In Las Vegas, entertainment has no age limit

Music and applause seem to have magical powers in Las Vegas.

Our local stages are filled with performers well past the age of retirement. Several actors, dancers and musicians in their 90s still perform here regularly.

Meet five of them.

Marty Allen, 93, comedian

Allen, who was a regular on “The Hollywood Squares,”, will turn 94 in March and has no intention of slowing down.

“I keep very busy,” Allen said. “My wife (singer/pianist Karon Kate Blackwell) and I have a sensational act that we enjoy doing. As long as I keep working, it makes me happy to know audiences enjoy my humor and want to hear more from me.”

Allen has bookings in Palm Beach, Dallas and Mill Valley (near San Francisco) and performed this year at the Rampart, Downtown Grand and Mirage. Allen and his partner Steve Rossi appeared on “The Ed Sullivan Show” 44 times, including the night the Beatles debuted there.

Allen credits laughter, exercise and a positive attitude for keeping him healthy and active.

“Living happy is a key ingredient to a long, healthy life,” Allen said. “You have to enjoy your life every day and be part of making others happy, too.”

Don Hill, 94, saxophonist

Hill toured with Louis Armstrong’s Big Band from 1944 to 1946 and was a founding member of the R&B group the Treniers.

In 55 years of playing lounges in Las Vegas, Atlantic City, Lake Tahoe, San Juan, Miami and beyond, he took only one two-week vacation and rarely had a day off, he said. Claude Trenier, the Treniers’ co-leader, asked the group’s manager to keep them working so they wouldn’t “lose their groove.”

Hill appeared in several television variety shows and movies, including “Don’t Knock The Rock,” and “The Girl Can’t Help It,” with Jayne Mansfield.

When Trenier died in 2003, Hill co-founded the Speakeasy Swingers band and has continued performing regularly. He now plays the first Thursday of every month at the Italian American Club.

Asked about the secret of his longevity, Hill said, “Red wine — buy me a glass!”

He also credits his vitality to his lifelong passions for golf and music.

“I celebrate my birthday every day, every hour,” Hill said. “I’m thankful I’m on the right side of the grass.”

As for the changes he’s seen during his nearly 70 years playing in Las Vegas, Hill said, “There’s hardly any places to play anymore. I miss when lounge acts were everywhere. I wish they’d hire more lounge entertainment. When I started in the casinos (back in the late ’40s), there were no lounges, so we played on the casino floor in the Bingo Club (which became the Sahara and more recently SLS Las Vegas). We helped create a scene that’s gone now.”

Here’s to another year, Don. Hill’s birthday was Nov. 2.

Roger Hall, 90, saxophonist

Hall turned 90 this summer and plays regularly with six big bands and two jam bands, including Tom Clark’s Old Farts jam trio, which includes 90-year-old bass player Ed Boyer. Hall also subs for other musicians and rehearses five to six times a week.

Hall arrived in Las Vegas in 1954, when there were only a few hotels on the Strip. The Desert Inn’s band leader had gone home to Pennsylvania for Christmas, heard Hall play, and two weeks later, hired him as first chair in a relief band.

Hall preferred playing in small groups in lounges, but gigs were limited. Casino owners restricted singers, horns and drumming so as not to disturb gamblers. Plus, Hall made better money in relief bands and enjoyed the variety of playing a different show every night.

“You’d play six months and swap into different bands at different hotels — play the 8 p.m. and midnight shows in the showroom, then double up by playing the lounge shows at 10 p.m. and 2 a.m. We’d try to work six nights a week as a relief band. It always felt like you couldn’t turn down a job or take a vacation because the sub might take your job if they were better than you.”

For eight years in the mid-’80s and early-’90s, Hall didn’t play music because “they were crap charts played way too loud.”

He became general manager of a photo studio and created television commercials and convention sales films for the Desert Inn, Tropicana, Showboat, Caesars Palace and the Sands. He took up ballroom dancing at age 59 and married for a third time.

But he missed making music and returned to it in his 70s.

“Playing music keeps you active mentally and physically,” Hall said. “It’s like a drug. It feels like something is missing or you’re going through withdrawals if you’re not playing. And it’s good therapy to play. I like to socialize with all the other guys in the band.”

Still, he misses hotels having house orchestras.

“When I arrived, each hotel’s house band usually had four saxes, three trombones and three trumpets, and we’d play for every star who came to town,” Hall said. “There is no more of that. It’s all Cirque or synthesizers now.”

Jimmy Wilkins, 94, trombonist

Wilkins tried retirement but said he got pulled back on stage by colleagues who wanted to play his book of arrangements. He now leads the Jimmy Wilkins New Life Orchestra, which plays at Ron DeCar’s Event Center, usually on the first Saturday of the month.

Wilkins’ music career began in a Navy band. In the 1950s, he joined the Count Basie Band. By then, Wilkins and his brother, arranger and musician Ernie Wilkins, had played the Savoy Ballroom, Carnegie Hall and the Apollo Theater. After touring with Basie, Wilkins became a staff musician for Motown Records, playing with the Supremes, Spinners, Four Tops, Temptations and Aretha Franklin.

Wilkins moved to Las Vegas in 1995 and continued performing at the Four Queens and the Riviera.

Wilkins credits his longevity to several factors — quitting smoking, taking vitamins, eating healthy and good genes. His mother lived to 90.

Music also keeps him young, he said.

“Music is my life,” Wilkins said. “It’s the thing that I love to do. It keeps me alert and active, not gathering dust on the couch.”

The biggest change Wilkins has observed in Las Vegas? Desegregation. When Wilkins toured with Basie, the band wasn’t allowed to stay in Strip hotels.

Joe Vento, ??, pianist & accordian player

Vento says he will turn 97 on Dec. 16, but his birth records are unclear. He began his career as a child prodigy playing a quarter-size violin at age 2. He later attended the Juilliard School.

Drafted into the Army, where he played in a band during World War II, Vento met a music contractor at MGM Studios and began a career performing in hundreds of movies and television shows. His credits include “Dallas,” “Night Court” and a recurring role on “McHale’s Navy” (the guy in the Jeep). In 1950, he played “Flight of the Bumblebee” on an accordion while blindfolded on an “Arthur Godfrey Show” talent contest. Members of the Three Suns, a trio with 17 gold and five platinum records, saw the show and hired him. Vento toured the world with the band for 24 years.

He moved to Las Vegas more than 25 years ago.

“It was just a two-lane highway from L.A. to Salt Lake City,” Vento said. “The Sands was a two-story motel, and next to that was Castaways, where rooms were 50 cents an hour. But when the mob ran Vegas, musicians were paid well. They would have run all these young kids playing rock out of town on a rail.”

Vento now plays in the lobby of the Royal Resort five nights a week, regaling audiences with stories about celebrities he has worked with — Howard Hughes, Al Capone, Frank Sinatra, Elvis, Ann-Margret, Bob Hope, Dean Martin and more. “When you use your brain, you have no time to vegetate,” Vento said. “People who retire, they drop dead six months later from being too sedentary.”

Vento attributes his long life to his diet and genes.

“I never ate meat in my life,” he said. “My mom died at 107, and she didn’t eat meat either. But my father died at 56 and my sister at 75 because they ate meat and smoked cigarettes.”

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story incorrectly listed Don Hill's birthday. | (December 21, 2015)