Las Vegas Trip - All About Me

And now a blog post about me. Las Vegas is my “hometown.” Mind you, in the first 10 years of my life, I lived in 15 different abodes – some houses, some apartments, some base housing. My first home is what my mother always described as, “The Hovel.”

After marrying my mother, my father took her far away from her family and home in Long Island to the great and untamed American desert where he was assigned to Nellis Air Force Base, outside of Las Vegas. It had been Las Vegas AFB until 1950, one year after military installations began being named after dead heroes. In this case, Lt. William Nellis – who flew P-47s in World War II in support of General George Patton’ 3^rd Army, in the Battle of the Bulge and, finally, in support of the U.S. Army 101^st Airborne Division – survived being shot down twice before guns took out his craft in Luxembourg, this time flying too low to bail out.

The now 11,300-acre base looks nothing today as it did in 1954 when I was born in the Clark County Hospital, just renamed from the Clark County Indigent Hospital and now the University Medical Center of Southern Nevada.

Wikipedia Photo

 

For that matter, when I was born, Las Vegas was nothing like the glaring and blaring place it is now.

The Las Vegas Strip in 1954, photo by Eloff Perez

Between 1952 and 1957, the Teamsters and Mormon bankers came together to build Las Vegas’ first casino hotels:  The Sahara, The Sands, and The Tropicana. The Riviera, first of the high-rises on the strip and in which the Marx Brothers had an interest, opened the month we left Nellis to follow my father to his assignment in Japan. These were the early days of Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Andy Williams, Liberace, Bing Crosby and Carol Channing. It wasn’t until a year after we left that the first “integrated” (as in racially) hotel opened.,, The Moulin Rouge.

I intended to attempt to track down places I lived as a baby but found the horizon-to-horizon dirt-colored housing tracts to be far too intimidating.