SPEAKER_00 0:03

Welcome to Lipstick and Legacy, a podcast where your story matters and your journey has purpose. Together we lift and inspire our communities one story at a time. Today on Lipstick and Legacy, I'm sitting down with bestseller, author, award-winning journalist, screenwriter, and storyteller Jack Daniel. With more than 40 years in professional writing, 18 published books, over a thousand articles, documentaries, screenplays, and biographies, Jack has spent a lifetime preserving stories, history, and legacy for the evolution of Las Vegas, from the evolution of Las Vegas to the deeply personal memoirs of extraordinary people. His work reminds us that every story truly matters. Jack, welcome to Lipstick and Legacy.

SPEAKER_02 0:48

Thanks, Julie. It's great to be with you.

SPEAKER_00 0:51

Jack, when did you first realize that you were a storyteller at heart?

SPEAKER_02 0:57

I think the first couple of times I actually got dates with girls. Because, you know, when I was in high school, I went to an all-boys Catholic high school, very secluded, very regimented. And I've I was six foot three when I was 15, which is my height today. I I quit growing at 15 and I weighed about 150 pounds. So I was funky winker bean, that cartoon character. I was just this skinny kid. And uh the girls I wanted to date wouldn't go out with me. And you know, I'd I'd get embarrassed and walk away and give up. And then, but I realized I I was always full of it, if you will. I had stories to tell. And I I learned somebody said you give up too early. I think it was my sister who said, You give up too soon. Girls aren't going to go out with you when you first ask them out, especially looking like you. So you you're gonna have to use your gift of gab to talk them into it. And and so that worked better than um, you know, the instant rejection. And then when I got into college, it's kind of an interesting story how I turned to literature and writing, because I went to uh the University of Oregon on a golf scholarship, and that was my other gift is I was a good junior golfer, and I was winning all sorts of nice tournaments and playing in national events when I was 15, 16, 17. And so I got a golf scholarship at the University of Oregon, and I went there, like all young guys who get an athletic scholarship. I'm thinking, well, I'll be a pro. Someday I'll be a pro and I'll play on the tour. And I realized, although I had a good college career, I wasn't great. I mean, there were 10 or 15 guys in my conference that I knew were better than I was, and so I had to make the decision uh close to graduating from college. What am I gonna do with my life? Another important thing that happened is I'm 76 years old. When I was in college, the Vietnam War was uh at its height and its most dangerous and most controversial. And the government decided in 1969 that they were gonna do a national draft lottery, and they were gonna put 366 dated pills, including um February 29th, including Leapier, in a fishbowl, and they were gonna pull them out, and there'd be uh a date on every pill. And they said, we have a great need to draft a lot more people uh for Vietnam because we were sending a ton of men and women to Vietnam. So this is right in the beginning of my junior year, and I'm I'm I was a business major and I was not a good student because I was spending all my time playing golf and chasing girls and acting like I was a hippie, I guess. And uh so actually at the beginning of my junior year, knowing this lottery was going to be held, I went into the English department and I asked if I could get a counselor. And this guy, kind of a crazy looking guy with long hair, I could tell he was probably an anti-war protester. I said, Um, you know, I'm majoring in business, but I want to change to English because that's my best subject, and I'm not doing very well in business. And he goes, Well, what's your main reason for doing this? And I said, to be honest with you, it's to stay out of the draft, because I recently got a letter that if I didn't uh take more hours and get better grades, I was going to be drafted. And he arranged for me to sign up for a bunch of English courses, beginning of my junior year in college, and all of a sudden I'm majoring in English and I'm studying Chaucer and Shakespeare, foreign language. Um, and as odd as it sounds, I loved all those subjects. I was a good reader and I could write well, and so that changed my life because getting out of business and going to English, which was my strength, allowed me to pursue something that I had a talent for. And as it turned out, I got a really high lottery number anyway. So I wouldn't have even had to change majors, but I'd already done it by that point. So I graduated with really good grades my last two years. Then I went to grad school and got a master's in English. And it was in grad school that I realized I'm not sure I can make a living as a writer, but I love this subject, so I'm gonna do whatever I can. And that was really the most oh, can I let my dog out before he kills me? And sorry. Sorry, Sadie.

SPEAKER_03 5:53

You guys gotta go out. There you go. Go at it.

SPEAKER_02 6:05

Okay, sorry. So anyway, I have a master's in English, and um I I'd gotten straight A's in grad school, and it was a difficult degree to get. I had to pass language exams and doing a thesis. I did had to do a couple hundred-page thesis on a great writer. I chose Ken Keasey, who wrote one flew over the cuckoo's nest and sometimes a great notion. He had Oregon roots, so I'd I was already familiar with him. And now the question is I'm 23 years old, I've got a master's degree, but nobody wants to hire somebody with a master's in English because what what are they going to have you do? Uh you know, recite poetry?

SPEAKER_00 6:48

Right, right. Where do you go with that?

SPEAKER_02 6:49

Exactly. Where do you go? And I'll I'll shorten the story. I ended up getting hired as a sports writer at the Spokesman Review, my morning newspaper in my hometown. And so I covered sports for two years. And I I enjoyed it. I they let me have all sorts of freedom to write, you know, the front page stories in the sports section, all that. But I also realized after two years on that job, that as much as I like sports, I didn't want to do that my whole life. I could have, it would have been very easy to stay in Spokane where my parents were still there and my sister. And I could have stayed there and probably been promoted to sports editor after five or ten years and retired, got the gold watch, you know, at age 65. But I've been to Las Vegas two times.

SPEAKER_00 7:43

Hold on just a second. Hold on just one second. So I want to go back a little bit. So you are from Spokane.

SPEAKER_02 7:48

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 7:49

Okay. And tell me just in a couple sentences, what was the young Jack like? Like the child Jack. Did you love reading? Did you love writing then, or were you just a free spirit? What did that look like for you?

SPEAKER_02 8:01

Um, the young Jack was a rascal. I got in a fair amount of trouble, you know, would throw snowballs at cars and would do stupid stuff. And um I have a theory about it is, you know, when you go to a Catholic school, you hear a lot about hell and eternal flames, and it never ends. And it's it's really the fear of sin that they fill you with. So I had so much of that all the way through grade school and high school, because I went from eight years of nuns to four years of priests. I I'm not ashamed to say I graduated from high school wearing white, if you get the drift. I was as virgin as they come. Part of it was being 6'3 and weighing 150 pounds.

SPEAKER_00 8:49

Yeah, it might have had something to do with it. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 8:52

But I also loved golf, and and because I was I had some talent at golf, my summers were playing golf every day and playing in tournaments and winning a bunch of them. So I was just kind of a carefree kid. There were just two kids in our family. My dad was a prominent dentist in Spokane, had a big practice, wonderful guy. He was a Navy veteran, served in World War II on a battleship. I was very fortunate. I had great parents. They were married 50 years until my mom suddenly died in her late 70s of a heart attack. But they had a wonderful marriage. There was no fighting in her house. I had a great uh one sister, older sister, and we got along great. So I really, you know, having grown up around people that have had all sorts of issues, I was very lucky to have a carefree, albeit um stoic upbringing. And then of course when I went to the University of Oregon and it was Vietnam and hippie girls and free love and all that, that's when I discovered a lot of the ways of the world. And I fell in love again with literature and English. And so to jump ahead, by the time I was 25 and ready to leave the newspaper, single, I'd had some girlfriends, but I'd never gotten close to getting married. And I've been to Las Vegas twice for short periods of time, and I was really intrigued by it, how unusual it was, how different from Spokane. I mean, Spokane's a real middle-class, conservative, professional community in eastern Washington. It's a big city compared to all the small farming communities around it. So my dad's patients as a dentist were from North Idaho, Montana, community, small communities in Washington. And we had a really nice, I guess you'd say upper middle class uh upbringing, and uh it was pretty carefree. But the impulsive decision I made to move here was really on a total whim. That I'd been to Las Vegas a couple times, I'd had fun, I'd played golf when I was here. The city had good golf courses, obviously, great weather compared to Spokane. And so I got here and I didn't have any employment. I'd saved probably five or six thousand dollars. I knew that would bide me over for a couple months, and um, I was running out of money quickly, and I was staying with a golfer friend of mine who had an extra room in his house. He let me stay there for a minimal amount of money. And I was writing articles and sending them to the New Yorker, the Saturday Evening Post, big newspapers, most of the stuff I sent would come back unread because I didn't have an agent. I didn't know the rules of the game. I was just hoping my writing would sell on its own merit, and that wasn't working out very well. And so my friends, who was a 21 dealer at the Riviera, said, if you're gonna stay in Vegas, you got to make some money. I'll teach you how to deal blackjack on an ironing board, and you can get a job. And you'll get hired because you're a good golfer, and guys who work in casinos like good golfers, they'll invite you to play golf. And so, anyway, that that plan worked out. And I dealt uh 21 at the Fort Queens downtown. Oh my goodness. I was on the late swing shift, 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. Now keep in mind, as a Catholic kid, I got up at 6 o'clock every morning. Now I'm on a shift where I go, I leave the leave my job at 5 a.m. Go home, take a shower, crash, and sleep through the day. And I was miserable. I didn't like dealing, I didn't like the customers blowing smoke in my face. All the I'd never smoked, was a very minimal drinker, and they're spilling drinks and asking for cigarettes, and they get mad when they start losing money. I was just miserable. And um, you can stop me whenever you want because my stories do get long.

SPEAKER_00 13:12

Well, you're gonna just yeah, just tell me kind of where it went from there.

SPEAKER_02 13:15

Okay, so I was dating a woman who was a former Las Vegas lead singer in the Follies of Bergère, really talented singer, and she said, you know, you're a nice guy, but you're so miserable at your job. You've got to get out of that casino. And I said, I don't know what to do. And she said, invaluable tip, why don't you go over to UNLV and see if they have an opening for any English teachers? Because I had taught uh freshman and sophomore English classes in grad school. So I stumble over to UNLV, probably had an hour or two sleep. It's the weekend right or the Friday before Labor Day when school's gonna start at UNLV the fall semester. I walked in the English department and I said, I'm just here on a whim, but I have a master's in English. Do you have any opening for freshman English teachers or sophomore English teachers? She said, Don't go anywhere. And she introduces me to the head of the freshman English department. He interviews me. I said, I've got a diploma. I got it in the car, I have my master's degree. I don't need to see it. I can tell you're well educated. Um, how many classes can you teach? And I said, How many do you have? He said, Can you teach a seven, eight, nine, and ten in the morning, four in a row, English 101? I said, Absolutely. He he signed me up. I did that, I continued to deal for another month so that I could have those two incomes. And that got me back on the right track.

SPEAKER_00 14:55

My sister actually had you as a professor there. Oh my gosh. Yes. I mean, it was a long time ago. She's she's older than I am, and she always reminded remembers that class for some reason. Maybe you were quite the strapping lad, I think. That was kind of the kind of the thing. Um what you have written over a thousand articles on everything from sports to politics, entertainment. Yeah. What did writing teach you about people?

SPEAKER_02 15:25

Wow. Unlimited. Um the decision I made to not limit myself to sports was another really good decision. Because if you envision yourself as a storyteller and a good writer, and I tell this to young writers all the time, why would you pigeonhole yourself in one field? So many writers, I'm a political writer, I'm an entertainment journalist, I'm an investigative reporter. I didn't see myself being pigeonholed in any of that. Any good story that came along, I wanted to hear it and I wanted to write about it. And so I very, very quickly learned how to write a newspaper column, how to write a magazine article. My actual book total now is 35, believe it or not.

SPEAKER_04 16:12

Oh, wow.

SPEAKER_02 16:13

Probably got that up in old bio. But I've written 35 full-length books from 175 pages to 400 pages. And um I choose my subjects based on two things. Is it a good business opportunity? Am I going to be compensated well, sometimes by the person who hires me, sometimes on spec, hoping we can sell a lot of books and I make I'll make royalty money. So I have a kind of a wide open mind about um what my next topic is going to be. I the one book I did, it's pertinent to you, you'll understand it, was with a man named Perry Thomas, who was a Mormon banker from Salt Lake City, Utah. The Thomas and Mac Center at UNLV is named after Perry Thomas and his business partner, Jerry Mack. That's what Thomas and Mac are. And I was on the board uh of directors at Opportunity Village, which helps disabled people and Down syndrome people. And it's a great charity here in Las Vegas. And I was on the board of directors of that. And another member of that board was the son of Perry Thomas. And in 2004 or five, a little over 20 years ago, he came to me after a board meeting one day and he said, You've written all these books. We'd like my dad to tell his story because he was the banker for Howard Hughes. He was the banker for Steve Wynne. I knew that already. So he's telling me things I already knew because I'm I'm very knowledgeable about Las Vegas history, especially in the last 75 years. And so I said, Well, I've always heard your dad would never talk to reporters. And Tom Thomas said, That's right, he won't. But I think if I introduce you to him in the right way, he's now 86 years old. Um, if he likes you, I think we can talk him into doing it. And he did. And I turned out to be a wonderful opportunity. I wrote a book called The Quiet Kingmaker of Las Vegas, which was Perry Thomas's life story of providing loans to all these characters in Las Vegas, from mobsters up to legitimate people. And he I've said this recently in a talk at the mob museum. I think Perry Thomas was the most important person in the growth of modern Las Vegas. Because in addition to helping Howard Hughes buy six hotels out of mob-controlled money and putting them in the hands of a man that, although he was strange and had long hair and long fingernails, he was regarded as this brilliant, wealthy man, one of the wealthiest men in the world. So everybody in town, the newspaper editors and everybody in business thought it was wonderful that Howard Hughes decided to stay in Las Vegas and buy six different hotels out of mob-controlled uh financing. And it really was the most instrumental thing in Las Vegas becoming nationally respectable rather than just a mob city. So that book led to several other biographies and other opportunities because the book did really well. And people they they knew if Perry Thomas had approved me to write a book, that I was probably okay.

SPEAKER_00 19:48

Right. So you've interviewed and written about so many fascinating individuals. What makes someone unforgettable to you?

SPEAKER_02 19:57

They have to be willing to share their story. If they're too private, it'll never work. My job as a writer is not, I tell this to young writers too. You have to be a good interviewer to write books. You have to be able to pull stories out of people and get them thinking. And so I will I will tell people when we start a book, um, make up a list of bullet points of dramatic moments in your life. I know you did that in working on your own book, and you had a lot of dramatic moments, some that were exceptionally positive, some that were the opposite of that. And so I tell people, write down 10, 12, 15 bullet points in your life, the good, the bad, and the ugly, your high points, your turning points, your emotional moments. You know, if you've lived a long life, you've lost people you loved. You might have lost your parents, you might have lost it, lost a brother or sister. We need to get that in the book. We need to put those moments in because the story that everybody on earth knows the best is the story of their own life. Right? About that. I mean, I I've known a million stories, but if somebody told me tomorrow, I'm gonna pay you a million dollars to write your life story, I'd stop everything and write my own life story. And people have asked me a million times, why don't you write your own life story? And I tell them I don't pay enough. You know, if I write my life story, I'm counting on that to be a best-selling book. And outside of Las Vegas, nobody knows who I am. But if I write a story about Howard Hughes, or I write a story about Steve Wynne, or I write a story about Frank Sinatra, I've got a built-in audience of people who want to hear that story. And so those are the two factors. Factors I look for. Someone that wants to write their story about an interesting life. And is there a financial benefit for me to spend a year, year and a half, two years on this project? Those are the two factors I look at.

SPEAKER_00 22:15

So you've seen writing evolve as a young English teacher to decades later, you're still ghostwriting and telling stories. How do you feel modern storytelling has changed because of social media and AI and all of these things coming in? How do you see that?

SPEAKER_02 22:33

I think it's it's evolving in a way that's not real positive for someone like me, but I'm at the point where I may do four or five more books and it's not going to affect me. Everything's is online and everything is AI. Um, I don't know how English teachers ever grade a paper from a student and trust that it was written by the student. Because if I assign a topic, tell me the most exper uh important thing that happened to you last summer, they're gonna go on AI and find some story, and then they're gonna put a few things in that make it sound like it's theirs. I don't even know how that it's gonna work.

SPEAKER_00 23:11

Or how you can tell it's not their writing. I mean, they you even say put it in my voice, and they write it like a child wrote it or something.

SPEAKER_02 23:18

The way I would do that is I would have them write the first two or three papers in class without having their phone nearby, so I could get a sense for what their level of skill is. In fact, when I taught at UNLV and I taught English 101, the first assignment, the first day of class, was I told everybody, tell me the most interesting thing you did last summer and write it in a descriptive essay. And I'm gonna put a grade on this that will tell you how it ranks for a college freshman. And most of them, honestly, Julie, were C's, D's, and F's. They can't write I'm not criticizing the Las Vegas high school education system, but it would it would it was unusual if I had a couple B's. And if somebody had an A, I thought, well, this person's gonna be have a they can take a vacation. If they can write an A off the top of their head, head at the first day of class, they're gonna breeze through this class. But then, and they would go, Oh my gosh, I got A's or B's at Western High School. Well, that's because your teacher was the football coach, and he he wasn't any better than you were. And so I would say, you're gonna really need to work. And I would teach grammar and punctuation and diction, and I would beat up their papers and grade them, you know, uh strictly. And if I could get an F student up to a C, I figured that was a triumph. If I could get a C to a B and a B to an A, then I'd I did a good job of teaching. But in this day and age, with everything being online, it's a different world. I'm glad that there are still people that want to publish a hardcover book that they can pass on to their kids, their grandkids, their friends, and their business associates. And if they don't want to do that, I'm not the guy for them.

SPEAKER_00 25:09

Yes. Yes, I love that. I see that. I'm a school teacher and I substitute teach, and I'm just the lack of basic skills is just very documented the evolution of modern Las Vegas. What fascinates you most about this city?

SPEAKER_02 25:28

I'm just amazed at how fast it's grown, how multidimensional it is, how almost to a fault, how accepting it is of every new sports team. And, you know, I'm not a big Formula One racing fan. I wish that had never come here. Apologies to racing fans. It put a lot of local business owners up against the wall because they had to shut down their streets. But the attitude of the city is almost too welcoming. I think we've got enough. I honestly love baseball. I don't think we needed to bring the Oakland A's in here and block off half of the South Las Vegas strip to bring a baseball team here. You know, we've got a great hockey team, we've got a great women's basketball professional team. You know, we we've got enough, but there's something in the mentality of the modern civic giants, if you will. We can take on anything. And I think it's almost gotten to the breaking point. But for a writer who's looking for good stories, I should never complain because it always gives me something else to write about. And because I write about every subject that I find interesting, um, yeah, I've got no complaints.

SPEAKER_00 26:45

What parts of Old Vegas do you wish that future generations would understand?

SPEAKER_02 26:51

Um well, let's talk about showrooms. And you often hear the comment from old timers that the town was better when the mob ran it. And there's there's there is an element of truth to that. If you walked into a casino in the mid-1970s when I got here, you didn't wear Bermuda shorts and a tank top. You will you will see people dress like you know they're they're going to a barbecue at the local uh park. And I I liked the older Vegas where you dress presentably. I always wore, of course, I was covering a lot of these entertainers, and I uh admittedly was getting free tickets because I back then I owned a magazine, and we would, if we were doing a cover story on Diana Ross, I would you know wear a suit and a tie and I would sit up front and I I would still tip the mater D, but they treated you extra carefully, and it's too I know the sphere is an amazing thing, um, but I I don't want to go into a room with 6,000 people. I I really don't, even as spectacular as it may be. I loved a showroom that held 800 people. You could see Elvis and you could be in the middle of the showroom and you still had a great view and you felt special because you were there. Now it's kind of um a group mentality that's gotten a little bit too big, and it's partly my age. You know, if I can watch a movie on TV, I'm gonna do that rather than pay 18 bucks and and eight bucks for popcorn. You know, I that it's just part of being old and lazy, but I like that part of old Las Vegas. I like the fact that um every part of town wasn't fully developed. When I got here, where we live in Summerlin was bare desert, and it was bare desert until about 1990. And and so the growth has been wonderful for me as far as writing opportunities. I I I I like Las Vegas when it was 400,000 rather than 3 million. Yes.

SPEAKER_00 29:06

Who is one of your favorite performers to ever see live?

SPEAKER_02 29:11

Well, I got this sounds corny, but Celine Dion put on a put on as good a show as any I've ever seen. Elton John, terrific. Uh I I go back a ways. I loved Hall of Notes. I saw their show a couple times. I did see Sinatra once, but it was at the end of his career. Uh Sammy Davis uh went to a couple times, unbelievably talented. The new performers, again, uh I'm showing my age, but I don't go to a lot of strip shows nowadays. But I do like this, I do like nowadays we can get the best performers in the world. So Bruno Mars will come here. Later Lady Gaga will come here. You know, the most popular performers in the world will come to Las Vegas. That's wonderful. In the mid-70s and late 70s, a lot of the headliners were over-the-hill comedians and singers. So Buddy Hackett was who was an old kind of raunchy comedian, was a headliner at the hotel. A guy like Buddy Hackett today would never get uh on the marquee at a strip hotel. You got to be a pretty big deal now to get on uh you know the main marquees at the hotel. So I like the fact that the level is is much higher now.

SPEAKER_00 30:27

It is, but I also love that these older performers from generations before coming back here. We just saw Donnie Osmond and one of the true showmen, they just have a quality, a charisma. They're they're actually singers and performers who can hold a show without a script, going off dialogue. I really enjoy Barry Manilow has been a really fun one to go see. And those are older entertainers, but I really stress that word. They are entertainers, they are a different class and different generation of performer.

SPEAKER_02 30:58

And more power to both those names you mentioned. They stayed revelent, or I'm scoring, they stayed relevant by making good music, by understanding that the audience wants to hear their old songs, and they're both performers. So if you keep yourself in good shape and you stay relevant, uh, yes, there's a place for you in Vegas.

SPEAKER_00 31:20

After decades um of writing about successful people, what is one thing that truly defines success for you? After interviewing people, writing about their life, what thread do you see that they all kind of have?

SPEAKER_02 31:34

They have to have a passion for their art. Um, if they just go through the motions, and I'm not going to mention any names, but sometimes you see a performer up there, he's just doing it for the paycheck. You can tell he's bored to death. He's sung his hit songs 8,000 times. He doesn't do them with passion. But you the two you mentioned, Donnie Osmond, Barry Manlow, people like that, they still act excited about their music and entertaining an audience. So I think it comes down to passion. And it it brings up another thought. Um when I've heard this a long time ago, but people have said, why did you choose writing? Was that your passion? Well, not really. It wasn't my passion. I was a good reader, I was a good writer. My passion was golf, probably, but I wasn't good enough. I knew that I was not going to make a great live. I could be a club pro. I could sell range balls at a driving range, I could do a lot of my friends have done, and more power to them if they love doing that. But my my talent was not the same as my passion. My talent was telling stories and writing stories. And so I tell young people, you may have a passion to be a guitarist, but boy, that's a that's a narrow window you've got to climb through to make a living playing guitar. If you want to do it and you want to perform at the local bar and that's your passion, God bless. But you choose your go for your talent, find out what you're really good at, and then get better at it. And you know, I I've never quit studying what makes a writer really good. So because I'm a nonfiction writer, I don't write novels, I write true stories, life stories. Um, I might embellish a little bit, and people will forgive you for that. But uh I always read nonfiction talented writers. I could read novels forever. I read a thousand novels by the time I got out of grad school. I was not a make-believe storyteller. I have written screenplays that are make-believe, and I enjoy doing it. I don't think it's my real talent. My my real talent is telling true stories and telling them well.

SPEAKER_00 34:00

So in the last decade, you've really focused heavily on memoirs and biographies. Why has that become so important to you? Again, is that just your talent where your talent lies, or do you find importance in the story?

SPEAKER_02 34:14

Because if I met somebody, if I meet someone that has an interesting life and they're passionate about sharing that story, and most of the people I work with now are up in age, their late 60s, up into their 80s. Perry Thomas was 87. A guy named Fred Gibson, who owned uh uh the the plant that blew to smithereens, that was his uh factory, Pepcon, the Pepcon explosion. I interviewed, I met uh Fred Gibson when he was 88. We worked on his book till he was 90, and he died at age 91. Um the challenge in with somebody that old is their memory isn't very good. I was lucky with Perry Thomas. He remembered everything. He had this photographic memory, and so he could tell the stories. Um, Art Marshall owned uh uh Marshall Clothing Store, and he's got a big family in Las Vegas. Wonderful guy. I met Art when he was 87. I had probably one good year with him, and then I really had to do research and work to get the stories out of him. But um, if if someone late in life, typically has a passion to share their story with their family, their friends, and their business associates, I'm I'm somebody that they're likely to find. They're gonna find my bio, or they're gonna read Perry Thomas's book, or Bill Bennett, who ran the Circus Circus, Maury Gallagher, uh, the founder of a Legion Airlines, Legion Stadium. I wrote his story. Um I've gotten to the point where that work, not in every case, but tends to come to me. I don't have to go out and really look for it. And and so I guess I've gotten to the point in life where I don't have to work as hard to find good jobs. And I find every dynamic person's life interesting. I'll give you an example. There's a woman, Corine Sporn, S-P-O-R-N, whose husband, whose ex-husband left her with hundreds of millions of dollars. She's a very wealthy woman. And her story is crazy because somebody called me and said, I've got a woman that you ought to meet. Here's her story in one sentence. Her father was a soldier for Hitler and Nazi Germany, and she converted to Judaism at the age of 21. You go, what? Her father was a Nazi soldier and she became a Jew. I said, I want to meet her. I met her, we spent two years and did her book, and it was a really interesting, fascinating book. Um so women, men, whoever, I'm just looking for a great story.

SPEAKER_00 37:04

What has talking to all of these really incredible people taught you about resilience?

SPEAKER_02 37:13

That if they're at the point where they're willing to pay a fair amount of money to get their story told, they've overcome something. They've acquired wealth, reasonable wealth one way or another. And they're kind of fearless because they're willing to tell their story. One of the things I told the good, the bad, and the ugly. I go back to that. I told Perry Thomas when we started his book, I said, Mr. Thomas, this may have been the first conversation. I said, Mr. Thomas, I'm not a PR guy, I'm not a public relations writer, I'm a storyteller, and I know you've had a brilliant career with 95% successes. I also want to talk about the failures in your book. I want to talk about the down moments, the tough times you got through. How did you get through those? What made you? You asked about resilience. Perry Thomas to practice banking at his level and sell his bank to the Bank of America for $2 billion. Think of what he went through in the early days when he was dealing with mobsters. He was giving small loans to mobbed up people, the Teamsters. Benny Binion, who wasn't mobbed up, but he had a criminal record. People like that, that he befriended those people and they respected him so much that they would uh take the loans that he gave them from Valley Bank, which was the original name of his bank. So, you know, I I can look at, I could give you 20 names of people who led long, full lives, very successful, resilient, and were willing to relive some of the painful moments. Because I won't let them get away with just telling me the glory moments.

SPEAKER_00 39:03

What how do you skirt around or how do you deal with moments that are very private and personal? Maybe dealing with something that they don't want to talk about. Do you say, no, if we're doing this, we have to put it out there? Or are you okay leaving some parts out just for privacy? How do you work around that?

SPEAKER_02 39:20

I think it's a balancing act. Um, if I know something is just way too personal, um I'll I will probably say, you know, give that some thought, and we'll come back to it later. And if they think about it for a while, sometimes they change their mind. Sometimes they want to put something in the book, and I suggest not to for legal reasons. I've had that discussion. Um, I don't think you should mention that. Or if you do, you need to change names and circumstances so it doesn't pinpoint the person you're talking about because there are legal issues. Um, you know, I I basically tell everyone we're gonna work on this book together. You will read my drafts as they appear. I'm not gonna surprise you with a 250-page book after a year and say, I hope you like it. You're gonna be reading chapters as we go. And then these are smart people that do the these things with me. I mean, I if they're really dumb, they're not gonna hire me in the first place. They're they're gonna they're gonna write a poem on the back of a cereal box or something. So, I mean, if they're smart people, they know to trust me. And once I uh have their trust, um it's I usually don't have to talk them into anything.

SPEAKER_00 40:50

Um, this is gonna be a little quick thing right before we end. I have a couple more questions, but this is a rapid, rapid fire for you. So just one-word answers. Favorite place in Las Vegas.

SPEAKER_02 41:06

My office.

SPEAKER_00 41:07

I love it. Book every person should read.

SPEAKER_01 41:16

I'll be safe, the Bible.

SPEAKER_00 41:19

It's really safe. That was so safe, Jack.

SPEAKER_02 41:21

Like okay, I'll give you another one. Um The Old Man in the Sea by Ernest Hemingway.

SPEAKER_00 41:31

Oh, that's a really good one. What historical figure you wish you could interview or write about?

SPEAKER_01 41:42

Abraham Lincoln.

SPEAKER_00 41:47

Coffee shop writing or complete silence.

SPEAKER_02 41:51

Complete silence.

SPEAKER_00 41:53

Newspaper or digital media?

SPEAKER_01 41:57

Both.

SPEAKER_00 41:58

Both, huh?

SPEAKER_01 42:00

You get information from both, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 42:02

One word that describes your life journey.

SPEAKER_01 42:09

Grateful.

SPEAKER_00 42:12

Beautiful. You live in gratitude. What do you believe is the power of preserving somebody's story?

SPEAKER_02 42:21

One word legacy. Let me expand on that. If Perry Thomas had never told his story in a book, his kids, his grandkids, all the people he did business with, they would tell the story wrong. He he he tells it right. They would make up, you know, embellish parts of his story. He loaned me this, he loaned me that. When you put it in a hardcover book, I uh I say this all the time people throw away newspapers and they throw away magazines. They do not throw away hardcover books. Once it's in a hardcover book or even a paperback book, it gets on a shelf and it's it's preserved. And that Perry Thomas must have told me 10 times in the he lived to be 95. We worked on the book from his ages of 87 to 89. So he lived six years after that. He must have told me 10 times, I am so glad I did that book with you. And he gave it to everybody. And if I do my job properly, when I'm done with the book, they will give it to everybody. If they don't, then they're either embarrassed of their story or maybe I didn't do a good job.

SPEAKER_00 43:33

I think it's really important, especially in this day and age, we capture everything on our phones through photographs and Facebook. And one swipe, that could all be gone. It's not preserved really in any way other than maybe in some big storage center somewhere, data storage. And so it's almost a lost art to preserve things on paper and hardcover. And I think at some point that's definitely going to make a comeback when we have to go back to these things, these hardcovered books, and say, who were these people that built these cities, these towns, these countries, these legacies?

SPEAKER_02 44:08

I certainly hope you're right, because the printed word in a book, uh, it is, it will endure long, uh, long after the computers are destroyed or become outmoded.

SPEAKER_00 44:22

Yep. My last question that I ask everybody that comes on my show what do you want your legacy to be, Jack Sheehan?

SPEAKER_02 44:37

How about a good husband and a good father? And a decent writer.

SPEAKER_00 44:45

I love that, I will. I know you're I know you're definitely all of those things. Definitely all of those things. What a legacy you have left here in Las Vegas already. The hard written, hard copy books of the people who built this city, that's a remarkable legacy to leave. I think that was a very humble answer you just gave.

SPEAKER_02 45:04

Well, and it that comes back to being grateful. I'm so grateful that after some missteps, I found the right profession and I found the right city. I'm lucky in both regards.

SPEAKER_00 45:16

Okay. Yeah, you're that's definitely true. And we live in gratitude. Well, thank you, Jack, so much for coming on. I really appreciate your time.

SPEAKER_02 45:24

All the best, Julie. Tell Kaylani, I'm gonna be mad at her if she doesn't bring that baby over again. I've that that little squished face. The first time I met her, she loved me, and the second time she hated me. So I want to I want to have a third time to see if she still likes me. What's her name, Brie?

SPEAKER_00 45:43

No, it's Remington.

SPEAKER_02 45:44

Oh, it's Rim. Yeah, Rem. Yeah, I gotta see her again.

SPEAKER_00 45:49

She um