Fabulous Las Vegas in the 50s: Glitz, Glamour & Games
by Fred E. Basten and Charles PhoenixAngel City Press, 127 pp., $26.95
A “real-life, make-believe world,” full of “fun, fantasy, and risque pleasures” — that was the promise Las Vegas offered a generation of Americans wearied by World War II and energized by the country’s burgeoning prosperity. Fabulous Las Vegas in the 50s captures that promise: glamour, kitsch, troublesome anomalies and all. The book is lavishly, marvelously illustrated with vintage photographs, advertisements, and reproductions of matchbooks, postcards, etc. These illustrations are the point, more so than the slightly sketchy text, which does include an entertaining forward by Keely Smith and a useful chronology of famous hotels and resorts. The authors also note in passing the less fabulous aspects of Vegas in the 50s, like the mushroom clouds you could see from the strip at dusk, and the color barrier preventing black entertainers from sleeping or eating at the hotels where they worked. But most of the book, as it should be, is devoted to the architecture, the entertainers, and the relaxed marriage laws that made this Las Vegas a more easygoing version of the terrifying megalith-of-fun it is today. Point me toward the Chuckwagon buffet, please.
This article appears in December 24 • 1999.