Audio clip from interview with Herb Tobman by Deborah Fischer, March 13, 1981

The informant here is Herb Tobman. The date is March 13th, 1981, at 8:15 a.m. The place is Sundance Hotel, Las Vegas, Nevada. The collector is Deborah Fisher, 2104 (Palidaya Span), Las Vegas, Nevada. The project is Local History Project, Oral Interview. Las Vegas Gambling is the subject. Mr. Tobman, where were you born and the date? I was born in Bronx, New York, on December 20th, 1924. Thank you. When did you move to Las Vegas? In 1950. Were you with your family? A wife, two children. Why did you move? I at that time was working for Standard Oil for a very short period of time and I decided I just wanted to leave New York and I was able to relocate here with Standard Oil as an employee of the Standard Oil Company. By car? Yeah, we drove here. Pulled a trailer. Pulling a trailer, okay. Did you have any school or education here in Nevada? All my education is in New York. I graduated from high school. And your occupation at that time when you arrived in Nevada? I worked in a service station, Standard Oil. Actually, I was a tire, battery and accessory salesman. And you were self employed? Well, I worked for Standard Oil for about three months. Then after that I became self employed. When was it that you got in the casino business? The first time was in 1955. There was a new hotel being opened in town called the Moulin Rouge, which was on West Bonanza. I had had a lot of previous experience in the hotel business as a young man in the Catskill Mountains in New York. That was prior to my time in the navy and while I was going to school. It was a summer type job. I was in the furniture business at that time and really needed some second employment to live a little bit better and do a little bit better. So I went to work at the Moulin Rouge while I had my furniture store. What was your occupation? What did you do? I went to the Moulin Rouge, applied for a job as desk clerk because I had worked as a desk clerk, a bellman, a waiter. I had been a busboy. I had worked in every facet of the hotel industry and I applied for a job there as a desk clerk. Within a week and a half I was the general manager. Very impressive. I knew all these things and it made it very easy for me. People started seeking me out for different information in different departments and the people that owned the place kept wondering why everybody was coming to me. So they talked to me. And after talking to me they gave me the job as general manager. Do you recall about what date that was, what year? Yes. It was probably in January of 1955. I believe that was when it opened. In fact, I was there about a month and a half before it opened helping them get ready. I stayed there about six months. I made money that I needed to make to further my own personal business. What was the popularity of gaming at that time? What was the popularity of gaming? Were there lots of?number of people? Yeah, at that time the town was very small. I think the population of Las Vegas was probably...I don't know if it was fifty thousand people. It might have been fifty or sixty thousand people here. Most of the big casinos were on the Strip. And then there were a lot of downtown casinos, but there weren't very many hotels. In fact, the biggest hotel downtown was the Sal Sagev, which is ?Las Vegas? spelled backwards, which is on the corner of First and Fremont, and that was a two or three story building. Matter of fact, fifty rooms. It's still there. Was Las Vegas western oriented? Yeah, I'd say most of the clubs were. A few of the newer hotels on the Strip weren't. Somewhere between '50 and '55, the Sands Hotel had opened. Well, in 1955 when the Dunes Hotel was a brand new hotel, another hotel opened called the Royal Nevada, which today is part of the Stardust Hotel, and the Moulin Rouge all opened in 1955. Prior to that there were five or six hotels on the Strip. Some of them were open in '50, like the Sahara and the Sands. The Desert Inn was probably open in 1948. Prior to that all you had was the Frontier, the Flamingo and the El Rancho; they were the original three big hotels on the Strip. And then downtown, you had a lot of little casinos, in the same one or two blocks that they're in today. Naturally, the Golden Nugget since has built a lot of rooms and the Horseshoe is still there. The Fremont was built about that time. Prior to that there was a gas station on that corner. And the Four Queens was just being built somewhere around '55. I'm not sure of the year. That was the first real big hotel on Fremont Street and I think it had a little over a hundred rooms.