Children of Las Vegas by Timothy O'Grady

Author:Timothy O'Grady
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2016-05-24T16:14:05+00:00

Bombs, Weddings, Vice and the Desert

The little city boomed for twenty years after William Clark’s auction, then staggered. A rail strike provoked the removal of the maintenance works up to Caliente in Utah and then everyone could see how fragile it was. The desert was right there on the edge, waiting to take it back, as it had Petra. It had nothing to sell. It would have to dance and sparkle and allure to go on living.

It tried resorts, even grassless golf, but vice was easier. Its hinterland was a vast terrain of parched earth and drifting men who worked the mines and railroads. It offered them prize fights when no other state in the Union would. Block 16 was an openly operating brothel district. Gambling and Prohibition laws were noted, then unenforced. When a Senate investigation in the 1950s leaned on organized crime, mobsters from all over America migrated to Las Vegas, where they knew they would be left alone. They skimmed millions in untaxed casino profits and settled deals with poison and ice picks. They were the City Fathers, looked upon not only with esteem but with a kind of tenderness.

Marriage and divorce became absorbed in the general deregulation. Nevada set the lowest residency requirements for either, then kept trimming them. You can drive in and get married as you would drive in for a hamburger. You can be serenaded by an Elvis impersonator. You can have a vampire minister at the Goretorium. The father of a student of mine had been a wedding chapel minister for twenty years. ‘Did he attend a seminary?’ I asked. ‘It was just that it didn’t work out when he tried selling insurance,’ he replied. One minister reported, ‘I’ve been doing weddings ten years and I have done a little more than thirty-seven thousand. Eighty-six is the most I’ve done in a day. I did one wedding on stage in a total nude joint. I did a commitment ceremony one night for a man and his motorcycle. I had a lady came in one day, had a couple of attendants with her were all dressed up. She wanted to marry herself.’

Las Vegas shuns control, but the government saved it several times when it was failing, first with the Hoover Dam, then with two military bases during the Second World War. They tried to keep the dam workers in dry, chaste and non-gambling Boulder City, but the workers got to Block 16 and the gambling halls nevertheless. After the war the testing site for the Manhattan Project was moved there. New entertainment features came into being, such as the Miss Atomic Bomb contest, the Nuclear Hairdo and the Mushroom Cloud Party. ‘It was a wonderful place for what the customers wanted,’ a waitress at the Desert Inn’s Sky Room said in the early fifties. ‘They would sit around and listen to our piano player and look out the big windows and see the pretty hotel fountain and the guests swimming in the pool and the traffic speeding by on Highway 91, and then, just when they were getting tired, the A-bomb.

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