Thursday, Dec. 27, 2001 | 8:18 a.m.
"I like a man who likes to talk," Kasper Gutman (played by Sydney Greenstreet) said to Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) in the 1941 film "The Maltese Falcon."
Gutman would have loved Howard Klein, who readily admits to being a man who likes to talk, perhaps too much on occasion.
"Sometimes, the faster I talk, the faster they run," the 50-year-old Mandalay Bay valet worker quipped.
Klein doesn't have to work. His parents, Al and Kay Klein, owned the Desert Rose Motel on the Strip. In 1995 the family and their business partners sold the 56-room motel to Steve Wynn and company. The small mom-and-pop operation was razed and replaced by the 32-story, 3,000-room, $344-million Monte Carlo.
"I didn't work for four years," Klein said. "But finally, when I started getting out of bed and asking what's for dinner, I decided I had to go to work to preserve my sanity."
That was three years ago.
Today Klein, who is married and has two grown children, is the self-proclaimed "Mayor of Mandalay Bay."
"I'm known as the guy who talks a lot," he said.
Klein will sing the praises of Mandalay Bay at the drop of a hat: "The thing that my family had over there (at the Desert Rose) was C.A.R.E. courtesy, attitude, respect and enthusiasm. You treat your customers like friends, not just guests, and they will respect you.
"Vegas has lost its hospitality, but Mandalay Bay has not. It still has old-fashioned hospitality."
And the hotel doesn't mind that Klein talks. And talks. And talks.
"I work in the booth in the valet department, where I'm able to talk to people and express to them what the hotel is about. It's a nice job. I do nothing and have fun talking."
His favorite topic is Las Vegas history, a subject that fascinates him so completely he has become a consummate pack rat.
Former Lt. Gov. Lonnie Hammargren, who connected his two homes in southeast Las Vegas to keep his massive collection of Las Vegas-related history items, may be the only person in town who has more collectibles than Klein.
Klein's southwest Las Vegas home is chock full of telephone books dating back to 1948; Las Vegas High School yearbooks from 1932; ashtrays, silverware, chinaware and other items from almost every hotel-casino from Las Vegas' past.
"I don't call myself a historian," Klein said as he conducted a tour through several rooms bursting with the oddest assortment of items imaginable. "I'm a Las Vegas evolutionist. A continuing evolution is taking place here, a continuation of life, and that's what evolution is all about."
In his evolutionary scheme of things he has 432 small bottles of shampoo from the old Aladdin, which was imploded in 1997. He has stacks and stacks of Aladdin posters. There are binders filled with photographs depicting a visual history of most of the major hotel-casinos in town.
Coasters, drinking glasses, poker chips, signs from various casinos and a table from the Desert Inn. Towels from the El Rancho. A carry-on flight bag stamped with the Hacienda logo. A 1940 issue of Look magazine that features an article about Las Vegas. A poster of old-time cowboy star Hoot Gibson's dude ranch, the D-4-D. More than 300 magazines published by Jack Cortez, a local publisher, from the late 1940s through 1973.
There are 55 pieces of china from Louis Prima's golf course in southeast Las Vegas, for which Klein paid prices ranging from $5-$20. He also has one piece of china from the Flamingo (circa the late '40s or early '50s), for which he paid $121.
"It's an ashtray (made of china)," he said of the Flamingo item. "They didn't make glass ashtrays in those days."
In this age of cell and wireless phones, Klein's house is wired for touch-tone phones he has salvaged from places such as the Dunes and El Rancho.
"When somebody calls, they're talking to me through history," he said. "You've got history in your hands."
Klein doesn't mind that some people may think he is odd.
"I know what I'm all about because I recognize what this town is all about, which is tourism," Klein said. "I don't know where the town is going -- it's just going to expand more, which is why I also collect maps ... (with successive maps) you can see the expansion of the streets."
Visiting Vegas
Klein says he made his first trip to Las Vegas in 1956 or '57. His grandfather had a bakery in East Los Angeles and sold baked goods to the Flamingo.
"My first time in Vegas I stayed at the Riviera. I have the documentation," he said.
Klein's father was in real estate when the deal for a partnership in the Desert Rose came up. Initially it had 26 rooms. In 1961 Al Klein bought a 25 percent interest in the property and became its manager. Eventually the family acquired a 48 1/2-percent interest.
In 1965 30 additional rooms were added. In 1980 the motel was featured in the movie "Melvin and Howard."
Al Klein died a few months after selling the motel in 1995.
"It was sad," Howard Klein said. "He was really a nice guy. Money didn't mean anything to him. He was a guy who wore shoes from K-Mart or Wal-Mart."
Klein moved to Las Vegas permanently in 1974 and helped operate the motel until it was sold.
His favorite pastime, naturally, was sitting out in front of the property and talking to guests and passersby.
"It was the best place on the Strip to watch cars go back and forth," Klein said. "I used to get a video camera and go out and shoot the traffic."
Klein says he is a natural-born collector.
"My mother said when I was 3, I would go through my neighbor's trash and pull things out to save," he said.
Klein began collecting everything related to Las Vegas around 1980, about the time his son, Jason, and daughter, Lisa, were born.
"It's for self-gratification, self-satisfaction," Klein said. "I have always loved history, and talking about it. People always want to know about the past."
Which doesn't really explain why he has 3,000 El Rancho place mats made before 1960.
Making a deal
Klein says he can't pass up a good deal, such as the place mats or the 7,000 coasters he has boxed away.
Items of which he has an oversupply he sells, or sometimes gives to friends so they may share in his love of history.
Klein spends about two hours each day on eBay, an Internet shopping site, where he often finds items related to Las Vegas that are for sale.
Rarely a day goes by that he doesn't get a delivery in the mail from eBay, or from other sources where he may have found items related to Las Vegas' past.
"I just got this china cup in the mail from the Meadows," he said, "but I don't know if it's (from) the Meadows (a former shopping center on Boulder Highway) in Las Vegas or the Meadows (Hotel) in Las Vegas, N.M."
Klein's expertise covers almost everything about Las Vegas, from postcards to films.
"The Landmark was called the 'Tangiers' in the movie 'Casino,' " Klein noted.
He pointed to the name "Tangiers" on a craps table in a picture from the movie featuring actress Sharon Stone throwing dice. He is going to hang the picture on the wall in his home office beside dozens of other pictures and posters from Las Vegas films, including 1956's "Crashing Las Vegas" featuring the Bowery Boys, and 1951's "My Friend Irma Goes West," starring Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis.
A film crew spent two days recently at Klein's residence shooting footage of some of his artifacts for a special about Las Vegas that will run next year on A&E (Cox Cable channel 32).
LA Weekly, a magazine in Los Angeles, recently published a story about the defunct Desert Inn and interviewed Klein for the article.
The reporter said Klein's collection was worth $250,000, a figure Klein said was speculation on the reporter's part and inaccurate.
"I wouldn't put a dollar value on it," Klein said.
The magazine noted that an oil painting of Paris that once hung on the wall of Bugsy Siegel's suite at the Flamingo is among Klein's collection of memorabilia.
Klein sometimes loans items to museums. Eventually, he may find a repository for it all so that more people may enjoy what he has gathered.
For now, he just enjoys collecting.
And talking about collecting.
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