Stein, founder of Excel Program for seniors, dies

Tuesday, Feb. 13, 2001 | 9:40 a.m.

Blanche Tarlin Stein, a longtime Las Vegas businesswoman and intellectual who helped bring to UNLV a program to stimulate the minds of seniors, has died. She was 81.

Stein, who also served as a president of Hadassah, a Jewish women's community organization, died Sunday at Sunrise Hospital and Medical Center.

A memorial service for the Las Vegas resident of 46 years, who co-founded UNLV's Excel Program, which is taught and attended by seniors, will be 1 p.m. Thursday at the Queens Ridge Club House. Burial will be private. Palm Mortuary-Jones is handling the arrangements.

Stein and her late husband, pharmacist Sig Stein, long operated Plaza Drugs at Sahara Avenue and Maryland Parkway.

"Both Blanche and Sig were the kind of people who would meet you and immediately start to talk issues," said Paul Aizley, dean of UNLV's College of Extended Studies, which oversees the 10-year-old Excel Program that is modeled after a program at Harvard, of which Sig Stein and Aizley were alumni.

"Other people would talk about children. With the Steins it was issues. And Blanche was very good at reading monologues and would give some stirring readings at Excel social events."

When officials from Harvard came to UNLV to set up the Excel Program, which is designed to give intellectually minded seniors a venue for stimulating conversation on subjects from mathematics to current and classical books, the Steins were among the founding members, Aizley said.

The Steins also were avid supporters of the cultural arts. In the late 1960s they allowed their drugstore to be used for an interior scene for the motion picture "The Only Game in Town," starring Elizabeth Taylor and Warren Beatty.

Most of that film -- released in 1970, director George Stevens' last movie -- was shot in Paris, but was a love story about a Las Vegas chorus girl and a gambler set in Las Vegas and adapted from a play by Frank Gilroy.

The Steins also were a driving force behind the Community Concert productions, which brought affordable cultural events to Las Vegas.

Born May 3, 1919, in Brookline, Mass., Stein was raised and educated in the Bay State. Stein's longtime profession was as a bacteriologist, and she worked at one time for the Clark County Health District in that capacity.

Stein came to Las Vegas in the mid-1950s and was active in the Jewish community. She was a member of Temple Beth Sholom and spearheaded community programs through Hadassah.

Stein is survived by two sons, Fredrick Michael Stein of Arlington, Va., and Gordon Stein of Greensboro, N.C.; a daughter, Victoria Goldie-Hoppe of Las Vegas; a sister, Edith Brodney of Boston; and seven grandchildren.

The family said donations can be made in Blanche Stein's memory to Hadassah.