Transcript of interview with Roger Hurley Dudley by Beth McLaren, March 7, 1981

UNLV University Libraries Roger H. Dudley i An Interview with Roger H. Dudley An Oral History Conducted by Elisabeth McLaren Ralph Roske Oral History Project on Early Las Vegas Special Collections and Archives Oral History Research Center University Libraries University of Nevada, Las Vegas UNLV University Libraries Roger H. Dudley ii © Ralph Roske Oral History Project on Early Las Vegas University of Nevada, Las Vegas, 2017 UNLV University Libraries Roger H. Dudley iii The Oral History Research Center (OHRC) was formally established by the Board of Regents of the University of Nevada System in September 2003 as an entity of the UNLV University Libraries’ Special Collections Division. The OHRC conducts oral interviews with individuals who are selected for their ability to provide first-hand observations on a variety of historical topics in Las Vegas and Southern Nevada. The OHRC is also home to legacy oral history interviews conducted prior to its establishment including many conducted by UNLV History Professor Ralph Roske and his students. This legacy interview transcript received minimal editing, such as the elimination of fragments, false starts, and repetitions in order to enhance the reader's understanding of the material. All measures have been taken to preserve the style and language of the narrator. The interviewee/narrator was not involved in the editing process. UNLV University Libraries Roger H. Dudley iv Abstract On March 7, 1981, Elisabeth McLaren interviewed blackjack dealer, Roger H. Dudley (born August 10th, 1940 in Las Vegas, Nevada) in his home. This interview covers Roger’s recollections on growing up in Las Vegas. During the interview they further discuss Roger’s childhood, his parents, grade school, World War II, the atomic testing, the Mesquite Club, the development of the Strip, rodeos, Howard Hughes, Paradise Valley and changes in Las Vegas, Nevada. UNLV University Libraries Roger H. Dudley 1 One, two. The informant is Roger Hurley Dudley. The place is 8525 Hammer Lane. The date is March 7th, nine a.m. And the place is 8525 Hammer Lane, Las Vegas. The collector is Beth McLaren, 1500 East Karen Boulevard, Las Vegas. The project is Local History, Project Two, Oral Interview, Life of a Man Who Has Lived in Las Vegas Since 1940. This is Roger Dudley at my address, 8525 Hammer Lane, Las Vegas, Nevada. I was born at home at 301 South Third Street on August 10th, 1940. How long did you live in this residence? I—my mother and father were renting this house. We lived here for three years. In 1943 my mom and dad wanted to buy a house of their own, and in the winter of ’43 there was a new housing development under construction down on the southeast corner of Fifteenth and Stewart. Dad and mom picked out the house, the address was 208 North Fifteenth and we moved in that summer. I believe it was in August. I can remember climbing on top of the house, you could see the mountain areas all the way around Las Vegas. There wasn’t any obstructions whatsoever. You could see entire valley and the surrounding mountains. In 1943 the Second World War was in full swing, how did this affect you and your family? Well, I don’t—I remember very little about World War II. Mostly, I remember the blackouts and ushering people across the dam and the armed guards at the dam, the food rationing and that was about it. I was too young for any more information than that. What was your first recollection of school? What type of building was it? I—the first school that I went to was North Ninth Street School. Ah, it was on North Ninth Street. We had kindergarten through the fourth grade at that time. I, my first kindergarten teacher was Misses Howell. Some of the other teachers: Misses Olive, Misses Tenjin, Misses Fyfe. We UNLV University Libraries Roger H. Dudley 2 had some activities in school, not near what they have today. But they did keep us busy. The school itself, we had five rooms, five separate rooms. Ah, one room was kindergarten, another room was first grade, second grade, third grade, fourth grade. One teacher, actually, for each room and one principal. Her name was Misses Fyfe. Misses Fyfe acted as a substitute when one of the other teachers would get sick. They were all female teachers and they had to take care of the recess and the sports, basketball and baseball. We didn’t play any football, the field that we had was rocks, if I’m not mistaken. Behind North Ninth Street School was an area called the Helldorado Village. They held a western celebration in May each year. They had a dance hall and carnival rides. The rodeos were at The Last Frontier sports room, behind the old Last Frontier Hotel. They hold the rodeos now, they used to hold them at Cashman Field after so many years and now they hold them at the Convention Center. School obviously occupied a major part of your day, but what was life like for an average nine year old at this time? Well, naturally during the school year we had activities that the school could get in. After school there was chores to do and plenty of desert to play in. There was a lot less kids to contend with. Consequently, I believe we had a little more fun. There weren’t near the problems that there is in Las Vegas today with the kids, with absolutely nothing to do except cause problems. We didn’t have very much, we had very little material things that is. What we did have we had to take care of cause there, there wasn’t gonna be any more. There weren’t very many schools in town, just Las Vegas High School, North Ninth Street Grade School, John S. Park, that was about it. By 1951 or ’52, a fellow by the name of Jimmy Gay, well, he got some activities for kids, started with the Clark County Recreation Department. We played football, baseball. Back in the fifties a semi-pro baseball team called the Las Vegas Wranglers was quite active. We played other teams UNLV University Libraries Roger H. Dudley 3 like El Centro and Uma and some other small towns around Los Angeles, ah, Salt Lake City. In the summer months we had a lot of things to do around the mountains, Mount Charleston, Lee’s Canyon, Red Rock, Mount Potosi, even over in the Pahrump Valley, which was really quite a trip. The mountains and Lake Mead, the deserts, we found a lot of things to do. We used to play down at the, there was a stream, a surface stream that popped up, why, down by the Old Fort, the Old Mormon Fort on Las Vegas Boulevard South. And there was a swimming pool there, big cottonwood trees. I remember an old timer telling me that he was riding from his ranch in North Las Vegas to the depot down on Main Street. They used to have a stockyard down there. He was riding horseback. He was riding underneath these trees and then something kicked his hat off and he stopped his horse and lit a match and some fella had either hung himself or someone else had hung him and this guy horseback rode underneath him and his boot heel kicked his hat off. When did your parents first arrive in Las Vegas? My mother and father moved here in 1936 from Riverside, California. My father was born in (Unintelligible) Colorado in 1891 and his parents had a cattle and horse ranch. He remembers one of the last Indian uprisings in the United States, about 1894. He did live quite an interesting life. He drove a stagecoach between (unintelligible) and (unintelligible) Colorado. He was a (unintelligible) weight wrestling champion of the world in 1909. He, after a couple of bad floods on the (unintelligible) he left the ranch country in the late ‘twenties and went to barber school in Denver in 1927. He had a barbershop in Leadville, Colorado, Riverside, California, and moved from Riverside here to Las Vegas in 1936 and he went to work in the Okay Barbershop on South First Street. About a year and a half later he opened his own barbershop on North First Street next to the old Log Cabin Bar and the Silver Café. The Silver Café was owned by Mister Fong, who owns Fong’s Garden now. I, he sold that barbershop and moved to another barbershop on UNLV University Libraries Roger H. Dudley 4 First or on Sixth and Fremont Street in 1945. He was there for a couple of years and went to the El Rancho Hotel in 1947. From there he went to the Last Frontier Village in the barbershop and from there to the Flamingo Hotel back to the Frontier and back again to the El Rancho Hotel when it burned in 1961. Then he went over to the Thunderbird Hotel and he retired there in 1964. The Korean War occurred around 1950 and 1953. What effect did this have on your life? Your personal life? Well, at, the Korean War really didn’t faze us much. The townspeople in Las Vegas, Nellis Air Force Base went into a hundred percent training program for the fighter pilots. Naturally, the economy boomed. Life went on as usual around here, really. The blackouts weren’t heard of anymore, and that’s, that’s about all I remember. And I remember my mother and father and I got involved in archery, target shooting. Some of the old archery ranges in Las Vegas. The first one we had was on Vegas Drive where the municipal golf course is now, and before that it was a trout pond, where they raised trout for Lake Mead. They thought they were until they found out the soil was too salty. We did a lot of archery hunting, had turkey shoots. The deer in Mount Charleston used to be several thousand head up there and now I don’t believe you can find a half a dozen if you took a month. Some of the things I personally believe, the human encroachment had a lot to do with the decline of the deer and the fallout from the atomic shots I think had something to do with the feed. Whatever it was, there’s no more game left on the mountain to speak of. The atomic testing started up in Frenchman’s Flat Atomic Test Site, ah, back in the early fifties. The first shot, I remember riding my bicycle down to Cashman’s Field so I could get a plainer view from Cashman’s Field, see mountain range from the north and west. They were aboveground shots. You could see the flash in the sky, usually went off early in the morning, like four thirty, five, five thirty in the morning. You could see the glow in the sky and UNLV University Libraries Roger H. Dudley 5 it'd take anywhere from forty-five minutes to an hour before you got the ground rumble. I then went up to Angel’s Peak with a fella here in town that owned a plumbing company. His name was Don McGarby. Don liked to watch those shots and he moved from Las Vegas to St. George, Utah, back in the late fifties. He died in Salt Lake last summer from leukemia. I wonder if he being next to those shots, as many as he was, if it didn’t have some effect on his life. There was a plane crash on Mt. Charleston Peak. It was carrying a lot of very important papers from the Atomic Energy Commission. They had their Air Force and the Army surround that mountain. Course it was in the middle of the wintertime, it wasn’t much of a chance of anyone getting to this information. It took ‘em about nine or ten days to get to the wreck and once they did get to it they realized that a couple of men had lived for three or four days; had they been able to get there a little earlier, why, they might’ve been able to save their lives. The shots that took place in the Test Site were at Frenchman’s Flats, Desert Rock. I remember in the newspaper they brought an atomic cannon into Las Vegas. They unloaded it—I don’t know exactly where they unloaded it but they were transporting it out to the Test Site. They thought they were gonna have to dismantle the Bonanza Underpass to get this huge cannon. The idea of this cannon was to fire an atomic bomb like any other cannon would be. I don’t know, I don’t believe they ever used this thing. Your mother, did she have any feelings about you watching the atomic bomb? No. She and dad didn’t care. They thought you gotta be crazy to get up at four o’clock in the morning to ride your bicycle halfway across town to watch a flash in the sky. To a kid that was something. I wasn’t the only kid. There was hundreds of other people lining the Tonopah Highway with their cameras and tripods and I wasn’t the only kid in town. UNLV University Libraries Roger H. Dudley 6 Life in Las Vegas at this point is essentially life in a small town. What was your mother doing? What were some of her activities? Well, what I remember best about my mother was naturally her cooking, and she had a television show in the fifties. She was the cook on the television program but before then she was very artistic, a very good homemaker, very good wife to my father. She was involved in making our clothes, her own clothes, mainly because there wasn’t enough money back in the forties. The price of things were extremely cheap looking back at ‘em now but then when my father consider him cutting hair for fifteen, twenty cents a head, it took a lot of haircutting to buy a suit a clothes. She got into ceramics, church work, and she was in the Mesquite Club in Las Vegas. We used to have our church at the Mesquite Club until we built, the congregation built the church down on Maryland Parkway and Bridger, the Lutheran Church. I believe my sister was the first one that was baptized in that church and her fingerprints and picture and the story of the whole thing is in the cornerstone of the building. I mentioned before my mother had a television cook show. She was, at the same time, she was the last president of the PTA in Clark County when there was just one president for the entire county. And her mother had a rooming house on First and Bridger Street. She took care of her mother in later years, as well as the rooming house, which is called the White House. My grandmother was quite active in church and might find it hard to believe but after church every Sunday, one or two o’clock in the afternoon you’d find her at the Nugget shooting craps or the Las Vegas Club or the Pioneer Club or Boulder Club playing (unintelligible) You mentioned the Mesquite Club that’s a fairly prominent social club here in Las Vegas today. Was your mother one of the original founders? UNLV University Libraries Roger H. Dudley 7 I don’t know if she was one of the original founders or not but it was pretty close. She got into those activities in the early forties. I really don’t know when the Mesquite Club was actually founded. What was the purpose of this club? The original purpose? I believe it was for holding bazaars and activities for the women, the housewives, to get ‘em out of the house, to get ‘em interested and let ‘em know that there was something else in Las Vegas besides a hot kitchen and a dusty living room. You have to remember now back in those years, there weren’t any coolers, refrigeration units in Las Vegas. A lot of the homes the kitchens were equipped with wood and coal stones, and they were hot. The best you could hope for in the summertime was the sun to go down and the cool breeze, the cool breezes were unheard of, and things were dusty. There weren’t any vacuum cleaners, why, you swept up, with a dustpan and a broom, and that’s the way it was back then. I can remember going to bed at night in the summer time with a wet sheet on top of you, the windows wide open. My dad finally got a bright idea with his barbershop down on First Street. He took a window out and he hung four or five burlap bags in the space where the window went and would dip ‘em in water. And they got a regular circulation fan and set the fan on a pedestal outside of the window and turned it on. The fan supposedly was to blow air through the burlap bags and cool it as it went through and cause a breeze going through the barbershop. You could imagine sitting in a barber chair with a robe wrapped around you and hair down around your neck, it got a little bit sticky. What type of jobs were available for teenage boys at this time? Well, back in 1947, ah, ’46, I started selling newspapers for the Review Journal. The Review Journal office then was on South First Street a half a block off of Fremont. We used to buy papers for three cents and during the week sell them for a nickel and the weekend or Sunday UNLV University Libraries Roger H. Dudley 8 newspaper we bought for a nickel and sold for a dime. I sold papers on Fremont Street in front of the Nugget for a couple of years. My dad had barbershops I mentioned that. I portered in the barbershop for a couple of years, shined shoes and swept up. I made beds in my grandmother’s rooming house and swept up around there, in later years I was fourteen, fifteen years old and I worked for a fella who had the (unintelligible) and the Last Frontier Village and I wrangled horses for him, after school and all summer. In the summertime, we had entailed those horses at the Last Frontier and took a string of them up to Mt. Charleston Lodge. We kept them up there all summer. For the people that used to come up to the lodge and spend an afternoon. Some of the old gambling places on Fremont Street, I used to kind of hang around. I would know a customer that was inside and I know I can sell him a newspaper. The Horseshoe was the Eldorado Club then. There was a couple old guys in there that I sold newspapers to everyday. The Pioneer Club, The Las Vegas Club, Mr. Binion came to town and he bought a place on Fremont Street, he called it the Westerner, that was before he bought the Eldorado Club from Joe Brown. Some of the places up and down the Strip, there weren’t very many hotels or casinos out there. I believe the first one built was the El Rancho and it was built out of railroad ties and old signboards. The hotels that stick into my memory there out on the Strip, the El Rancho Hotel, which I just mentioned. The Flamingo Hotel, The Last Frontier, The Bingo Club is the Sahara Hotel now. The Red Rooster was across the Strip from the Flamingo Hotel. Back in the, after the Korean War a man by the name of Willy Martello owned a place in Searchlight, Nevada called The El Ray Club and I believe he was the first one that would fly junkets into the state of Nevada, and that was back in ’55, ’56, ’57. And I think some of these guys in the hotels about ten years ago picked up on the idea and started doing the same thing. It turned out to be quite a profitable venture. UNLV University Libraries Roger H. Dudley 9 In ’56, ’57, you were in high school, what were you thinking at this point? What were you doing? Do you have plans for the future? I didn’t think too much about the future then, I was kind of interested in the activities we were doing in high school. Early in high school I was involved in archery. We were having shoots every week: in the wintertime, hunting, in the summertime, fishing. Later on, my second year in high school, I, of course, I had an opportunity to wind up with a car and my second thought was financing and then later on, cars lead into girls and finances and sports and finances and my junior and senior year in high school was travelling to small rodeos and being able to finance my way to them. Of course every now and then you think about school. I quit school in ’59, ’58, I believe it was, and I went to work for the Clark County Recreation Department in Lee’s Canyon. I worked up there for three years and finished school in the meantime, and I started dealing 21 in August 1960. The rodeos that you attended, were you an active participant, what was your specialty? Well, I got into the saddle bump then bareback riding and bulldogging. I never was much with the roping end of it. The steer opener or calf roping, and I found out later on that tall people don’t ride very well, which was the case. I guess I won my share of money but it just wasn’t enough to keep me seriously after the rodeo sport so I just passed on it and went on. The first high rise that was built in Las Vegas for casinos was The Mint. What, do you remember this happening? Yes. The Mint was built back in 1959. It was the first high rise hotel and gambling place in Las Vegas. I don’t remember who the people were that built The Mint. I believe Johnny, Hughes, and Sam Boyd, had something to do with it. But most of the gambling places, all of the gambling places in Las Vegas were privately owned by whomever and along about the early sixties, why, UNLV University Libraries Roger H. Dudley 10 corporations started coming in. They saw the profit in gambling. Del Webb showed up. He was the first, if my memory serves me correct, the private owners and the clubs that he acquired at the time were really happy with the profit that they were taking down from these places. But when the corporations took over they had a different system of counting the money boxes or the handle, what they call the money that was handled in the hotel or club at that, for a twenty-four hour period. And when the corporations took over, they realized that they were counting a lot more money than the private owners were counting. The private owners we’ll say for instance on the previous sixty days before the sale to corporation would could a hundred thousand dollars a week profit. When the corporations took over, the profit was two hundred and fifty-three (unintelligible) dollars a week. And they, they often wondered just exactly what happened in the counting room. In the counting room is where it all happened—nevertheless, the corporations that come into Las Vegas were a boost to the economy. The money started staying here in Las Vegas, going through payroll and like it’s supposed to, instead of being shipped out of town to Chicago and New York and Miami and Los Angeles and wherever. I think the corporations naturally were good for Las Vegas and the people that worked in these places also got a little more job security it seemed like. That’s about all I can remember really about the actual changes back when it changed from privately owned to corporation. Would you go so far as to say that the corporations legitimized gambling? Oh, I’d have to say that, yes, probably just about a hundred percent. They, all these corporate heads and the pencil pushers, they want to know where every single dime went. I can remember when some of the hotels on the Strip would have forty-nine cent breakfast. Now it would cost the hotel probably a dollar forty-nine to plate out that breakfast and they were taking a loss. But they figured if they got so x-amount of heads in the hotel for a particular breakfast or luncheon or UNLV University Libraries Roger H. Dudley 11 what have you, that they’d pick up the slack with the people playing slot machines and gambling. When the corporations came in each facet of the hotel or gambling place would have to pack its own weight and if they didn’t pack its own weight they would discontinue it. Every part of the hotel had to pay for itself otherwise it was no good. You said earlier that you sold newspapers outside the hotels when you were young, were there any security guards? What were the restrictions? Were minors allowed in the casinos in these days? Well, I sold newspapers down on Fremont Street, now I didn’t get out on the Strip until I went to work for my dad in his barbershop. I, no, there wasn’t any security. There was a half a dozen policemen in town. I can remember, lagging quarters after we got through selling newspapers in the alley behind the Apache Hotel, which is the Horseshoe Club, and they called the police department the Blue Room. It would get eight, nine o’clock at night and the sheriff would figure us kids should be on our way home, he’d rattle his stick and the bars and tells us to get the hell out of the alley and naturally we would. I remember walking into the Pioneer Club and the Boulder Club and I saw the customers sitting at a table playing (unintelligible) or poker that I could sell him the newspaper I’d stand there and watch the play until the hand was over and sell him the newspaper and be on my way. There wasn’t any security guards in there that I can remember but naturally there was always a bouncer hanging around if some young tough got out of line, why, he’d wind up out on the street. I’ve seen that a time or two. Howard Hughes arrived in Las Vegas around this time, he took up residence in the Desert Inn Hotel. Well, Howard Hughes is kind of a mystique to the people around Las Vegas, ah, very few people ever saw this man. I saw him a couple of times and the first time I saw him I didn’t know who I UNLV University Libraries Roger H. Dudley 12 was looking at until I was told later. I don’t really remember this guy doing anything outstandingly good for Las Vegas. Like a couple of guys, Benny Binion has done a lot of good for the schools in Las Vegas and other charitable organizations. Wilbur Clark he had a pretty good name around Las Vegas. They used his name in the Desert Inn Hotel. I don’t believe he had a lot to do with it. But he had a good name and they used it. As far as Howard Hughes is concerned, he gobbled up three or four sections of land west of Las Vegas and it’s still in his name, Summa Corporation, I think, with big plans of bringing the movie industry to Las Vegas from Hollywood. But as we all know it didn’t transpire and that’s all I know about Mr. Hughes. It would appear that one of the major, if not the most important aspect of Las Vegas has of course been the gambling industry, and you have been in it now for almost twenty years, so definite changes have been noted through these years. What is the major change that you have seen? Or actually, there’s really been several changes, I go back to 1945, ’46, when I can remember being around those dusty old joints down on Fremont Street. The trade was not really tourist oriented at the time. The train would come through and people would get off the train and go down Fremont Street and drink and gamble and what have you. I guess that type of trade along with the people here in Las Vegas that their small businesses were, I guess you could say, prospering. They spent a good deal of their time down at Fremont Street on the weekends. It went from that type of business to an auto trade where, after the Second World War, why, people were able to get a hold of automobiles where previous to that and during the war, they couldn’t get an automobile. And they would come in from, the majority of them from California. California kept our business going here for a good many years. And I remember the old signs on the highways coming into Las Vegas and then they started advertising in other states nearby and UNLV University Libraries Roger H. Dudley 13 even back east along in the late fifties, ’58, ’59, why the air trade started bringing a lot of people in. Then from the air trade, nationally the advertisement went farther than that and then the corporations took over Las Vegas and running these places and doing the advertisement and it got into a nationwide situation. And in the last five or six years, I’d say 1975 through today, 1981, why, the international trade has been unbelievable. The Mexican trade and the Canadian trade, Puerto Rico, just all the major countries and our side of the North and South American continent are bringing junkets into this, into Las Vegas. You deal blackjack and you have now for almost twenty years, obviously the game of blackjack has stayed reasonably stable over this time, well there must be certain differences between the time you started dealing and the time you’re dealing now. I, when I first started dealing blackjack, the game of blackjack had already become quite popular. They brought blackjack games into the gambling places here in Las Vegas to give the ladies something to do while their husbands were shooting crap, and they realized what a moneymaker it was. And also there were very few slot machines, they started putting a lot of them into the Golden Nugget when it opened up in ’46. And all the places that opened up after that had a, the casino was surrounded, the games were surrounded with slot machines and plenty of them. They realized that the actual nut of the gambling place was paid by the slot machine. They can set a slot machine to pay off just about whatever percentage they wanted it to. They, you take, if a hundred dollar bill is dropped in change in a slot machine they can set it to where it would hold forty percent, sixty percent, thirty percent, whatever they wanted it to hold. And that would, they could just set their barometer on whatever it would take to pay their monthly nut and the games were nothing but gravy, if they won. UNLV University Libraries Roger H. Dudley 14 Why in particular was blackjack considered such a money maker, as opposed to say, oh craps or poker? Why, you can get out a lot of hands. Back in, up until about 1965 or ’66, they were, blackjack was a six handed game and they some genius, I don’t know who he was discovered that they could add an extra hand to that blackjack game. Now they were paying license to the state for a six hold game and they can add one more hold to that game so for every six games they wound up with one game absolutely free. That was the idea behind it, if you understand what I mean. What do you mean six hold game as opposed to seven hold game? Well, a six handed blackjack game is the way it used to be dealt. Now they have, now the dealer deals to seven hands. They pay the tax on one game, we’ll say that the tax on the game is twenty-five hundred dollars a year for a six hold game. They add one more hold to that layout and you put five other games with the first one then you have an extra game that an extra six hands that you’re actually not paying for, which amounts to one free game. Which is pure profit for the casino? Well, no, just you don’t have to pay tax on it, that’s all. It was a pencil pusher’s idea and that’s the way it went down. They added more games to the casinos all along. When I first went to work at the Sahara we had twelve 21 games, two wheels and four dice games and a big six. A big six? Well, Wheel of Fortune. Big six. The large wheel with the paddle on it that clicks and drives everybody crazy. What is the purpose of that? That’s a money maker and it’s also, I guess, you might say, the romance of the gambling business. People just expect it to be there. It was in all the movies and all the riverboats and the UNLV University Libraries Roger H. Dudley 15 Mississippi and where have you. So every gambling place has one. It holds about seventy or eighty percent. I don’t even know why they license it in the state of Nevada but they do, that’s beside the point. But they, these gambling places added more 21 games all the time. I believe the MGM has eighty or ninety 21 games, I’m not sure on the count. The Hilton has thirty-eight or forty. The other large casinos in town, the more 21 games the better. If on two or three 21 games in the course of an eight hour period, they get beat for a large sum of money, the other thirty-five or forty or fifty or sixty would pick up the difference and narrow the loss down considerably, if not overtake it, and that’s the reason for it. Where were you living at this point in your life? This is now about 1961. In ’61 I was living on 208 North Fifteenth Street. I bought a piece of property out in Paradise Valley on the corner of Annie Oakley and Rawhide. I bought six acres out there. I sold some of it off and I built a home out there and I got married. At that particular time I was dealing 21 at The Mint. I dealt there for, oh, two or three months, if I remember correctly, and I went across the street to the Lucky Strike Club. I dealt over there for about six months and then I was hired at the Horseshoe. At that time in the Horseshoe’s history Mr. Binion was in the federal prison for income tax evasion and the people from the Fremont Hotel had taken over the Horseshoe. I worked there for about six months and I quit the gambling business and started in the construction business, that lasted about two and a half months and things kinda started going downhill. And I got a chance to go out to Henderson to the Eldorado Club. Sam Boyd and his son Bill Boyd had just bought a place out there, it was formally the Wheel, they named it the Eldorado Club. I worked there for about eight or ten months, something like that and I went to work at the Sahara Hotel. I was at the Sahara for seven years and went to work at the International Hotel or the Hilton, when it opened in July 2nd, 1969, and I’ve been there ever UNLV University Libraries Roger H. Dudley 16 since. That’s about, that’ll gobble up the last twenty years and that last, in that twenty year period in 1963 I bought a rod