Las Vegas Takes Cue from Los Angeles
The legal nature of betting in the Silver Sate enabled gamblers to practice their livelihood respectably.
This brought them above ground from the underworld, so they in turn helped to ensure the success of the urban gambling resort which gave legitimacy to their way of life.
The most important contribution of professional operators from Los Angeles, however, was the strengthening of the bond between Southern California and Las Vegas.
Gamblers like McAfee, Cornero, and Siegel had all worked in the Los Angeles area and encouraged many of their former customers to visit southern Nevada.
Moreover, relocated casino entrepreneurs knew how to cater to Southern Californians.
When Guy McAfee timed the opening of his 91 club, on the Los Angeles highway, to coincide with Ria Gable's divorce from Clark Gable, he demonstrated the knack for publicity that was essential to the rapid growth of the gaming industry in Las Vegas.
McAfee and his California colleagues not only amended their local adversaries to broaden their businesses, but they also mimicked Las Vegas' and Hollywood' past.
The movie crowd had regularly patronized the gambling dens along Spring Street before the municipal reforms of 1938 and 1939.
Now it made its way increasingly to southern Nevada, and attractedother Californians to the desert town in its wake.
Taking a cue from the newly arrived entrepreneurs, the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce readily incorporated Hollywood personalities into a promotional campaign.
By this means urging tourists to rub elbows with writers, movie stars, directors, and other vacationists around the gaming tables, a ploy certain to appeal to a population enamored of its celluloid heroes.
The migration of experienced casino operators from Los Angeles at long last made Las Vegas a full-fledged satellite of Southern California.
A mere trickle during the 1930s, the swelling current of Angelenos streaming through Las Vegas after 1939 washed away old limitations and drastically reshaped both gaming practices and the resort town.
A certain fondness for southern Nevada and a pronounced inclination to gamble openly channeled Californians' thorough-going impact on the desert community.
Angelenos had demonstrated an attachment to the area by visiting enough to the Coast to be an ideal automobile excursion, its climate seemed familiarly pleasant, especially with the growing use of air conditioning, and it offered recreational opportunities that appealed to Californians, but after municipal reforms in Los Angeles, were less readily available in the Golden State.
Moreover, once they began traveling to Las Vegas regularly, Southern Californians found the town congenial.
The trappings of the wild West may have attracted visitors to southern Nevada a first time, but such gimmicks gradually lost their appeal.
