Family Traditions

That’s the thing about this city, there’s more than one reason it earned the nickname Sin City. 

You can’t write about Las Vegas, Nevada without giving credit where credit is due. Most of which belongs to the caginess of one very large, very extended east coast based family. That family and it's role in building such a mega-glamour capitol from desert sand captured my imagination and was the sole reason for my sixty year intrigue with the city.

By the time my own extended family discovered that ill-gotten electric city in the 60s, Vegas was in its hey-day.  We fell in love with the sunbaked wonderland and launched a family tradition of our own. The lure of easy money was hard to resist. The jangle of falling coins snatched up each generation of our family as we came of age. Vegas, baby. Those words could make us tingle with anticipation.

But it wasn’t until the seventies that I’d risen through the family ranks, old enough to be included in those Vegas outings. Mom had it well established by then. She and her mother, joined by assorted cousins or sisters, had been going every other year for well over a decade and I was now on their radar. By the time I joined our jet-setting group, the tradition had morphed into a version of girls’ night out. 

Through the sixties and well into the seventies Las Vegas glittered with style. Evening cocktail attire and dinner jackets, lavish jewelry and big hair covered up a criminal undercurrent, the city pulsated with thrilling possibilities. Timing was the only thing needed to hit a jackpot or rub elbows with celebrities or mobsters. Celebrities played the same table games as we excitable tourists and were easily recognizable, mobsters not so much. The thrill of maybe surrounded me. I loved it all, Las Vegas glamour with underworld allusions.

Still mobbed up in the seventies and eighties Vegas nonetheless came across as a much friendlier place than today. Welcoming. Blazing neon innocently lit up the desert sky inviting all to the party. Alcoholic beverages were free to all gamblers. Shrimp cocktails actually overflowing with tasty shrimp could be had for ninety-nine cents. Hot dogs came in the foot long variety including all fixings imaginable and could also be had for ninety-nine cents. Buffets were numerous and affordable in every casino. Faithful hotel returnees were rewarded for their loyalty with points exchangeable for hotel gift shop items or, if your player’s club card had accrued enough points, three free nights’ hotel stay. Give-aways were the bait that reeled in plane fulls of naïve suburbanites. 

Westward-Ho Hotel and Casino became our Las Vegas home away from home. Each visit assured us of either the free Hawaiian Luau Dinner Show or the Chuck Wagon BBQ Dinner Show. Great entertainment and free food! The city really was a very affordable escape from every-day life back then.

The Westward-Ho sat right next door to the mob owned Stardust Hotel where I swear I walked right past Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal during an early 70s trip.

Much later the movie, Casino would be based on Rosenthal’s life. But at the time, he was on my “star sightings” list. I know I know…..what can I say? I have this weird fetish.

By 1996 Westward-Ho began showing its age, sliding towards “seedy”. The suite we had booked was so far away from the main casino that the hotel provided a shuttle to get us to and from the room, fearful for our safety. Always before we had rooms one or two floors above the main casino. This should have been a warning as to a change on the horizon. Things were not looking good for those original hotels; the Stardust, the Sahara, the Sands and the Riviera, those pleasure palaces built with all that bilked money funneled in by the mob in the forties. 2006 was the year that our home away from home was demolished. Others followed.

At the same time, downtown Las Vegas was struggling to compete with the Strip for tourist business. By then even the crooks had departed downtown, having been run out, imprisoned or disappeared into that vast desert surrounding the neon oasis. First, they closed Freemont Street to automobile traffic then they covered the whole block with framework connecting casino rooftops. Each night starting at nine o’clock all exterior casino lights went dark. No neon? Was this Vegas? The party came outside. Every hour, on the hour a moving light and music show lit up a block long section of the desert sky. The city was taking on a Hollywood quality.

1996 was also the year my family was introduced to big things, a ten foot tall white ceramic polar bear, a seven foot tall bottle of bubbling Coca-Cola, a slot machine big enough to dwarf a typical kitchen, a pair of M&M’s each the size of a honey-moon suite round bed. Things were growing bigger in Vegas. My mind kept calling up the word tacky. Vacationers were being drawn like moths to a flame onto the Strip where everything was bigger, noisier, and flashier. With the opening of the Mirage in 1989 the “bigger is better” movement shifted into high gear. Hotels attracted tourist dollars by advertising big name entertainment shows and bigger jackpots.  

A lava spewing volcano couldn’t stop it. A roller coaster circling the top of NYNY couldn’t stop it. Battles on a sinking pirate ship couldn’t stop it. You can visit the Eiffel Tower, be serenaded on a gondola floating down a Venice canal, watch colored water dancing to music or knights jousting on horseback at full gallop while you enjoy dinner and still the mammoth growth doesn’t slow.

My family continues to heed the call of that siren song heard so long ago by our fore mothers. Not as often these days what with casinos popping up in most states, and life moving faster, becoming more on-line and isolating. Traditions are turning into things of the past, melting into ‘remember when’.

Now, a visit to Las Vegas with daughters or granddaughters might mean shopping at Betty Paige’s in the Fashion Mall or careening down the Fremont St zipline or braving ear shattering music at Hard Rock Café for a meal. Things became more carnival-like, less about shadows and atmosphere, cigarette smoke and high heels. Power people are no longer apt to wander through the multitudes that descend each year into a sun-drenched playground. Vegas has lost that mid-century pull, that call of possibilities not attainable in hamlets of home and with it, many of the hotel icons of yesteryear.

Yet, happily for me, we sometimes seek retro Vegas, casinos like the El Cortez, still pungent with years of smoke and booze where I pretend to hear coins clatter from slot machine jack-pots or visualize the Rat Pack cutting up on stage or listen to Old Blue eyes crooning away while I sip cocktails near a cozy lounge stage. Or soak in mental images of former times as I wander through gardens at The Flamingo Hotel amazed at a memorial built to capitalize on the infamy of Bugsy Siegel, its mobster owner of the forties.

Those years before Howard Hughes moved into the Desert Inn penthouse and never left, deciding instead to purchase the whole place. Imagining what it might have been like in those days before us, before the sixties, is my quest, my personal treasure hunt of a family past. A different sort of family, those founding fathers of Las Vegas.

Here in 2021 mobsters can still be found in Vegas. Not on casino floors, shiny suits bulging suggestively as they closely watch dealers, not in back rooms counting the skim or seated together in small intimidating groups in dimly lit lounges. But for the price of a ticket, the Mob Museum in downtown Las Vegas will be sure to make you an offer you can’t refuse. 

 Tell them doll face sent you.