Audio file
Audio file
Information
Narrator
Date
2015-08-18
Description
In this audio clip, Sonja Saltman describes coming to the United States, and to Las Vegas, in the 1970s.
Digital ID
jhp000204
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I agree.In this audio clip, Sonja Saltman describes coming to the United States, and to Las Vegas, in the 1970s.
Sonja Saltman oral history interview, 2015 August 18. OH-02456. [Audio recording]. Oral History Research Center, Special Collections and Archives, University Libraries, University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Las Vegas, Nevada. http://n2t.net/ark:/62930/d1h41n68p
English
So what did you know about Las Vegas when you moved here in the seventies? Not a thing. About the history of it or anything? Only the one time when I visited a few years before then and we went to this property in Utah. There was the Strip. I thought it was awful. I wouldn't even set foot in hotels in the first couple of years without getting depressed. I never saw Elvis. I thought he was just awful. If I would get into a hotel or a casino, I found it so depressing. It was all so artificial. Both Michael and I came to the US with a healthy dose of European snobbery about America. Now the young people think everything in America is so hip and so wonderful. But this is almost forty years ago. So back then, no, it was the ugly America and Americans were uncouth or they weren't sophisticated or fashionable. And here was the casino and all that very artificial environment. We were both definitely snobs about it, me probably more because I had that in me from birth and Michael a little bit from so many years living in Europe. But we also loved the freedom that Las Vegas gave us. It was such an adventure, such an outpost, no tradition, no history, no limits really. You could do whatever you wanted here. There was a lot of freedom in that as well.