April 14, 2018
Saturday
I just finished my fifth interview with Morgan White Jr. on
his clear-channel broadcast from Boston that reaches the eastern two-thirds of
the country. In our hour-and-a-quarter discussion, we covered what the isolated
but romantic Las Vegas Strip resort desert oases were like in the 1950s, my
wonderful years working for Howard Hughes’ Summa Corporation, and Ben Siegel’s
life and vision for the Las Vegas Strip.
We also discussed how I opened the first sports book in a
Strip casino, and it became Las Vegas’ most popular. I explained how my sports
book manager Sonny Reizner set the betting line for the entire nation. Every
morning, as he put up his contest numbers in the book at 9 a.m., 35 men stood
around writing them down, so they could rush to the nearest payphones to call
them to the nation’s largest bookmaking syndicates. Similarly, America’s
biggest newspapers and TV and radio stations across the country carried the Castaways’ betting line in their sports
stories.
Morgan was very interested in talking with me about Sonny,
because they were good friends. Every time Morgan visited Las Vegas, they had
long chats. Now when Morgan visits, he and I have dinner and talk late into the
evening about the town’s casino history and the colorful characters associated
with it. Thank you, Morgan, for the great publicity!
I continue to work hard on my next Nevada history book about
the casinos of the 1920s through the 1940s, which I described in detail in my
last blog below. In the meantime, a major casino consulting assignment came my
way, and it slowed me down from writing for awhile, so I am now looking forward
to this new history’s publication next Spring, rather than this Fall.
