he had, and we've recently brought in the governor's papers from when the time that he left the governorship to his passing. And so that's how it generally happens is that either we reach out to the family or the family is going through stuff and saying, you know, I know that dad wouldn't want me to throw this stuff away, but I don't know what to do with it. And then it kind of dawns on them that the university is there and is a great place to hold those kinds of things. Right.

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Photographs are such an important part of our collections. And we have, can you describe the breadth of that photograph of our collections? Sure. So Las Vegas is unique in the sense, as you know,

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that it really started as a city in 1905 and it only started as a, how do we say, European settler area about 50 years before that. Prior to that, of course, there have been for thousands of years, there have been our Native Americans who have lived here for all those periods of time. But if you think about where Europeans started coming to Las Vegas, it's almost about the same time that photography was invented. So, you know, by the time photography started to hit a semi-commercial way, there were small cameras and people were able to carry them and were able to do that. So much of our history, you know, is covered in that. I mean, think of a city like, say, I don't know, Rome. I mean, how many thousands of years? Their history is not covered in that, right? Now, of course, this doesn't cover our Native American tribes that have been here forever, but for the Las Vegas area, we have a great history of visual documentation. And that history goes all the way through, and part of one of the reasons, or one of the things that I focus on more is more modern stuff because we've mined a lot of stuff out of family albums from the turn of the century and we have great materials leading up through the 1920s and 30s. Then we get into the dam building and it just gets better from there, you know, and then right into the Rat Pack era and there's, you know, great documentation, visual representation of that and Fremont Street and Las Vegas Boulevard turning into the Las Vegas Strip and all the entertainment and the dance, you know, all the way through. And then you kind of get to the 80s and 90s and it drops right off. And that's kind of one of the things that I work on is trying to bring in materials that hit that era forward. And then I'm not exactly for sure how and where it's going to go from when, you know, You know we went from film to digitization about basically in 1997 and 8 when commercial digital cameras really started taking off Because that's going to be a whole nother monster how we do that so explain what?

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Digitization is to someone listening to this sir

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So digitization is the is the act of taking something that is physical you generally in our case. It's a two-dimensional piece of paper, a two-dimensional photograph, something like that. But in other institutions, there's a lot of three-dimensional work, sculptures, items, artifacts, that kind of stuff. We just don't have a lot of that. We try to stay mostly to two-dimensional items. So that's digitization. The other side of that is born digital, things that were never physical in the beginning. So born digital photographs are, of course, what you do on your phone. And now, you know, you have, everyone has, everyone is doing what they used to do back in the day, but everyone is keeping it, and no one's making prints. And so there's no physical connection to this. And so at some point, there's this nexus of where this is all going to meet and get lost or captured and kept. And it's one of the things that kind of, I mean, it doesn't keep me up at late at night, but I do think about an awful lot.

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So we're going to capture maybe websites?

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We do capture websites currently. We have a, our session or Tammy Kim does a great job of managing our Wayback Machine. What is that machine? The Wayback Machine project is, goes, goes way back. Basically, it tries to capture the entire internet as it goes forward. But we're able to ask it to do specific sites and specific things. And we do general collecting in that way and then targeted when we can. But that's one way of capturing. But think about your phone. I don't know how many photographs I have on my phone. And I know how all of my photographs that I've taken that are born digital that I've taken with digital cameras, I know where they are and everything, but it's an awful lot to put together. And for, and that's me, and I, you know, work at this, and I do this. I, you know, I struggle with how, you know, non-professionals are doing this, and just, you know, people at home thinking about their, their family's visual legacy, and, you know, are they going to move them forward? Because if you look at, like, you know, early Las Vegas in particular, much of what we really know about life in Las Vegas are captured in family albums. They're just, they're little snapshots of their kids running down the streets or participating in parades or this, that, and the other thing, and they're just pasted into family albums. Well, we don't do that anymore. We don't make physical things that are going to be left. So that's one of the things that I work on is to try and figure out how to get people's materials in in the right way and So that they're that it's usable and that our patrons can find it So I've never thought of this before so how would I advise a family whose photographs are on five six different? Telephones throughout the family. What are they going to do with them? How what should they do? Well, let's say if they get a hold of me, what I would tell them. Okay. So the first thing is, yeah, send them my way because then I would tell them that let's get a plan together to gather them. We'll get them off your phone and into a way that we can ingest into our system and hold on to them for you in the same way that we would hold on to a physical item. It's just a virtual folder instead

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of a physical one. Oh wonderful, okay. So because a lot of people are probably thinking once they are listening to this, how am I going to preserve this? Wow, so that's amazing. Aaron, this has been wonderful.

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Well, thank you. Yes, thank you so much

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for coming on the show. So as you know this is Soul to Soul, universal ideas for a brighter tomorrow. So this is a show that airs on fourth Sunday mornings at 8.30 here on KUNV. It's a show that is a free for all of positive energy that includes book discussions, music, politics, books, food, COVID-19, oral interviews, and the history of Las Vegas. Today, it was my pleasure to talk to Aaron Mayes. Once again, thank you, Aaron.

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Thank you.

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It was my pleasure.

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You've been listening to special programming sponsored by Public Radio KUNV 91.5 Chazz & More, the University of Nevada Las Vegas, or the Board of Regents of the Nevada System of Higher Education.

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I'm going to be doing a lot of work on this. so the the the I'm going to be doing a lot of work on this. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, Thank you.

Transcribed with Cockatoo