In an outspoken style usually shown by her husband, she talked openly with In Business about her life with the mayor, their decision to come to Las Vegas more than 40 years ago, his early career as a mob lawyer and her views on the educational systems in Clark County and the country.

Carolyn Goodman LEILA NAVIDI / STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

Answer: It was fun, actually. We were just married, and he was finishing up law school. I was working and supporting us with my gross of, I think, $75 a week. We lived in a minuscule apartment, where you had to go outside to change your mind - it was that big. So Oscar didn't have to ask me for money when he was in law school, which he thought was at best degrading, he took a job in the DA's office in Philadelphia for a big dollar an hour.

The district attorney happened to be Arlen Specter, the U.S. senator, who is a great guy. Arlen said there was a wealthy widow who had been murdered - Lulabelle Rothman was her name.

(Laughs) Yes that's right. Oh my gosh - age, it's horrible.

Anyway, she was murdered, and the murderers, uh, the alleged murderers, brought the money from under her mattress out to Las Vegas to the craps tables to change it to unmarked bills. They were caught and the sheriffs brought them back to Philadelphia, and Arlen asked Oscar to take them out to dinner. He called me up and said, "I'm not coming home for dinner. I'm going to go out with these sheriffs from Las Vegas."

I thought that was sort of weird, sheriffs, but I said I was going to bed because I have to get to work. At 2 o'clock, it was raining and horrible, as Philadelphia can be, but he woke me up and said, "How would you like to move to the land of milk and honey?"

I said to myself, "My God, he's lost his mind, he wants to move to Israel. How dumb."

I said, "Israel?" And he said, "No, Las Vegas."

I said, "I have to go to work in the morning. Whatever you want is fine with me."

The Meadows School is located at 8601 Scholar lane, near Rampart and Lake Mead boulevards. ULF BUCHHOLZ / RESEARCH DIRECTOR

Fast forward, we're on the way, as soon as he graduated. He took the Pennsylvania Bar to make sure he had that under his belt, and then we took off for Las Vegas and arrived with $87 together coming in over railroad paths. All you could see was sagebrush, sagebrush and some buildings waaay far away.

I remember looking at him - my parents had hated him - and I thought I should never have married him. But they grew to love him. But I looked at him and thought, "My parents were right, he's absolutely out of his mind to bring me to this desolate place from New York City" and all that ... but it was great.

You know, it's interesting. I know what his job was. I believed philosophically in what he was doing, that everybody has a right to representation. I heard the stories, I read the stories, and I did meet the people.

They never did anything but treat me with such kindness and such attentiveness and were so thoughtful. I mean, when Oscar was gone almost every single week in trials all over the country, some of them would call me up and just say, "We're here. Do you need anything?" because I had the four children at the time and, "We'll be there in a flash. We can get you groceries," whatever.

With all of the hoopla of who they were, allegedly, I never saw that side. In fact, I had real questions to believe it and I'm not naive and I never was naive, but some of it ... (shakes her head).

Of course the movie "Casino" - which Oscar was briefly in, and his mother said he should stick to the law - obviously, you have to sell the movie, but there are pieces of it that I just don't believe, I really don't believe. Because I know some of the people, and maybe I was naive for it, but that's what I thought.

I'm me and he's him, and he's been so out there all his life. When I met him in college, people either loved him or hated him. Everybody just fell over for him. He's brilliant. He's extremely well read. He's very artistic. He doesn't know geography, though. But he's always been this type of person who's a tremendous draw because he's so funny and he never knows what he's saying half the time. But he's always very calculated. When he talked about cutting off the thumbs, you better believe it. That brought national attention and international attention. There is a part there where people are drawn in and then they get to a certain spot where they are scared because he's so smart.

He is so honest, and I would die on that sword.

Not at all. I think perhaps in entertainment fields it might be difficult for some, but if, in fact, you have your own comfort for yourself, you are happy for people you love when they are successful. I'm thrilled for him, and I think he's doing a great job. I think term limits are the stupidest thing. How dumb is the voting public if they can't vote out somebody who doesn't deserve to be in there. I mean, that says so much. They should do something so he can continue on and finish what he started.

Oh my goodness. There couldn't have been 75 ... 80,000 when we came. There was rolling sagebrush and nothing went past Decatur. Certainly, there was dirt road after Flamingo and Eastern - we loved it from the beginning. We loved it through the '70s, but we love it now, too. It's still a small town and the family feeling is still here. But people coming from anywhere in the world, whatever you are, no matter who you are, you can make a difference. You can't do that in New York.

Yeah, because we are so young -this is such a young community, and there is always this anticipation of what's coming and what's changing. And I think we need more and stronger political direction, as far as planning. When you see communities move out of the downtown and move from place to place and leave an empty building, there should be something built-in that when you build your building, if it becomes vacant, you tear it down or something. Don't leave an empty building that's just going to end up being a place for homeless people or a threat to kids or a fire hazard. I think those are things that will come in time. But education is the key, I mean to me - everything (starts) with education.

That's the key. Everything has to do with the individual human being. It goes back to education. I've always told Oscar that the Meadows School is just a microcosm of everything else. You can't pay a quality person enough and whatever you pay mediocrity is too much. So when you have a mayor who slips in for a term who is without proper development or education, it dies. Whether you are a bank teller or a reporter, whatever you do in life, it's the quality of the human being first and then it's having the development of the skills and ability that you want to plan and want to see growth. So I think we could end up with a terrible mayor, and everything (Goodman) started could go down the tubes. Or Oscar could continue and finish it up.

Just our personalities, and I mean we just laugh a lot. We're both half-full-glasses people. There are two things you can't do anything about: death and taxes. You've got to pay your taxes, and someday you are going to die. But everything else, when a door closes another door opens and if you look you can find it. So we both believe in the half-full and we just love to laugh. I'm certainly not anywhere near as smart as he is, but he's just fun to play off of. People have said, "My God, you're like George Burns and Gracie Allen," and I can't help but wonder which one is which.

Everyone has his or her own opinion of Mayor Goodman, usually as this bigger-than-life guy, but we've talked about this before, and you see another side of him. Can you talk about that?

He's definitely a family man. He adored his parents and was, and is, a good person. He reads constantly, he paints. I think he's kind of lost that creativity a teeny bit. I have to put that in there because he used to love to paint a lot. He loves his private time, he loves boating, he loves cruising, he loves fishing and he loves discovery of things. But he also loves being with people who are different, who challenge his intellect, learning from them. He likes to read his Sunday paper. He loves to make his phone calls Monday morning to the radio stations, whichever one it is. He loves the challenge of something new. He loves to see the accomplishment of what's happened so far, and I think he really likes the camaraderie of the people with whom he works. And he loves his martini, his Bombay, with an olive and ice on the side.

Oscar and I had four children and as they got to school age, I went out to look at what was available in Las Vegas. We had wanted either a preschool or kindergarten through 12th grade where all students would ultimately go on to college, and there was nothing here of that nature. So I went home and said to my husband, "We're going to move. We have to leave Las Vegas because they don't have the type of program we want for our children."

Thereafter, a friend of mine called me and said I have just found a miracle in the desert, and if you're smart, you'll go over to Sandhill and Desert Inn, where there is a public elementary school called George Harris Elementary.

I did my homework and found out that the woman who was running this school was a Mormon lady who had grown up in Idaho, had gone to normal school in Idaho to become a teacher. She went on to UNR, got her master's degree at Reno, then went on and got a Ph.D. at Brigham Young (University) in the days when they were first admitting women.

In the mid '50s she came to Las Vegas and went to work at the Ninth Street School, which is off Las Vegas Boulevard and U.S. 95. She started as a teacher there and became principal. As the town began to grow, probably in the mid '60s, she was called by the superintendent of schools to open up a brand-new elementary school more toward the valley, out near Flamingo and Eastern. She opened the elementary school called Lewis Rowe. She was there about 10 years developing a superior program. She was then called by the district again to open another school at Sandhill and DI as the town started to move toward the east, and she opened George Harris Elementary.

On the other side of the coin, I was born and raised in Manhattan in New York City and had gone to a prep school from the time I was little and had a wonderful education. When we came out here, I was sort of looking for our children to have that.

The woman's name was Dr. LeOre Cobbley and having done my homework about her program, I went over to see her and I asker her if I could get a zone variance, because we're outside of your zone, for our children. She said, "Mrs. Goodman, I have 680 children in this school and have over 400 zone variance requests, I cannot take your son, and that was the eldest one. So I said, "But Dr. Cobbley, I have four children and so finally she agreed to take them one by one. They all had this fabulous program that begins everything in kindergarten: reading, writing, math, social studies, everything began initially.

So, for the first five or six years of their lives, until the youngest one was coming along, all of them went to George Harris Elementary and had this fabulous, very traditional type of basic program. But as my daughter came along, the youngest of the group, it became really clear to me that we needed to figure out a way to continue the education we had gotten in that program.

At that time, for the three boys we had at that time, I think when Kenny Guinn was superintendent of schools, (the district) established sixth grade centers in an effort to diversify the community and for affirmative action purposes. The intent was excellent, but the practicality of it was ridiculous, because you have children in their home-zoned schools for kindergarten through fifth grade. Then you pick them up and bus them to the west side to the lower economic area and they are mixed with children from three or four other feeder schools for one year. They then go back to their home-zoned area for seventh grade with other feeder schools to middle schools. What you end up with is the child, at the onset of adolescence and puberty, had three different educational programs and children with whom they had to socialize, so academics sort of took a back seat to that.

It became even more paramount to me that we do something to continue the program that Dr. Cobbley had, but also to meld it with the traditional college preparatory schools on the East Coast in the '40s, '50s and '60s.

The true idea was, if somebody had been kind enough to give us the money to do it all, it would have been open to everybody, based on the qualifications that we had set for enrollment. Our hope had been that we wouldn't have to charge tuition, and that those students who were academically ambitious and able would test and come into the school. Ultimately that was not practical either.

I drew up a prospectus in the late '70s of a program that combined Dr. Cobbley's K-5 program and added in some very salient pieces of quality education.

In the '70s, it didn't take a brain surgeon to know the community was going to be bilingual in Spanish. One of the things I insisted upon was that we have an immersion Spanish program, beginning in the kindergarten. Parents should do their homework with children until the age of 10, because then I guess you get down on your knees and pray a lot as they go through adolescence and into high school. But the earlier you introduce things to children, the easier it is for them to adjust to it. You can take a 2- or 3-year-old and show them a computer, and they have absolutely no fear of it. Yet you can take a 40-year-old who has never touched one and it's nail-biting (for them).

So that was another piece: We wanted to have computer technology, and we begin that in kindergarten here. We also wanted it to be culturally well-rounded, so there's art integrated into the program - we have music twice a week - and we have full athletics as well.

We opened the school in 1984 and the reason it took so long was I had been out trying to find land and from all the research I had, the minimum acreage I needed was 40 acres. Obviously, nobody was forthcoming with 40 acres. I thought it would be brilliant because people were homesteading five acres for $25 in the old days. I had hoped somebody who was well-landed would give us 40 acres, take a current-day donation, tax write-off and we'd be set. Then I'd lease off the corners to gas stations and (restaurants), and we'd build our school.

Everything was wonderful, except nobody would part with the 40 acres. So, initially we opened in a loan of land on Decatur and Meadows Lane. Ken Jones, Fletcher's son, had the Chevrolet dealership there, and he said we could have the north acre and a quarter to open the school in modular buildings.

We opened in the fall of 1984, on an acre and a quarter, to 140 children in kindergarten through sixth grade and the plan was, and happened, that we added a grade every year. We also began to increase the breadth of the program from the bottom.

We started off with two kindergartens, then two firsts and so on. Our first senior class graduated in 1991. It started off with a class of 20 and dwindled to three by senior year. Two went to UNLV in the Honors Program and one went on to Stanford. The second year of graduation we had 12, then 13, then 12, then 21 and now we are running in the 60s and are wait-listed at every grade level except (high school). Because we expanded the high school to 75 a grade level, we have a capacity of 300 at the high school.

We have about 34 percent minority, pretty reflective of the Las Vegas community except for the huge growth in the Hispanic population. We were comparable demographically with the numbers for the Hispanic population until about seven years ago. We're about 15 to 18 percent low-income families.

Everybody has to be interviewed and tested. What we look for are academically able and ambitious children. It's wonderful. The lower school is pretty much a self-contained classroom with six specialized areas. Kindergarten through fifth grade is replete. There are three classrooms of 20 each, all wait-listed, so we have 60 a grade level in kindergarten through fifth.

The students have reading, writing, grammar, great books, music, we have specialists and a fully certified librarian, so every class has library. We have computers, a science lab, physical education four days a week and a growing Spanish program taught entirely in Spanish except for instructions, which are done in English, and that is mandatory kindergarten through eight.

We also make Latin mandatory six through eight and at the high school they have to have three sequencing years of a foreign language, but they may select from French, Spanish or Latin. We have had classes in German and tutoring in Hebrew, but those are the three basics.

In the high school, academic class sizes may be no more than 18, and we have 26 advanced placement classes. It's possible that in advanced placement chemistry or economics, there could be three or five students. Everything is available at the honors level. We have placed 100 percent of our students in four year accredited colleges and universities - the only school in the state that does that - and they are all over the country. Obviously, those who are able and ambitious and apply themselves have a higher level of selection than those who sort of find it's fun to go to school and do all the sports and play in the band and be part of debate. At the upper school we have dance and musical theater and drama, studio art, photography, vocal, strings and band. We are ranked nationally in debate and forensics. And it's just a wonderful, wonderful program.

In forming the curriculum, we use Harvard's guide, "Choosing Courses to Go to College." Basically what they say in here is they want English, math, science, foreign language and history. So we mandate they have four years of (those programs) and then at least one year of biology, chemistry and physics. For those who are going on to the sciences, they would take more than the basic three. So, it's a really replete program for students to find themselves because they are introduced into everything in elementary school. Our entire focus is to help children discover who they are and what their loves, propensities and gifts are and also to do it in a safe environment.

Starting in fourth grade we have a drug and good-conduct closed campus sheet that students have to sign every year, saying that they will note the Meadows promotes and maintains a drug-free environment and will tolerate nothing less, and anybody in violation of that policy is subject to immediate expulsion. The same is true for anybody who brings discredit upon the school. So there's a definite thrust in the school, and the students appreciate that and appreciate the structure and that we treat everybody else equally.

The key to everything for us is our faculty. Buildings are beautiful, but they don't teach. It's all about the human being and making learning fun and relevant. So I think I've overdone telling you about the Meadows School.

The gratification comes from watching individual students find themselves and come back and just be wonderful young adults. Look, to come back to Las Vegas and contribute and understand there is something more than "me, I, my" in life, obviously, this school has not happened alone. There have been hundreds and hundreds of people who have helped along the way; helped put the desks together, volunteered time and helped through sacrifice - we are debt free. This acreage was donated to use through the Howard Hughes Corp. and Howard Hughes Properties. There was nothing out in Summerlin. We had to wait two years from 1986 for the infrastructure to be put into Summerlin. I've been told more than once, from people in executive wings of the Howard Hughes Corp., that the singularly most significant piece of the development of Summerlin was the building of this school. It's because people move to put their children in schools when they find a school they like. And in Las Vegas you'd better open up whatever you do right, and if you don't, you are going to be closed quickly.

So we've held on for dear life to all of the founding principles of this school and we are world recognized. I can pick up a phone almost anywhere, and anybody in education will have heard of the Meadows, and we get calls from all over the world and, of course, now because of the Internet even more so.

I always tell kids when you wake up, you'd better find what you like to do and the way you are going to find that out is to be true to the things you love, because if you make a mistake, it's your own fault. You do not want to wake up at 40 and think, "I hate what I'm doing."

I love kids, I just love being with kids and I just love letting them find themselves and letting them do the self-discovery. So every day I wake up and Oscar just can't believe it that I am ready to come back here to the Meadows and it's been like that for 24 years, even through the summer.

You know, I think the whole country is in such a mess, and I know comparisons are made to the Far East, to the Asian countries. What is forgotten is that they'll take a population that's huge and test that population and those that don't pass that test, whatever it is, are out. And they go ahead and educate this group and retest and this gets narrower and narrower. And you find yourself with the top students having gone to school six days a week, probably public and private. (They are) coming home, doing their work with no complaining, knowing that the key to life is education.

Somehow in all of the well-meaning of this country, because we feel we need to be more heterogeneous, more even-based, we've forgotten to assume that every child comes into this world in exactly the same way.

So what's happened in Clark County is happening everywhere else. Instead of giving the children the tools - obviously special-education children need special programs - they don't need to mainstream, because then you are serving no one.

But for every child who comes in, if I had my druthers way back in the '70s, I would have taken every 2-year-old with a single parent, put the single parent into classes and taken that 2-year-old and given them more exposure, so that when they were ready to go into a Head Start - or any program - at 4 years old, they would have had the same exposure.

The only reason people fail in life, at least in my opinion, is that they don't have the education and they don't have the tools with which to take care of themselves or be an effective part of humanity. So here they are in the fourth grade and all of a sudden they can't read because nobody cared to help them. By seventh grade they are for sure going to drop out and then what's left in life for them without the education? That's why hate develops.

Clark County has had to deal so much and direct so much to building buildings and as I said earlier on, buildings don't teach, people teach. We recycle mediocrity so often and yet we have the finest teachers in this community, but they keep moving them around as they open a new school. A parent goes in and buys a home on Sandhill and DI to get close to that school. The next thing you know, the district says, "Mr. Jones, you are the head of the school at Sandhill, will you come now and open a school over there at Sahara and Decatur?

Well, he's going to pick up his best teachers and take them with him. Now (the parents) are stuck with the home at Sandhill and DI that doesn't have the school they wanted their kids in. All of the best teachers are gone, and the whole district is doing nothing but talking about building buildings.

I can remember going to a legislative meeting to talk about a voucher program (that would allow parents to pick a school for their children), so I was asked to go down to Washington and Las Vegas Boulevard for the Assembly hookup in Carson City. I asked for a time, and they said to come at 12:30 p.m. and I would probably be on at 1 p.m. At 4:30, the teachers union was still talking about the vouchers and how it was going to destroy what was left of the school. There was never, in those 4 1/2 hours, a word mentioned about the kids, it was all about the teachers. It was never about the kids or their education or the books.

Yes, Clark County needs to be shaken up.

We do a lot of gimmicky things. I've sat on a lot of committees for the Clark County School District over the years and tried to ameliorate and make some waves into what they are doing.

What resulted from the last session I was on - I'm going back probably 15 years - they decided to open up magnet schools. In New York City, there are two magnet schools, the Bronx High School of Science and the School of Music and Art, and you have to be a veritable genius to get into either of them. And what came out of there were phenomenons. So, across the board we started opening up magnet schools and kids would go down to magnet schools, but they didn't realize what they were sacrificing on the other end. Then they moved magnet schools down into middle schools.

How about developing the whole child? How do you find out (what they excel at)? I read this morning that they are talking about leadership schools at the elementary level. My goodness, these are little people. Let them learn how to live and to learn and to read and to do math.

Yes, I think the School District is in a terrible mess. I don't blame Walt Rulffes, I don't blame anybody. It's just trying to keep up with the huge growth here, but it's got to stop. There is no reason to have a Meadows School.

This school that we have here, maybe 75 to 80 cents of every tuition dollar is in the classroom, in supplies, in teacher salaries and benefits. This entire 40-acre campus that is almost completely built out is debt free, because parents believe in what we do here. To, me it's a model.

Then the comment comes back, "Well, we select our children." Well, excuse me.

What happens at the Las Vegas Academy and all these specialized schools? Not only do you test and audition, or whatever, but then you go into a lottery. So their selection process is exactly the same and we are a nonprofit (school), too. Nobody owns this school, it owns itself. It exists for the sole purpose of giving children a better chance at life and better opportunities. And we don't have visitors from the district. They don't come here to look at this, yet they know what we are doing. If they really care about the community, why aren't they looking at this?

Dr. Cobbley spent 35 years in the public school system and for the past 22, I have put her name in to get an elementary school named after her. Twenty-two years (pounds her finger on the desk) of trying to get an elementary school named after a woman who gave 35 years of her life to the Clark County School District and was exemplary. She has people working at all levels, who would support her and yet the district has passed right over with all of these recommendations, it's just beyond me. Obviously, I'm passionate (about this).

No, I've got to pass it on. That's just not fair. We've got wonderful people for the future and a new leader that understands the principles of the school, and he's simply grand. I have tremendous faith that he'll do that.

I'm a Meadows School girl.

I have no idea what I want to do next. I just love life, so does he and we just love every day, both of us are just thinking, "Why do these veins have to appear and the wrinkles?" You still feel, and just know this, that it doesn't change inside. All of a sudden the years pass and you think, "How can I be 40 or 50?" It's impossible. And who knows what the future holds?

I've had a lot of people say, "You should do it." I've had e-mails, I've had phone calls and I do believe in that. I do believe the best world would be for him to continue it, because of who he is. He sees it, he doesn't need it, he's said that from the beginning. The population, they may not like what he's going to say, but it's totally honest and he's going to say it just like it is. There are so many pieces right now, especially with this economy in this country - they need a continuum, rather than to let this die. I have no idea who would be elected, but I know who ran last time and they don't have the vision and they don't have the balance of his pieces. He's such an ombudsman and he's such a fun-loving character. Wherever he goes, he speaks and people love to listen to him and that charismatic piece is so important to Las Vegas.

This is not for me. Before (Goodman) ran, he said to me, "Carolyn, do you want to run for something?" and I won't tell you what I said. When he finally zeroed in on the mayorship, I said absolutely not. I love the Meadows, I love the kids, I love to work with them and it's such a joy.

He said, "OK, should I run?" and I said, "Yeah, I think you'd be great." And so he said was going to get some political opinions. Well, the first set of political opinions were, "What are you, crazy? You can't do it with your baggage. Never."

Finally a couple of years later, he came to me again and said, "What do you think now?"

I said, "The same as I said before. Run, they'll know who you are and you'll make it." And he's the best thing that's ever happened to this town.

No. I think that people are too intelligent here and they know his sincerity and believe in it, despite the badgering that he took from different parts of the community.

You know, Washington was in the mix before, and we thought about it, but we moved here. We both love Las Vegas, this is our home and we've been here since '64. We love the people. We love the mix of people that are here. To go back to Washington for four to six years, or whatever, we seriously looked at it because we've had a lot of political people come talk to us about that. That wasn't something either of us wanted. It takes a certain type of person, and although we'd love to go back there - and we've been back there a lot - but not for that.

As far as Oscar and the governorship, he's put so much, he's put nine years in already here and this thing is just burgeoning and it needs his ability to be able to travel wherever he goes: To go back to New York and talk to developers and sell it, and to be intelligent and to understand the mentality of the Eastern person or the European person, and be able to walk in whatever shoes are necessary to get the commitment, to get the interest in this community.

If you take the wrong person and have them go back to New York or Paris or wherever - it's just not going to happen.

As far as the governorship, yes, we have some issues here and I think it's been said by many - this isn't rocket science, either - we need to increase taxes. Where are we going to get the money? There's no rainfall out there and we shouldn't be dipping into money that has been set aside for other things. We certainly shouldn't be stealing from the smoking thing from the kids to settle things that we can't do here.

(She points to the pictures of her children and grandchildren) ... and the kids here and we've got these 695 grads. I used to do college counseling and do counseling of families. I love people and I love to work with people. And I prefer young people because they are just so open and beautiful, and they just need somebody who cares enough to listen and to help them work through what they are dealing with and help them make their decisions and make good choices.

Mark Hansel covers retail and real estate for In Business Las Vegas and its sister publication, the Las Vegas Sun. He can be reached at 259-4069 or at hansel@lasvegassun.com.