December 15-16, 1979: An IST Meeting in Los Angeles
	November 23, 1979: My 33rd Birthday in Chicago
	Return to Index for 1979

My second assignment for IST during my trial period was a public course in Minneapolis on November 26th that went quite well. The third and final assignment was to do an SSAD (Structured Systems Analysis and Design) course at Nellis AFB just outside Las Vegas on December 10th.

Getting to Las Vegas

I left Chicago on the last flight on Saturday afternoon so that I could spend Sunday doing something in the Las Vegas area. I knew that when the class ended on Friday I would need to fly on to Los Angeles for an IST company meeting in that city, at which I hoped that I would get final approval from Chris and Trish to join their roster of consultants.

This time, I flew on American Airlines. Most of my travel up to this point was on United Airlines; they had a program where they sent prints of old planes and a plaque and marker system to their frequent flyers to let them track where and how many times they flew on the airline. This wasn't a frequent flyer program as we know them today, though. American was the first airline to start one, in 1981, and Greg and I joined it two days after it began. United's program started just two days later, and we joined that one too, but as it turned out, between now and 1981 I discovered that American's schedules and service fitted my travel habits a bit better, and I began flying them pretty exclusively. But up until now, almost all my travel had been on United.

After a pleasant, 2+-hour flight, I arrived in Las Vegas in the late afternoon (given the time change). I rented a car and drove down towards the Las Vegas strip to check in to the hotel that Nellis had recommended- the Royal Inn.

The Royal Inn

For some reason, probably because by the time I got to Las Vegas it was pretty dark, and by the time I got back to the hotel from Nellis each afternon it was dark as well, I did not take a good picture of the Royal Inn.

I have been to Las Vegas many times subsequent to this trip, but had no recollection of seeing the Royal Inn on those trips, so I had to do a bit of research for this album page. What I found was that I had indeed been in the Royal Inn on subsequent trips.

The Royal Inn opened in 1970, and in the years of its existence has had many owners and several name changes. In the years after my stay it became the Royal Americana, the Paddlewheel, the Debbie Reynolds Hotel and Casino (which it was when I visited in the 1990s), the Greek Isles, and, finally, the Clarion Hotel and Casino. The hotel was located on the north end of the Las Vegas "Strip", in an area known locally as "Downtown Las Vegas", to distinguish it from the southern portion of the Strip where todays mega-hotels and resorts are located.

The Clarion closed its doors on September 1, 2014, and shortly before 3 am on February 10, 2015 the building was imploded. The implosion did not go as expected; the main core of the elevator shaft dropped about 1 story but remained standing. The Clarion closed it doors September 1, 2014.

The site had been purchased by a local developer, who had plans to create a 60-story mega-resort, but by the time the building was demolished, a recession had come to Las Vegas and those plans were put on hold. They are still on hold, and there are no actual plans filed for the property, which lies between the Strip and the Las Vegas Convention Center:

The site of the hotel I stayed at this week is outlined in red on the aerial view above. And I do recall that a bunch of us visited the hotel when it was the Debbie Reynolds Casino, as one of the group I was with was a big fan of hers.

While I didn't take any pictures of the hotel itself, I did take a picture out the window of my room one afternoon after I returned from my class session. The view looks west, of course, towards the mountains to the west of the city. Below is an area map so you can see the two places I visited during my stay- the Las Vegas "Strip" itself and Hoover Dam:

A Visit to Hoover Dam

On Sunday, the weather was absolutely perfect, so I decided to drive out to Hoover Dam- my first visit to that landmark. Hoover Dam is a concrete arch-gravity dam in the Black Canyon of the Colorado River, on the border between the U.S. states of Nevada and Arizona. It was constructed between 1931 and 1936 during the Great Depression and was dedicated on September 30, 1935, by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Its construction was the result of a massive effort involving thousands of workers, and cost over one hundred lives. Originally known as Boulder Dam from 1933, it was officially renamed Hoover Dam, for President Herbert Hoover, by a joint resolution of Congress in 1947.

At left is an aerial view of the dam and the area immediately around it. And this is one of the many cases in this album when the aerial views and maps available to me now are significantly different from the reality when the pictures I have here in the album were actually taken.

Today, there is an expressway that connects Las Vegas to US Highway 93. In 1979, that expressway did not exist, so one would just pick up a street on the east side of the city that angled southeast to pick up that highway. US 93 actually crossed right over the top of the dam, on a narrow, two-lane road where traffic could only move about 10-20 MPH. For many years, this was a huge bottleneck for anyone wanting to get over to Arizona, and various schemes were tried to re-route traffic elsewhere. But the crossing was so convenient that in the late 1990s plans were drawn up for the expressway and a new highway bridge over the canyon. The expressway and the Tillman Bridge over the canyon were opened in 2010, and the road across the top of the dam limited to local tourist shuttle traffic and pedestrians. On the day I visited, I drove directly to the dam and parked in a lot on the west side of the canyon. Then I walked over to the dam itself.

Since about 1900, the Black Canyon and nearby Boulder Canyon had been investigated for their potential to support a dam that would control floods, provide irrigation water and produce hydroelectric power. In 1928, Congress authorized the project. The winning bid to build the dam was submitted by a consortium called Six Companies, Inc., which began construction on the dam in early 1931. Such a large concrete structure had never been built before, and some of the techniques were unproven. The torrid summer weather and lack of facilities near the site also presented difficulties. Nevertheless, Six Companies turned the dam over to the federal government on March 1, 1936, more than two years ahead of schedule.

The dam is located near Boulder City, Nevada, a municipality originally constructed for workers on the construction project, about 30 miles southeast of Las Vegas, Nevada. The dam's generators provide power for public and private utilities in Nevada, Arizona, and California. Hoover Dam is a major tourist attraction; nearly a million people tour the dam each year. The heavily traveled U.S. Route 93 (US 93) ran along the dam's crest until October 2010, when the Hoover Dam Bypass opened.

Hoover Dam impounds Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the United States by volume (when it is full). You can see at left a picture of a small part of Lake Mead as seen from a vantage point near the western side of the dam. The reservoir serves water to the states of Arizona, California, and Nevada, as well as some of Mexico, providing sustenance to nearly 20 million people and large areas of farmland.

At maximum capacity, Lake Mead is 112 miles long, 532 feet at its greatest depth, has a surface elevation of 1,221.4 feet above sea level and 247 square miles of surface area, and contains 26.12 million acre feet of water. While Lake Mead was pretty close to full capacity on my visit today, and will remain so for the next few years, 1983 will see the beginning of a steady decline in the amount of water held. This will be due to a combination of drought and increased water demand- particularly for the building boom that will hit Clark County in the mid-1980s. By 2017, the last year for which figures are available, the lake will have dropped to some 40% of capacity, making it, since 2013, smaller than Lake Powell, formerly the second-largest US reservoir.

Although there are tours you can take of the dam itself, I eschewed them today in favor of just walking around outside. I first strolled across the dam itself, using one of the pedestrian walkways that are on either side of the two-lane highway that crosses the dam. On the eastern side, I was in Arizona, and there is a place where you can walk our along the lake and look back at the dam itself. That's the view that you can see at left.

The dam is protected against over-topping by two spillways and four water intakes that are positioned just north of each side of the dam, and you can see those intakes in the picture at left. The spillway entrances are located behind each dam abutment, running roughly parallel to the canyon walls. The spillway entrance arrangement forms a classic side-flow weir with each spillway containing four 100-foot-long and 16-foot-wide steel-drum gates. Each gate weighs 5,000,000 pounds and can be operated manually or automatically. Gates are raised and lowered depending on water levels in the reservoir and flood conditions. The gates could not entirely prevent water from entering the spillways but could maintain an extra 16 ft of lake level.

Water flowing over the spillways falls dramatically into 600-foot-long, 50-foot-wide spillway tunnels before connecting to the outer diversion tunnels, and reentering the main river channel below the dam. This complex spillway entrance arrangement combined with the approximate 700-foot elevation drop from the top of the reservoir to the river below was a difficult engineering problem and posed numerous design challenges. Each spillway's capacity of 200,000 cu ft/s was empirically verified in post-construction tests in 1941. The spillways have only been used once- during the floods of 1983.

The views both upstream towards Lake Mead and downstream through the Black Canyon are simply spectacular:

Looking Upstream at Lake Mead

The View Downstream / The Black Canyon

I spent a couple of hours wandering around the dam, walking from side to side. One of these days I look forward to coming back here and actually taking a tour of the dam itself; I can only assume it is as impressive inside as it is out.

On the way back to the city from the dam, I noticed that there was a turnoff to what the sign said was an overlook for views of Lake Mead, so I turned off the highway and went up to the parking lot for the observation area.

When I got out of the car and turned the engine off, the silence was deafening. There were no other people at the overlook, and I could not hear the cars that might have been going by on the highway below and behind me. The quiet made the views out across Lake Mead that much more impressive. It was quite a sight- the huge blue lake in the middle of the desert, but it was a sight I would get to see many more times in the future.

As you look at other album pages going forward, compare this view to the same views taken more recently, and you will be able to tell that while the lake is pretty full now, it won't always be so.

The class went well. I was beginning to feel quite good about my ability to teach the material, and less apprehensive that making the switch would be a bad thing to do. This class was particularly tough, because the attendees were all pilots who wanted to use the methods to design new functions for their war game simulation programs to do- certainly out of the ordinary for IST clients.

On the Strip in Las Vegas

Of course I did some walking up and down the Las Vegas Strip, looking at and going into some of the hotels along the street, and marveling at the extensive use of neon.

The Stardust Resort and Casino was a casino resort located on 63 acres along the Las Vegas Strip. It opened in 1958, and was one of the iconic Las Vegas properties. The hotel was fairly small when I walked by it tonight, and even extremely small when compared to the mega-properties that would be built in the future. The hotel's main 32-story tower wasn't built until 1991. The hotel was demolished in 2007, a short lifetime even by Las Vegas standards.

The famed Stardust sign, seen in my picture at left, became one of the symbols of Las Vegas. The sign you see here replaced the original one put up when the hotel was built. That original sign was 216 feet long and 37 feet high and wrapped around two sides of the building. The sign you see at left replaced that original sign in 1967.

At a cost of half a million dollars, the new sign's form was blurred by a scatter of star shapes, a shower of stardust. At night, incorporating neon and incandescent bulbs in the animation sequence, light fell from the stars, sprinkling from the top of the 188-foot tall sign down over the Stardust name.

The Stardust permanently closed its doors to the public on November 1, 2006. Just before the casino was officially closed at noon, the Bobbie Howard Band led the customers out the doors for the last time (in a conga line) to the tune of "When the Saints Go Marching In", and the hotel/casino complex closed after a 48-year run of continuous 24-hour operation. Four and a half months later, on March 13, 2007 at 2:33 a.m., the Stardust Resort was imploded in a grand ceremony which included fireworks marking the 10-second countdown before the East and West Towers tumbled. 428 pounds of explosives brought down the hotel, which at the time was the tallest building demolished on the Strip.

In the picture at right, you can see three more of Las Vegas' most famous hotels. In the nearground, right, is the Riviera Hotel and Casino. The Riviera operated from April 1955 to May 2015. It was last owned by the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority, which decided to demolish it to make way for the Las Vegas Global Business District. The hotel had more than 2,100 rooms, fewer than half of which were located in a 23-story tower. The casino had 110,000 sq ft of gaming space. Again, all these stats were small by the standards of later years.

The hotel casino was the prime example of mob influence in Las Vegas; indeed, the casino was first proposed by Detroit mobster William Bischoff, and he received a gaming license in 1952. Samuel Cohen, a member of Miami's S & G gambling syndicate, was a secret partner (along with Harpo and Gummo Marx) at the opening. The Riviera was the first highrise (9 stories) on the Strip; Liberace cut the ribbon and was the first resident performer. The Riviera also broke new ground in its design: previously, Strip resorts resembled roadside motor courts. When it opened, Life Magazine opined that the "Las Vegas boom" was overextended, and that with 5,000 hotel rooms, the city's casinos couldn't possibly be profitable. (Today, in 2018, there are 300 times that many rooms, and more are being built.

The Riviera casino went bankrupt just three months after opening and a group led Gus Greenbaum took over. Greenbaum had recently retired, and it was widely suspected that he was coerced to return to work by threats from Chicago mob boss Tony Accardo. Greenbaum's "entertainment director" was soon discovered to be mob informer Willie Bioff; he was murdered in November, 1955. Greenbaum's drug and gambling addictions led to his embezzling from the casino and, in 1958, to the murder of himself and his wife in their Phoenix, Arizona home, reportedly on the orders of either Meyer Lansky or Tony Accardo.

Mob fixer Sidney Korshak played a major role in the property's management; he represented the Chicago mob's interest in the Riviera, and was responsible for skimming the casino's revenue and delivering the proceeds to Chicago. In 1969, Dean Martin was hired as the casino's "permanent" performer; he received an ownership stake in the property. He quit and gave up his ownership in 1972.

By the late 2000s it was apparent that the property could no longer attract a significant clientele, when compared to the mega-properties that had been built in the previous fifteen years. The property was officially closed on May 4, 2015. The buildings were gutted and everything useful removed. Las Vegas is the only US City with a designated time for implosions- 2:30AM. So, at that time on June 14, 2016, the 24-story Monaco tower was brought down. The original 9-story tower, the oldest structure on the Strip, was brought down a month later, at exactly the same time. Finally, at the same time on August 16, 2016, the Monte Carlo tower along with the 12-story tower constructed in 1966 were imploded.

In 1948, the Thunderbird Hotel became the fourth resort to open on the Las Vegas Strip. The resort had a Native American theme and featured portraits, a Navajo-based restaurant, the only bowling alley ever on the Strip, and a showroom. An adjacent hotel was added to the property in 1953, and a four-story addition in 1963. The property changed hands twice in subsequent years, before it was finally sold in 1976 to Major Riddle, owner of the Dunes Hotel; he renamed it the Silverbird. It was at this hotel that singer Rosemary Clooney made her first appearance in Las Vegas in 1951, and where Judy Garland made her final Las Vegas appearance in 1965.

By 1980, the Silverbird had 400 hotel rooms. In 1981, Major Riddle sold the resort to the owner of the Aladdin Hotel and Casino, who renamed it the El Rancho. The remodeled hotel reopened in 1982 and a 13-story 600-room hotel tower was added. Rodney Dangerfield became the hotel's "permanent performer". Even with a thousand rooms, the hotel couldn't compete, and it closed in 1992.

What followed next were eight years of the most complicated jockeying ever for any Las Vegas property. The land on which the El Rancho sat was quite valuable, and there were plans galore for it by numerous organizations. For example, the Las Vegas Entertainment Network Inc. (LVEN), a Los Angeles-based television production company, had plans to redevelop the resort and reopen it in 1994 as El Rancho's Countryland USA. These plans never came to fruition, and in 1996, a New Jersey racetrack operator purchased the site and announced plans to demolish the El Rancho to construct "Starship Orion", a $1 billion, 5.4 million square foot complex with 2,400 hotel rooms in a 65-story tower. Financing never materialized, so the property was sold back to LVEN, who resurrected the Countryland USA project. By 1999, it was clear that those plans wouldn't get financing either.

An expose by local channel KVBC in 1999 revealed that the site had decomposed so badly that no renovation would be possible; indeed, the cleanup would have cost many millions all by itself. In 2000, Turnberry Associates purchased the resort; it was an eyesore that was complicating the development of nearby Turnberry Place, a series of luxury high-rise condominium towers. On October 3, 2000, the resort's last remaining structure, the 13-story hotel tower, was imploded with 700 pounds of explosives in front of 2,000 spectators. The site itself may be cursed; it was eventually bought by the owners of Miami's Fontainebleau Hotel to become its sister resort. Construction began in 2007, but by 2019 had still not been completed.

Finally, we have Circus Circus, and I can finally say that a hotel I photographed in 1979 still exists. This hotel, 125,000 square foot casino, and RV park is still owned and operated by MGM Resorts International, and features circus acts and carnival type games daily on the Midway.

Circus Circus is the largest permanent big top in the world. The Lucky The Clown marquee at the entrance was constructed in 1976 and is still on the property. Until 2005, the property was owned by Circus Circus Enterprises, which later became Mandalay Resort Group- owner of the much larger and much more upscale Mandalay Bay Casino and Hotel a good ways south on the Las Vegas Strip. The new owners, MGM, also have other, much larger properties in Las Vegas and elsewhere.

Circus Circus was opened in 1968, and was the flagship casino for Circus Circus Enterprises (CCE). The architects designed a giant circus tent shaped main structure for the casino.

At its opening, the $15 million facility only included a casino. The lack of a hotel resulted in financial problems, as the casino was not able to attract high rollers. CCE obtained a $23 million loan from the Teamsters Pension Fund to construct a hotel. As part of the arrangement, the Chicago Outfit's enforcer, Anthony Spilotro (under the name of Tony Stuart) was granted a gift shop concession in the hotel. In addition to a government investigation into the organized-crime connections, the casino managers were also being investigated for tax code violations. The casino's financial problems also continued and so the owners decided to sell. The sale occurred in 1974, and the new owners expanded the property with hotel tower additions in 1972, 1975, 1980, 1986, and 1996.

I apologize for the poor photograph at left; even if I had a flash, it wouldn't have helped in such a large space as the interior of Circus Circus. The concept of this casino is really intriguing.

Casinos do not allow minors in the gambling areas, but casino owners have long realized that many of their patrons (and the ones that are likely to be the most inexperienced and thus likely to lose the most) are families on vacation, who will probably have kids along. All the casinos have kind of "nightcare" centers or baby-sitters on call, but many families are reluctant to leave their kids with someone they don't know.

Oddly enough, parents are much more willing to let their kids roam around a casino, much like letting them go to the Mall. Circus Circus solved the problem. On the main floor is all the gambling. Access to the main floor is through special elevators and stairs, and the casino stations unobtrusive watchers to ensure that all the persons in the gaming areas are adults. Kids are free to roam the rest of the building, but the place they congregate is the arcade.

On a balcony one level above the gaming area, completely circling it, is an arcade, run by the casino with every imaginable video game, pinball machine, and a line of games just like those at any state fair, a miniature bowling alley, and so on. Kids are free to play any of these games, although they are not quite free. They are, however, partially subsidized by the gaming winnings of the hotel. At any time the kids can look down and probably see their parents. When the kids or parents get bored, they can go up one more level where, every hour on the hour, a fifteen-minute circus act performs. It might be trapeze artists, jugglers, lion tamers- all sorts of things. At the moment, a juggling act is performing on the circus level.

The hotel in the foreground, the Barbary Coast, sits on the site of Empey's Desert Villa, a small casino hotel that opened in 1952. In 1977, the property was purchased and totally remodeled and expanded as the result of a $12 million project; the new casino hotel opened earlier this year as the Barbary Coast. from 1952. Over time, this property, along with others would become Coast Casinos Inc. The hotel would continue to operate under the same name until 2007, when it was sold and its name changed. This happened one more time in 2013, and the property is now a "boutique" hotel and casino.

Further back, you can see the Flamingo Las Vegas, which is owned and operated by Caesars Entertainment Corporation. The Flamingo opened in 1946, and has been in continuous operation since then, although it has undergone a number of ownership changes. The property has been expanded and/or remodeled numerous times, and now includes a 72,300 square-foot casino along with 3,626 hotel rooms. The architectural theme is reminiscent of the Art Deco and Streamline Moderne style of Miami and South Beach. Staying true to its theme, the hotel includes a garden courtyard which serves as a wildlife habitat for flamingos. The hotel was the third resort to open on the Strip and remains the oldest resort on the Strip in operation today.

I should say that in my numerous trips back to Las Vegas over the years, for both business and pleasure, I have seen the Las Vegas Strip totally transformed. As late as 1972, the entire strip was a collection of motor inn-type structures, albeit with casinos attached, and most of these had 200 rooms or less. Beginning in the early 1970s, the new hotels that opened were more like resorts, with more rooms, more facilities, and larger gaming areas. Most of the older motor inns were actually torn down and rebuilt. In the 1980s, this change went into overdrive, as the city and the Strip saw one mega-resort after another open. You are undoubtedly familiar with the themes of many of these new properties- New York, New York; the MGM Grand; the Luxor; Mandalay Bay; the Venetian; the Bellagio; Caesar's Palace; and many more. Like cruise ships, they have gotten bigger and bigger and bigger, with more and more attractions, to bring in more than just gamblers. It is often said of Las Vegas that the ONLY thing that matters is how much money you have.

I ended the evening with a visit to the gaming floor of the MGM Grand (a hotel-resort which has been reconstructed twice since I visited in 1979. My picture of the gaming floor isn't very good, but you can have a look at it here.

Chris Gane is having a company meeting in Los Angeles this weekend, so that's where I'll be heading next.

You can use the links below to continue to another photo album page.

	December 15-16, 1979: An IST Meeting in Los Angeles
	November 23, 1979: My 33rd Birthday in Chicago
	Return to Index for 1979