ANOTHER CLEAR-CHANNEL RADIO INTERVIEW


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.