Mongrel Wed Nov 08, 2017 8:34 am
My first memories of Las Vegas are from the late 1950's when I was in elementary school. My parents would take me out of school for over a month and we'd drive to visit my mother's sister and family in Orange County just east of L.A. My father and uncle liked to gamble so we'd hop in a huge station wagon and drive the 288 miles to Las Vegas. We always stayed at the Stardust, a trim one story motel with attached casino. My mother would give me pennies so I could play the slots in the corridors leading from the motel rooms to the casino. When I was in my teens, we'd go to Vegas and I could get served booze and play the slots and Keno. It was a good time with cheap rooms, cheap good food, clean streets, mostly clean people, great free entertainment and about the safest streets in the Western World. Then it all went to shit when the Family turned it over to the Corporate World. The wife and I flew out for five days in November of 2011. I hadn't been there since 1975. I was shocked and disgusted with the air pollution, grid-lock traffic, human refuse on the streets, hotels, restaurants and casinos. It's like they took a pristine little desert oasis and turned it into a Chicago-like shit-hole in less than a generation.
In a couple of weeks, the wife and I are taking a cruise out of Miami that stops in Havana for a day. I wanted to do this because my father used to go on junkets with his Italian country club buddies in the 1950's and I want to see what became of the buildings that housed the casinos. Reference Godfather II Havana scene sequence for what it was like.
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