Columnist Susan Snyder: Program gives voice to memories

Friday, Oct. 8, 2004 | 9:18 a.m.

When Mary Ann Merrill passed away in Pensacola, Fla., last month, she took a little bit of Southern Nevada history with her.

The 89-year-old woman was 18 in 1933 when her family moved to Boulder City so her father could help build Boulder Dam (which would one day be called Hoover Dam).

"These people were watching as children this major public works project that has captured the imaginations of the country and the world," said Guy Rocha, an archivist for the Nevada State Library & Archives in Carson City. "They're leaving us only with the oral histories, the books and the movies."

Rocha was among those who helped take oral histories of the dam workers for the University of Nevada Oral History Program to make sure the era's stories didn't die when those who lived them did. The next round of interviews were done among the children of those workers.

"We were trying to capture the last of the players, and these are their children," Rocha said Tuesday. "In 2004 we're watching those children passing from the scene."

The oral histories offer snapshots of a simple life during the Great Depression in a community that created one of the 20th century's greatest engineering feats. In one excerpt, Merrill recalled asking her father for a new dress she saw in the company store:

"And he said, 'I just can't afford to buy it for you.' I said, 'Well, I sure do need a new dress.' And then he said, 'Well, why don't you find yourself a job then?' " a transcript of Merrill's recording says.

Merrill told of how she went downtown with her brother and stopped at Smith's root beer stand, where a neighbor girl had a job. The neighbor said they needed a carhop, so Merrill took the job and earned the money for the dress.

"The downtown area was nice. The Manix store was the place to go. It had everything. It had dry goods, and it had a shoe shop, and it has a little grocery store. And of course the company store had all of these, too," Merrill says in the transcript. "And those were the two stores in town. That's all we had right then."

Three years after her family moved to Boulder City, then-Mary Ann Vaughan married Carl Merrill, who also worked on the dam. The two stayed in Boulder City, where they raised two sons and worked in church and community groups.

Carl died in 1989. Mary Ann stayed in Boulder City until 1997, when she moved to Florida to be closer to one of her sons and his family.

"I was always amazed by their contributions to the Hoover Dam," Michelle Merrill, a granddaughter-in-law in Albuquerque, said in a telephone conversation Monday. "I took a tour of the dam with her (in 1994), and it was extremely exciting. She loved talking about it."

Rocha, who was raised in Las Vegas, said Southern Nevada has changed and built so much, so fast, that it is in danger of failing oral history. The "institutional memory" is in danger of being lost as the people who lived it are "either dead or dispersed."

Michelle Merrill plans to make sure that doesn't happen -- at least not in her family.

"I want her to be remembered," she said. "This is information I plan to pass onto my daughters. Not many kids can say their great-grandparents were that much a part of history."