Las Vegas in 1961: A miracle wrought in the desert

By Brian Greenspun (contact)

Sunday, June 28, 2015 | 2 a.m.

In 1961, the Las Vegas Sun published a golden era edition chronicling the years from Las Vegas’ infancy in 1941 to what then appeared to be its glory years in 1961. Twenty years of incredible growth from a sleepy little town to the center of tourism and gaming on the planet.

My father, Hank Greenspun, wrote in this space about those years with a prescient look toward the future — the next 20 years! As usual he was right on, but off only in the depth and breadth of his vision.

This week, as the Sun celebrates its 65th anniversary, we can look over what has ensued since Hank’s observations and reflections, and understand this fabulous community we have built is really just beginning. All it takes is people of vision and many others committed to making it happen.

I commend the following Where I Stand column written almost 55 years ago and encourage Las Vegans today to pursue that early vision and their own aspirations with all deliberate speed.

Las Vegas — our town — is a city of a hundred contrasts. Its growth continues to astonish old-timers as well as new residents. Its prosperity baffles all economic laws of financial survival.

People from all over the world seek to invest in this area. Its potential is greater today than in the boom that caused the great western trek to our state in the fabulous days of gold and silver discoveries.

The mines petered out, but there are still untapped veins of wealth that guarantee continued wholesome and beneficial progress.

Progress is moving forward — the eternal quest to conquer boundaries that limited the past. And nowhere is it more evident than in Southern Nevada.

Our remarkable advancement from a small desert community to the state’s most heavily populated area is well-documented and interestingly told in the pages of this, the golden era edition of the Las Vegas Sun.

We have attempted to cover every endeavor, every industry and all facets of daily living and after months of careful research have compiled the information in the written documentary that follows.

The result amazes us, for our most exuberant estimates of the future are surpassed even before the information gathered can be put into type. Our confidence in the bright future of Southern Nevada grows greater each day.

We frequently must look backward in order to see forward. The rapid strides made are apparent only when compared with what has gone before.

The town’s number one industry, tourism — or gambling, as the more courageous are willing to admit — can be quickly detailed with an impressive array of statistics, but figures can’t tell the story. The proof is found in history and the people who lived it.

Remember when Tommy Hull’s El Rancho Vegas was the only hotel on the now-fabulous and enchanted Strip highway? Even the most clairvoyant could never have dreamed that in its place would soon rise a new monument of luxury and pleasure with rooms to dwarf the boldest of plans ever conceived by Mr. Hull.

All this has brought the usual growing pains, just as in any other community. And all the investigating committees of Congress or the state will not change a decimal point in financial estimate of the future.

The impact of questionable characters on the industry is far less today than in the past and if we have experienced a golden era since 1941, the next 20 years can conservatively be called the diamond era of Las Vegas.

When we first came here, the town had many undesirables in the gambling business. It still does, but we think the proportion of bad to good is dwindling.

In a town of 100, 10 bad ones are a big percentage. In a city of thousands, 15 evil characters have little impact. So the greater the number of good people who come here to live, the less apparent will be the effect of the bad ones on our community.

I recall when they used to settle their differences with guns. Now we’ve progressed to where the courts are called upon to decide right and wrong. It may hurt the firearm industry but is helpful financially to the lawyers — if lawyers as a group should be helped.

Even the undertakers have prospered. We recall the period of only one undertaker, and he worked part time. Today, four mortuary parlors are operating full time with most of the burials due to old age, which is unusual for a city with the sin reputation others have fixed on us.

I will not deny that many years ago the mobsters owned one-third of the hotels in town, but then there were only three. Today with magnificent structures dotting our skyline in goodly numbers, one or two still controlled by the syndicate is a small percentage indeed.

Those we believe to have sinister connections are getting old and in the due course of human events will find a better world than they tried to make on earth. Their places will be taken by large hotel chains willing to invest in decent and stable areas.

In the past it was fairly easy for the hoodlum element to find roots here, but our work laws and gaming-control boards are making it almost impossible for them to infiltrate.

This is good progress and if the people who look upon Las Vegas as a sin city will only read history and recall the development of the United States, it will be seen that we are taking the same course the country did from its infancy to date.

Some of the 13 original states started as penal colonies of England. The felons being males, boatloads of not-so-fancy females came over to merge and build the colony. From these roots some of our finest families have sprung. The offspring went to school, grew up decently, became respected citizens and attained the highest offices in the land.

This is Las Vegas today — conservative, decent to a degree no less than in large cities that do not have legal gambling and with less crime and juvenile delinquency than areas not as well-policed because of the nature of our economy.

Talk about progress: even the banks are lending money to gaming undertakings — which in the past was more difficult than pulling teeth with tweezers. Insurance companies once considered us a bad risk, yet today all the big ones are fighting for the privilege of financing new entertainment palaces.

As a community we seem to have taken on a new social and financial status. The sale of our bonds for civic and public improvements are high on the eligible list on conservative Wall Street. One of our better hotels has made the charmed circle of public offerings, which is a large step in the right direction.

You may say we have made exceptional progress in the field of entertainment — depending, of course, on personal tastes.

Time was when the guitar-playing western singer with the nasal twang was the best we had to offer. But the hillbillies have been replaced by the Folies Bergere, outstanding Broadway hits Gypsy and Tenderloin, top TV personalities such as Frank Sinatra, Red Skelton, Dean Martin, Peter Lind Hayes, Jimmy Durante, Milton Berle and all the famous and near-famous. They not only have made Las Vegas the entertainment capital of the nation but use it as a playground for their leisure moments.

No educational system in the country has progressed more rapidly than ours, per capita. The school enrollment today is almost twice the total population of the entire area in the official 1940 census. Our graduates become doctors, scientists, lawyers and journalists in the same proportion as supposedly more enlightened areas of the nation.

Las Vegas can boast of as much “height of fashion” as New York’s Fifth Avenue, Bond Street in London, or the Rue in Paris where American women spend half their husbands’ income. Our women are as voguish, modish and chic as the most sophisticated of Paris models; or they can be relaxed, gay and informal as an island girl in a muumuu.

We can look back and say we remember Las Vegas when …

Old columns that filled this space tell the story; Life magazine, in a recent issue, thought “the zenith of the boom had been reached and a slight falling-off process might be taking place, if not now then soon.”

That was written in 1955, and meaning no disrespect to a fine publication like Life, the present can tell how terribly wrong they were.

It was also in 1955 that the conservatively statistical Wall Street Journal ran a series on Las Vegas, dolefully predicting economic collapse.

We challenged them then and it was as recently as one year ago that they challenged themselves when The Wall Street Journal wrote that Las Vegas was the only bright spot in a dismal financial picture of the nation.

Our bankers are building new institutions of finance on virtually every corner, and savings-and-loan firms are popping up in the middle of the streets.

Four-lane highways connect us in many directions with intercontinental freeways being rushed to completion.

In 1950 this space predicted vast expansion in nuclear and scientific development for the area. Today we see it all around us, the Atomic Energy Commission with the brilliant men and women it has brought here planning for future exploration to the moon, the jets flying at Nellis, the talk of nuclear reactors and scientific jargon understood only by men of science.

Las Vegas is a miracle town, baffling all laws of economic existence, but from its first major convention, “The World Congress of Flight,” to the hundreds of conventions now signed including the American Legion and others of similar scope, we would like to predict that we “ain’t seen nothing yet.”

Industry slated to come here in the next few months includes electronic plants and aircraft installations of major proportions.

The contribution of this area to the nation’s advancement in nuclear exploration is inestimable. It is only matched by the achievement of mathematical equations of chance formulated in the nimble brain of the town’s leading citizen, Nick the Greek, who has devoted a lifetime to the improvement of the breed of those dedicated to the proposition that five will get you 10 and are willing to risk their comfort, security and present happiness for a result that seems more worthwhile: This, after all, is gambling in its most elementary sense — a basic instinct in human beings more compelling than the love of normal, honest toll.

Nevada offers the opportunity in its uncorrupted, strictly legal, scrupulously honest, state-controlled method of catering to this basic human need.

This, too, is progress, for if people must gamble, where better than in a rigidly supervised state that recognizes it is impossible to legislate morals? And, incidentally, makes this golden era edition possible.

Brian Greenspun is owner, publisher and editor of the Las Vegas Sun.