Chester Hodson interview, March 4, 1981: transcript

UNLV University Libraries Chester A. Hodson Jr. i An Interview with Chester A. Hodson Jr. An Oral History Conducted by Marlene L. Larsen 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 Chester A. Hodson Jr. ii © Ralph Roske Oral History Project on Early Las Vegas University of Nevada, Las Vegas, 2019 UNLV University Libraries Chester A. Hodson Jr. 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 Chester A. Hodson Jr. iv Abstract On March 4, 1981, collector Marlene L. Larson interviewed Chester Albert Hodson, Jr. (born December 21st, 1948 in Las Vegas, Nevada) at the Sizzler restaurant in Las Vegas, Nevada. In this interview, Mr. Hodson speaks about working in the restaurant industry in Las Vegas, as well as his father’s experience working in the industry. He also talks about living in Las Vegas and the changes he has seen throughout his life. UNLV University Libraries Chester A. Hodson Jr. 5 Okay. I’m Marlene Larsen and I am here speaking to Chet Hodson. It’s Wednesday, March, 4th, 1981, and we’re at the Sizzler restaurant on the corner of Tropicana and Eastern in Las Vegas. We’re gonna repeat some of the things that we just talked about over here. You wanna tell me a little bit about your family’s history? You spoke about them being Mormons. Yes. My father’s family were all Mormons, okay. They were Mormons from Utah. They moved to the United States, where both my father’s mother and his dad—my father’s father (unintelligible), my father’s mother, my grandmother on the other side, her dad was the first supervisor of the Mormon Church Farm in Salt Lake City, Utah. He came across what (unintelligible). My—on my mother’s side, that’s very sketchy too, ‘cause my family, because there was a divorced dad in the middle of it, and lost track of the Durham half of the family, but the Durham half we haven’t been able to trace back. We know a lot about the Totten family. My mother’s dad was a bootlegger during prohibition, okay. And just Idaho—they were Idaho Baptists. Where did your father meet your mother? Okay, my dad met my mother in Salt Lake City, Utah. My dad was executive chef in the Hotel Utah in Salt Lake City. My mother was in nurses training at St. Marks Hospital in Salt Lake City. And they met each other in Salt Lake City. And after they were married, my dad became executive chef of Sun Valley Lodge in Idaho for the Union Pacific Railroad. My mother became head nurse of the Sun Valley Medical Unit up there. And she was a surgical nurse at Sun Valley, my dad was the executive chef. They were—‘cause he was doing with the Union Pacific, they then set off from there to New York City, wherefore, they lived in New York City for about six months. He did his Chefs-in-Stewards training for the Union Pacific Railroad at the Waldorf UNLV University Libraries Chester A. Hodson Jr. 6 Astoria. From there, they moved back to Sun Valley, Idaho and he became executive chef of Sun Valley, Idaho for the Union Pacific. He also was executive chef over the chefs that he had at Bryce Canyon, Zion Canyon, and one other, let’s see, Bryce, Zion, and Yosemite. They were all—at that time, all the—most of the national parks were controlled by all the concessions, the restaurants and all that sort of stuff, were controlled by the railroads. They set those places up for places to take people for vacations. That’s interesting. I didn’t know that. When did they come to Vegas? They came to Vegas in September, 1948. My dad came here as a sous chef for the Las Vegas Flamingo Hotel. Bugsy Siegel had been killed, and he came to Las Vegas with Chef Jack Cohen. Jack Cohen was the guy that started my dad at the Hotel Utah. My dad had started out as a dishwasher at the Hotel Utah for Chef Jack Cohen. And when Jack Cohen left, I forget where Jack went at that time, my dad had grown up in the Hotel Utah, and he became the executive chef. At the time my dad came to Las Vegas, he was the only American born, American trained chef of any status in Las Vegas. All the other chefs were European. When he made executive chef in the Flamingo Hotel, he was the only American born, American trained chef in Las Vegas up until, really until Don Anderson, who was executive chef—used to be, he’s not it now, but used to be the executive chef at the Sahara. There was no other American born or American trained chef on the Las Vegas Strip. My dad spent thirteen years as executive chef at the Flamingo Hotel. During that time, the Flamingo at that time—well, like I said, Bugsy Siegel had been killed, alright? Gus Greenbaum and Mayer Lansky from the syndicate had the Flamingo Hotel. They were in control of syndicate bosses in the Flamingo Hotel. Gus Greenbaum during that time stepped out of line. They killed him and his wife in Tucson, Arizona. Mayer Lansky then brought the Florida UNLV University Libraries Chester A. Hodson Jr. 7 syndicate, so Gus Greenbaum’s interest in the Flamingo to the Florida syndicate. The Florida syndicate took over for the hotel. And my dad had never worked for anybody but like, the New York or California syndicate people, so he didn’t get along with the Florida syndicate at all ‘cause they wanted to run it just like they ran their hotels in Florida. So many hotels at that time were on the coast in Miami, that people just stayed. They had the flocking of people. They didn’t have to maintain a real high standard. Where Las Vegas, it was built on the whole concept of the high roller at that time. So the Flamingo Hotel had hardly any rooms at all. It was—they had bungalows and they had one or two story buildings, guest rooms, and everything was geared for the high roller. The shows were comped, the food was free, the rooms were free, ‘cause those people spent large sums of money on the gaming tables. The whole Las Vegas Strip was built under that original concept. One of the oldest hotels at that time was the El Rancho Vegas. Very few rooms. The first real, full size hotel really on the Las Vegas Strip, it was, when you drove, when you came to Las Vegas in that time—1948—there was the El Rancho Vegas, there was the Last Frontier, there was the Desert Inn, the Sands, what is now the Sahara, was the old Bingo Club, and from the Sands on, it was desert. (Laughs) Until you got to the Flamingo Hotel. They built here in the middle—way out there in the desert, set the Flamingo Hotel. It was a city in itself. It had its own water supply, its own sewage system, everything. It was just a little entity. Just, wasn’t tied to anything, city or county or anything else, it was set up there. And then way out past that, straight up the Strip was McCarran Airport. At that time, McCarran Air field was also co-owned with the federal government. And the Flamingo food service was under the control of your father at that time? UNLV University Libraries Chester A. Hodson Jr. 8 Yes. All of food service. The kitchens, dining rooms were all his. So he couldn’t get along with these people from Florida and he just quit? So he just made an arrangement. It was their hotel and somebody had to go (Laughs) and it wasn’t gonna be them. (Laughs) (Laughs) So he left there and he went to work for the Showboat Hotel on the opposite end of town. The Showboat sat all by itself down on Boulder Highway. On the corner of Boulder Highway, Charleston, and Fremont Street. They all came together then. And that was—the people that had that hotel at the time were the Morlidges, the Conways, and Jackie Gaughan was a major stockholder in it. They were all native Las Vegans. They were all—they were more (unintelligible) syndicate. Okay, they were syndicate families. They were local families who had got into the gaming industry here. Jackie Gaughan had the El Cortez Hotel in town, the Morlidges and the Houssel’s, the Conway’s all had an interest in other hotels. Their major hotel was the Tropicana Hotel on the Strip. That was their major property. Then they—they owned several of the other properties around town as shareholders of the smaller clubs. Jackie Gaughan now has the El Cortez. I believe he still has interest in the Showboat, he may still have interest in that. But he has the Western, the Barbary Coast, alright. He is a major stockholder in (unintelligible). At one time he was a major stockholder. Whether he still is or not, I don’t know for the Union Pacific. Another guy was involved in that thing, how he’s tied in, I don’t know for sure, was Sam Boyd of Sam Boyd’s California Hotel Downtown. He was a major stockholder in the original building that opened for the Union Pacific. He was also a major stockholder in the Aladdin Hotel when it first originated in Las Vegas. The Aladdin Hotel was the first hotel to ever be built on the UNLV University Libraries Chester A. Hodson Jr. 9 Las Vegas Strip without a casino. It was called the Tallyho. It had no casino. Where the casino is now was like a big, open lobby. It had soda shops. It was done on an old English concept. The Tallyho. It failed as the Tallyho because of locating. It became the King’s Crown, and it failed as the King’s Crown, then it became the Aladdin. (Unintelligible) Aladdin, the long story. After the Showboat, did your father retire? No. Okay, while my dad was at the Showboat, he found out he had a disease called (unintelligible), cancer of the lymph nodes, alright. This is a starting point for Hodgkin’s Disease, alright. And his health got worse and worse. He was there for—he was at the Showboat for nine years. And his health got real bad so he quit the Showboat and they took him to UCLA Medical Center. And they used a treatment at that time of nitrogen mustard gas, pumping nitrogen mustard right into the bloodstream. And they arrested the disease completely. And so when he came back, he was feeling real good. The Silver Slipper had been closed by the Nevada State Gaming Commission for cheating. They found shaved dice and shaved cards on the tables. It had been closed for, I think a good year. And Mr. Moss, who’d been a minor partner in the Flamingo, my dad was there, had just purchased Silver Slipper and reopened it. And he brought my dad over as director of food and beverage for the Silver Slipper. My dad spent the next nineteen months there as director of food and beverage and this cancer flared back up again. He left there and within a year he died. He died in 1966. You get your interest in the restaurant business from your father? Yes. It’s all I ever—I started this business when I was twelve years old. I told my dad I wanted to work in a restaurant and he said, “Fine”. I was twelve years old and I started working in the kitchen of the Showboat Hotel. I started by hauling garbage in the kitchens. I went from hauling UNLV University Libraries Chester A. Hodson Jr. 10 garbage to being a dishwasher. From dishwasher to coming in on the weekends and some stuff working with the pantry people, cooking pancakes, waffles, and that sort of stuff in the pantry, doing prep work. I then trained, so under my dad, when I trained with my dad, ‘cause I couldn’t really be put on the payroll so I used to get pay outs, cash paid outs. They trained me over on the fry cook station. They trained me on the porter station. I trained with the store room man, where learning how to do liquor purchasing, how to do food purchasing. By the time I was sixteen years old, I had trained in just about every department in the kitchen. And when I was sixteen, I went out and started training—started working in the dining rooms as a busboy. I left there, I left the Showboat when my dad did. I went to the Silver Slipper with him. And I was head busboy at the Silver Slipper with him. And when I left the Silver Slipper then I went to the Dunes Hotel. I was sixteen and a half years old. I was fifteen when I left the Showboat, I was sixteen and a half when we left the Silver Slipper, and I went to the Dunes. Then I was—‘cause when I was sixteen and a half, I was six foot two. I became a busboy in the Showroom, which was totally illegal (Laughs) right, because it was a nude show. (Laughs) And I became a busboy at the Dunes, upstairs in the balcony. There’s a sixteen year and a half kid pulling down sixty-five, seventy bucks a night in tips. (Unintelligible) Yes. I was living very good. I left there and I went to work at the Flamingo Hotel. I worked Flamingo for a while as a busboy. And let’s see, my dad died about—let’s see, he died in November of ’66, and I was, I graduated in June of ’77. I didn’t know what I was gonna do. So I spent that summer just kicking around. I think I went back to the Silver Slipper for a while, bussed, the first time, just kicking around. And that year, they opened the hotel school at the UNLV University Libraries Chester A. Hodson Jr. 11 University of Nevada Las Vegas. And so I went out there and enrolled in Hotel Administration. So I was in school for three years and I pretty much majored in cafeteria for my first three years. (Laughs) (Laughs) I was just going to school because the Vietnam War. I was draftable. And, I failed to carry enough credits, so I got notified by the United States Government. They wanted me to attend their party in Vietnam. And, I says, “No, I’m not going to Vietnam”. I went down to Senator Howard Cannon’s office. My sister had been private secretary for Governor Grant Sawyer, the governor of the state of Nevada. And we knew a lot of people through her and a lot of people in the political offices of Howard Cannon, Alan Bible. And through Howard Cannon, I got into the—into the Army Reserves. So, to fulfill my active duty time in the reserves, I had to drop out of college, and they sent me off and I did my tour of duty. So I got sent to Fort (Unintelligible), Kentucky for basic training, and then Fort Sill, Oklahoma for artillery training. And I came back from that, I was almost twenty-one years old. I did about one more semester of school. I was married for the first time and I dropped out of school. I was out of school for five years. (Unintelligible) very fast, right? (Laughs) Life goes by quick, alright. But, I was married for the first time for about four and a half years. And towards the last year of my first marriage, I decided it was time for me to go back to college because my first wife, I got her through college. And she was a Geologist for the Department of Defense. She was the first woman Geologist to get to go underground at the Nevada Test Site, as an actual person on the payroll. They had had other women underground as tourists and that sort of stuff, female congresswoman, that sort of stuff. But she was the first woman employed UNLV University Libraries Chester A. Hodson Jr. 12 underground in the Nevada Test Site tunnels. And, I went back and finished my degree in hotel administration. Got divorced, then accepted a job with the Marriott Corporation. They sent me to Washington D.C. For my training, I spent nine weeks there in Washington D.C. for training, and from Washington D.C., they sent me to Los Angeles, California. I spent eighteen months in Los Angeles, California as an assistant food and beverage director at the Los Angeles Marriott Hotel. There was 1,063 rooms, we had seven bars, three restaurants that I was assistant director of. And, I left them in November ’78, came back to Las Vegas, Nevada. Spent a very brief time with Fred Harvey’s at McCarran International Airport as assistant director of food operations at McCarran International Airport. I said, I’m not in the business of feeding cattle. (Laughs) I did not like airline feeding. I found that out very fast. I found out that I didn’t like the type of feeding they do for passengers on airlines, okay. Not the people in the airplanes, but inside the terminals. It was a big rip off. The food was second rate at first rate prices. I just was totally unimpressed with anything I saw. Excuse me. So I left Fred Harvey operation and I came to work for Sizzler. And I’ve been with Sizzler Family Steakhouses now since May of 1979. I did nine months as an assistant manager with them. After nine months, I got my own unit. I was manager of the store up on Decatur (unintelligible) South Decatur? North Decatur, and I was there for approximately one year. I went from there to—I hadn’t even been there a year, so I took it January 12th—I was there January 12th of ’79, and I went back, from there I’d been the assistant manager at the Sahara store, and then I did assistant manager at the store that I’m in now. I was the assistant manager that opened this store—Tropicana and Eastern, August of ’78. Then they made me a manager January of ’79. In August of ’79, they took me and transferred me back in the store they had on Sahara Avenue. And for one year I trained managers for the UNLV University Libraries Chester A. Hodson Jr. 13 corporation. That’s only a—you only do it for twelve months. After twelve months, I was ready to go bananas, because you got a unit to run, you got manager trainees to take care of, to teach, it’s just a very heavy workload. Drives you nuts after a while. Left that—left there and came back to this store. And I’ve been the assistant manager for (unintelligible) who took over this store. Did you request coming back here or? This was the store that was open. The manager that was here became the training manager. So whoever took the training managers job at the end of my year, I took his store. Will you be training again in the future or were they just twelve months forever? No. I could possibly go back to training, but I have to request to go back. This—one of the priorities of the job is you’ve gotta be—you have got to want to do the job, because the headaches were unbelievable. Did you enjoy that? Yes, I enjoy training people. Especially in the service industry, okay, the food, service industry. I grew up, my dad stressed to me that this whole business, and in Las Vegas, especially—we’re talking about the tourist capital of the world—Las Vegas, Nevada. The gambling capital of the world, the entertainment center of the world, we have got to be this town. Service might—we have to know how to give service and not think that we’re subservient to the people we’re serving. That’s very hard for people to understand. It’s how to give service to people and yet maintain their own personal respect. Several other cities have destroyed themselves in this business, because they lost sight of that. One of the cities that’s now starting to rejuvenate itself is Atlantic City, New Jersey. For a long time, Atlantic City, New Jersey was a very service orientated town. It was the convention UNLV University Libraries Chester A. Hodson Jr. 14 center of the East Coast. And they lost sight of treating the tourists as welcome guests in their city. Doing that, giving good, quality service, and conventioneers got to the point where they didn’t want to go back. They didn’t want to go back to Atlantic City. Atlantic City, the Boardwalk was right there on the tubes, okay. Las Vegas is getting those. It’s getting to a point now, that, people really question whether or not they want to come to Las Vegas as (unintelligible). If you listen to the news, they interview people—conventioneers that have come here. They say, yes, we’re not a big—we’re not big rollers, so we get bumped around from hotel to hotel, our reservations aren’t here, we can’t get in to see this show, or we got—our reservations get bumped for this show, because they’re not big spenders. Las Vegas has gotta realize that the era of the big spender is over with. We’re not a city (unintelligible), we’re not a Las Vegas town. The city can run this town. They will—each one of the hotels will have it’s own entity, will have its own private police force, and they ran themselves. Nobody had to come in and tell them, hey, clean up your prostitution or clean up your—there wasn’t any. You never—you didn’t see streetwalkers. You didn’t see a streetwalker on the Strip. There were girls belonged to the hotels, they were—they worked for the hotel, take care of the big rollers, but there wasn’t the street prostitution. Now, the syndicates gone out of Las Vegas, the real syndicate, the real syndicate. Sure they always bring up all this (unintelligible) this person’s got syndicate ties, the real syndicate control is gone. It’s the big corporations, they don’t know how to handle—they don’t have any concept of what the city was based on. That was the thing. You could come to Las Vegas, you could have a good time, you could be wild and as rowdy as you wanted to be, so long as you didn’t step on somebody else’s toes. They don’t know how to control the people. They don’t know how to bring the big money people. They’ve let the federal government get in so tight with UNLV University Libraries Chester A. Hodson Jr. 15 auditing what happens on those gaming tables. The big money doesn’t want to put its big money down on those tables because they don’t know if the guy sitting next to him is an IRS agent. (Laughs) (Unintelligible) to the casino cages. The big money that gambles, it doesn’t want the IRS to know where that money is. (Laughs) The unions have—even though Las Vegas has been a union town for a long, long time, the unions have lost control of their people. (Unintelligible) this is what service is all about (unintelligible) and now they strike right at the, you know, the most critical times in the city ‘cause they think that’s a leverage. Sure it’s a leverage for ‘em, because the hotels want to hurry up and settle the strike, ‘cause they don’t want to lose all the business. But the people that get hurt during that strike don’t ever want to come back to Las Vegas. (Unintelligible) working at the hotels, the hotels and the union working together, and the people of Las Vegas saying, “Hey we’re here, the service people, let’s do our primary job.” They’re giving Vegas, really, a bad name. They’re saying, well, they’ll run us through like cattle, they wanna visit. It’s a cattle line. So you think that the city is losing its identity? As far as which direction its going? And it’s not sure exactly whether it’s going to go for conventions or back to high rollers or to ordinary people? It’s not sure how to assimilate all three. I don’t think they can assimilate all three, okay. Because of the economy, the traveling tourist, unless they’re in the immediate vicinity, Los Angeles, let’s take the median surrounding states. They gotta be either from Arizona, Utah, California, Idaho, Oregon, and they gotta be within immediate driving distance to one of the major gambling centers inside the state, either Reno or Las Vegas to be able to afford to drive here anymore, alright. Airfares are, you know, they’re gonna skyrocket. People and—it’s really gonna dampen, put a little bit of damper on the amount of tourist trade, just freelance tourist trade. (Unintelligible) the junkets, the charter groups, other UNLV University Libraries Chester A. Hodson Jr. 16 type of business. As far as tourist business, we’re gonna have to go after it. Being able to put together good, sellable packages for groups of people. When you bring in a group of people, you’ve gotta satisfy that whole group. Because if you don’t, you’re not gonna put that group back together. It’ll break it up. Those members will go and join other groups and they say, “No, I don’t want to go back to Las Vegas, alright.” You know, I usually say every one person that you hurt tells ten. Okay. So, you just keep multiplying. To go into the convention business, Las Vegas has got all of the facilities for conventions, they’ve got all the rooms they need. The convention center has grown so rapidly that it is able to house these large conventions. But the hotels have lost sight of the fact that when you book a convention, those conventioneers have gotta really get here. If they had reservations at the Las Vegas Hilton, or they had reservations at the Flamingo Hilton, their rooms gotta be there. You can’t bump ‘em out, because all of a sudden Joe Shmoe is bringing you a junket from Chicago. (Tape one ends) You’ve been to other cities and I’m sure you’ve heard, “Wow, you’re from Las Vegas, isn’t that exciting?” Did you find living in Las Vegas as a child real exciting? Okay, this is what always got me growing up in Las Vegas. We’d go out of town ‘cause we had friends up in Washington or Idaho or Salt Lake City, and they’d go, “You live in Las Vegas!” Yes, I live in Las Vegas. “Where can you live in Las Vegas?” Nobody—I go back let’s say ten, fifteen years ago, people didn’t believe anybody lived here. I guess they all thought we commuted in from Los Angeles and just worked the day, and you know, commuted back. I used to get, when I was a busboy in the coffee shops in the hotels in this town, I used to get some of the strangest things. “Well, where do you sleep at night?” “Well, I clear off a crap table and we UNLV University Libraries Chester A. Hodson Jr. 17 sleep there, you know.” You tell ‘em all sorts of stupid things because people couldn’t visualize Las Vegas having a community outside of the gambling of the Las Vegas Strip and Downtown for so many years. Las Vegas is a normal city. It’s absolutely normal. It’s like any other major city in the United States. And truly for its size, Las Vegas is not a major city. I mean, it’s not a Los Angeles, I mean, it’s not millions of people crammed into this area. We’re talking about 300,000 in the whole entire valley. Inside this mountain range around us, only 300,000 people, only 600,000 in the whole southern half of the state. It—it’s farming communities, it’s grocery stores, it’s just a normal town. I—I’ll tell you the fact my wife now works on the Las Vegas Strip. I never go there. We have friends come in town, we take ‘em down on the Strip. We show ‘em the Strip. We take ‘em Downtown. We show ‘em the Downtown. We give them our car if they don’t have their own car, a key to the house, and say, “Here, go!” Because, there’s no—there’s nothing in it for us really. You can’t live in Las Vegas and live the tourist life. You can’t live here and gamble. You can’t live here and party (unintelligible). That was not designed for the locals to partake in. Because it’s too—too close, too excessive. If you’re gonna gamble, move someplace else and visit Las Vegas. If you live in Las Vegas, don’t gamble here, okay. Because Caesar’s Palace was not built on people winning. Caesar’s Palace was built on it winning. Did you go through a stage of gambling? I think everybody that comes to Las Vegas or was born here, or grows up here or anything else at one time in their life has gotta be tempted by the gambling. Yes, I went through a stage of gambling in Las Vegas. I came out very (unintelligible). Luckily, the first time I had some big losses, I said whoops, that’s it. It’s all over with. I sat in the Mint Hotel one time. I was twenty one, twenty two years old, my brother—I have a half-brother, lives in Sacramento, California—UNLV University Libraries Chester A. Hodson Jr. 18 and he came to visit us, and at ten o’clock at night, we went Downtown, I don’t remember where it was, I think it was the Mint Hotel, we started gambling. I had fifty dollars in my pocket. We started gambling. At about three o’clock in the morning, I’ve got four thousand dollars stacked up in front of me. Left there at eight o’clock in the morning gave back that three or four thousand dollars I had stacked up in front of me plus the fifty I started with. And I says, if I’m too stupid to get up and walk away from the table that much money ahead, I don’t need to gamble anymore. I really have never gambled since. When people come to town for us, I’ll drop two dollars in the nickel slot machine, okay. But I don’t touch the slot machines in the grocery stores. In fact, it’s just like my restaurant, okay. There’s no slot machines in this restaurant. There’s not even a cigarette machine in this restaurant. Is that your request or? They wanna put one in, the only place it would fit inside my dining room—this is a family dining restaurant. There’s no room for a machine of cigarettes in the middle of my dining room. If the guy wants to install it outside the building, which he doesn’t because he’s afraid it’ll get ripped off, which it will, if he wants to install it out there, sure. I’d let him do it for the convenience of people who want to come in, hey I ran out of cigarettes (unintelligible). We’re one of the few restaurants, I guess, really in Las Vegas that has a non-smoking section. And we enforce it. We take one section of each, we control our restaurants. We post it, “Thank you for not smoking in this section”. There are no ashtrays, our waitresses automatically, if someone lights up a cigarette, the lady tells the people, “This area is non-smoking. I’ll gladly move you to a table on the other side or I’ll have to ask you not to smoke in this section.” We enforce that. And I think it makes a big impression on our clientele, that we take into consideration those people that don’t smoke, we take into consideration those that do. When we originally opened UNLV University Libraries Chester A. Hodson Jr. 19 these restaurants in Las Vegas, up until November of 1979, Sizzler Las Vegas had no beer or wine. All it served was coffee, tea, milk, and soft drinks. Do you have complaints from people in that there is no slot machines in here? Well, we get people that can’t believe that we don’t have slot machines. But I just went to (unintelligible) for breakfast this morning and they got slot machines. That’s (unintelligible). Sizzler is not involved in the gaming industry. We are—it’s just like we’re not involved really in the tourist industry. We are a neighborhood restaurant. Our whole business concept is every one of our restaurants we have in Las Vegas, all five of ‘em, were originally designed in their locations pick to service local clientele. The corner of Tropicana and Eastern is not exactly the tourist drag strip, you know, of Las Vegas. The store that we put on the corner on Decatur and Meadow Lane is not a major tourist load. We do have a lot on Sahara Avenue. But that was put there, where it was located on Sahara Avenue, was to service the local clientele. It does pick up quite a few tourists that are looking to get out of the hotels, alright. Looking for a name that they know, looking for a product that they’re familiar with at a reasonable price. The hotels no longer have a good steakhouse for a reasonable—they’re no longer really a reasonable price. They’re right up there with the rest of the corn country. (Unintelligible) Tennessee restaurants. Do you think that that’s in a way, false advertising? ‘Cause they advertise, in Wisconsin for example, come to whatever the restaurant and you can have all this for ninety-nine cents. Then you go into their buffets for breakfast or whatever, and you then you go back for lunch and they put you in a dining room and you wind up paying nine, ten dollars for dinner. Okay. No. I don’t think that really happens in Las Vegas. If you go into a buffet in Las Vegas, that’s what it is. The room was designed to make the structure of a buffet room, alright. Now UNLV University Libraries Chester A. Hodson Jr. 20 there are rooms in this town where you have both a buffet line and a sit down menu, but you have an option, okay. When I look at the national advertising that Las Vegas does, you can go and have a prime rib dinner, complete with all the trimmings, for $3.95, okay, or $4.95, whatever the different ads are now. But, it’s not in any of the goo