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You haven’t heard a lot about Carolyn Goodman, which may be just how she wants it.

Goodman, 76, was elected mayor of Las Vegas in 2011, succeeding her husband, Oscar Goodman, who had served three terms and was barred by term limits from running for a fourth. She was re-elected last year.

Whereas Oscar is “flamboyant,” as Goodman puts it in an interview in her office overlooking the Strip, she is more self-effacing. She is prone to be gracious in victory, and once praised an election opponent for having “good intentions” for Las Vegas. Oscar, a former mob lawyer who played a version of himself in “Goodfellas,” had once called the same challenger a “piece of crap.”

She’s also disarmingly candid, confessing that she was “born a brunette” and recounting with pride the adoption of her four children, whose photos surround her.

“The second one’s an attorney, very much like his father, very aggressive,” Goodman said.

Before the presidential caucuses in Nevada, Goodman shared her thoughts on the growth of the city’s Jewish community, the November election and how her husband would love to give Republican front-runner Donald Trump a run for his money.

Las Vegas Mayor Carolyn Goodman photo/jta-ron kampeas

 “Fifty-four years come June,” she said of her marriage. “It should have been 55, but my parents really didn’t like him.”

Did they come around?

“Yes, of course, one always comes around to Oscar,” Goodman said.

They met when she was at Bryn Mawr and he was at Haverford, when the suburban Philadelphia colleges were both strictly single-sex. He went on to study law at the University of Pennsylvania (as did two of their children) and was hired while still studying for the bar by then Philadelphia Assistant District Attorney Arlen Specter — later a U.S. senator — for a dollar an hour.

That professional relationship is what eventually led the Goodmans to Las Vegas, after Oscar met two law-enforcement officers who had come from Las Vegas to Philadelphia escorting two murder suspects. “There was a wealthy Jewish widow by the name of Lulubell Rossman who was murdered, and the money that she kept under her mattress was brought out here to Las Vegas,” Goodman explained.

When the alleged killers were apprehended and brought back to Philadelphia by the Nevada sheriffs, Specter told Oscar to take the two officials out to dinner. Presumably the idea to move to Las Vegas started germinating that evening — although Goodman also recalls Oscar suggesting that they make aliyah. “At 2 in the morning, he woke me up and he said, ‘How would you like to move to the land of milk and honey?’” Goodman related. “And I said, ‘For heaven’s sake, we’re just newlyweds, I don’t want to move to Israel yet.’ ”

Instead, they visited Las Vegas in May 1964 and moved in August that year. Goodman was involved in the local Jewish federation from the get-go, heading the women’s divisions for several years while her husband made a name for himself defending the gangster Meyer Lansky and others with sobriquets like Fat Herbie, Lefty and Tony the Ant.

“When we came here in ’64, there was only one [Reform] temple and there was an Orthodox temple operating out of a little house on Maryland Parkway,” Goodman said. “And now I can’t even begin to tell you.” (Todd Polikoff, the current federation director, estimates there are about 60,000 Jews in Las Vegas, along with 28 congregations — only 15 have buildings — and four Jewish schools.)

After 17 years jointly in office, is there a Goodman legacy in Las Vegas?

Goodman doesn’t like the word, at least not applied to her.

“To me, everything that both of us did, but more specifically — as I say, I can only speak for me — I wasn’t looking to get any recognition,” she said. “If there’s a legacy here at all, I think that Oscar brought the town back, the core of the city of Las Vegas back, from crime-infested, boarded up, really scummy core of the city, back to vitality and began the whole initiative to see everything you see behind me take place.”

She sweeps her hand toward the picture window behind her.

Asked about the presidential election, Goodman — like her husband, an Independent — politely offers: “You want somebody who has the qualities and dignity of a presidential leader.”

Has she ever met Donald Trump, whose Las Vegas tower is visible in the distance? Goodman recalls an appeal her husband once made for Trump’s help in developing a rail yard the city had obtained from Union Pacific. Trump was interested, but soon they began arguing. Oscar, whose mother was an artist, favored an eclectic architectural approach. Trump envisioned something more uniform.

“I had such a headache when I left,” Goodman said. “You obviously have not met Oscar. He’s [like] Donald Trump, but so kind and good. And a religious, very religious man. I don’t know if Donald is or not.

“But two egos — like, humongous egos — and each one, every statement out of one man, the other one had to come back. I’m sitting there doing this between the two of them” — she swivels her head like she’s watching a tennis match — “and I’m thinking, oh my God. What a headache I’ve got from this.”