Larry Ruvo and Ken Henderson: 35 years of Las Vegas memories

I first visited Las Vegas on a cross-country drive from Los Angeles to New York in 1965, and my only memory was watching Dean Martin and his Golddiggers at Caesars Palace. Although I shot the first episodes of “Entertainment Tonight” and “Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous” here, my own real memories of this great town began when I moved here full time in 1999.

With BOLV about to celebrate, this was the perfect time to turn back the clock 35 years with Keep Memory Alive founder Larry Ruvo, who brought the Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health to our city, and Best Agency CEO Ken Henderson, who also is the producer of Clint Holmes’ “Between the Lines” at The Palazzo.

Larry is up first:

Thirty-five years ago, I was all over the Strip. I was having a great time. The Stardust was open, The Maxim had opened and it was a popular place. Even then, at least once a month, I had to go by The Frontier and see Siegfried & Roy. I loved that show so much: It was so small and intimate, that room. The Landmark was still in its heyday. You drove down the Strip and in front of Circus Circus, there were mini fountains.

Entertainers from that period, Don Rickles, Jerry Lewis, Marty Allen, are still around. We would go Downtown more frequently because of The Top of the Mint. Sinatra Downtown at the old Nugget in the 1980s, that was a spectacular part of my life and history. The Union Plaza was there, but it was a time that Howard Hughes was changing the city, and Nieman Marcus opened at Fashion Show mall. That was a revelation on Feb. 14, 1981.

My favorite story from the ’80s was with the Formula 1 race at the Caesars Palace parking lot. In order to encourage people to buy tickets to the race and also because Nieman Marcus wanted to support the race, the department store was raffling a 1981 Ferrari 308 GTSI, my dream car at the time. I bought tickets for other people and myself. People from all over the world called me. They wanted tickets, and I’d take the extra stub and put it in a drum for the raffle.

I felt without question that I was going to win that car because I had hundreds and hundreds of tickets in that cylinder that was going around. After the race, I ran down to Neiman Marcus, and I knew that I was going to get that car. I didn’t get it; a lady from New Hampshire won it.

I went up to her and asked, “How are you going to get that car back to the East Coast?” Long story short, I bought it from her on the spot at Neiman Marcus. The next day, I drove it through Fashion Show, and the big, big excitement for me in the ’80s was having that Ferrari.

My mother and father’s original Italian restaurant The Venetian was open in the ’80s. It opened in 1955 and closed in 1994. They had a long run. In the ’80s, you go into The Venetian and Perry Como was starring in Las Vegas. Perry came to the restaurant with me, we brought Vic Damone, Frank Sinatra, so many entertainers.

They all ate there, and my day was between Southern Wine and Spirits and back to my house, and I passed The Venetian all the time and I’d see my dad. If there weren’t celebrities inside, there was the Mafia or the FBI or Oscar Goodman and his friends. It was always an interesting group in our Venetian restaurant.

Giant boxing matches

The Strip compared to today was bare 35 years ago. If you looked west of the 15, it was bare desert. There was not a lot of development or homes or any industrial development. The Strip hotels weren’t as big. It didn’t begin to change until The Mirage opened in November 1989.

In the early ’80s, the big thing we had were the boxing fights, giant fights. Marvin Hagler and Tommy Hearns, Muhammad Ali at Caesars. Those were the events. Today, we have T-Mobile Arena, MGM Grand Garden Arena and the Thomas & Mack Center.

Back then, we didn’t have an arena; they were all outside. They remained outside until 1993 when parachutist James Miller, aka “The Fan Man,” flew into the ring during the Evander Holyfield and Riddick Bowe bout at Caesars.

(It was the year that Motorola introduced its “elongated brick” of a cell phone, which one of Bowe’s security staff used to hit the helmet of the parachutist many times. The fight was delayed 21 minutes.)

Las Vegas back then was all about entertainment and big buffets. Fine dining was at House of Lords where I worked when I was a teenager. We had Palace Court at Caesars and Regency Room at The Sands. Those were the true great restaurants on the Strip. Batista’s also was very popular. In those days, nobody came here for hotel rooms. The regular rooms were not that much, nothing like they are today.

My friend, may he rest in peace, Ralph Lamb, he ran this town with an iron fist. He was a true, great sheriff. There was a lot more formality. Men more often than not at least had a coat and tie, sometimes tuxedos, but always a coat and tie on a Saturday night. When you went to see shows and almost all restaurants in fine dining, you had to have a jacket, and they would prefer a tie. It wasn’t so much an elegant era but definitely more tasteful and sophisticated.

The time we are in now is pretty elegant with the celebrity chefs and restaurants. Somebody said to me recently, “What do you miss about Old Las Vegas having grown up here all your life?” I said, “Nothing, not compared to today.” Look at the medical. We didn’t have great medicine then. Culture, we have The Smith Center now. The schools are much better today. We didn’t have any private schools other than Bishop Gorman High.

First high rise

We had our first high-rise building back then, The Regency Towers. The thing that changed really, though, was Howard Hughes with Fashion Show and Neiman being built. So many of the gamblers used to have to be flown with their families to Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills for their shopping. By the time they came home, they were exhausted. Our mutual friend Wolfgang Puck really started the evolution of fine dining with Spago at Caesars Palace in 1992.

The I-15 as we know it today was nothing like that in 1980. The on-ramps were just at Sahara and Tropicana. I don’t know if the road went all the way to Russell, but it did have a median. Las Vegas in the ’80s didn’t go very far east or west of I-15. Sahara stopped at Decatur, and from there on it was a dirt road.

I remember the tumbleweed rolling down Sahara Avenue. My father owned a piece of property on Paradise Road, and I would do my shotgun clay pigeon shooting on Paradise and Tropicana at the property 50 yards due south of Paradise. Sahara Avenue used to be called San Francisco Street and was still a two-lane street.

It’s amazing what’s happened in 35 years. OMG. There’s no other city in the world like it.

And here’s Ken Henderson:

In 1980, I was one year out of high school, my first year of college. Siegfried & Roy lived real close to where I lived off Vegas Drive, at that time a very small street behind me. I used to hear them loading their tigers in and out every evening. It would sound like we were in the Serengeti. They were at the Frontier way before The Mirage was built. You could hear the lions roaring every night about 11 or midnight. Since we were in the desert, this would sound like Africa.

I was in college working at a bar across from UNLV that was the hot place to go for music and live music. There were no big clubs on the Strip, no hotel clubs. This was the bar that everyone went to as the hot place to go: PT’s. The very same two brothers who started PT’s all over the city, and they sold it off to Golden Gaming and made their millions.

That was the place to go, and it was a $2 cover charge, all the beer you can drink until 10 o’clock, then it became like a nightclub. Local DJs spun real vinyl, not any of the fancy mixing like we have today.

The telephone club

There was a place called The Brewery, which was the other nightclub, and a place called Pucci’s, a bar where you sat at tables and there were lights above the tables, and the lights had a number on them and there was a phone on every booth. You could pick up the phone because you saw a hot girl sitting over at table 21, and you could call her, could talk to her.

They really wouldn’t know where it was coming from, but that was the whole idea of the place. You could communicate with each other. You know, “Can I buy you a drink?” It was quite funny, and a lot of meet-ups took place there. There are couples still married in Las Vegas who met there.

It was 10 years before it began to change with the arrival of The Mirage. We thought that we had the biggest club, the best club based on the lines. It was spectacular in a simplistic way. Wood-panel wall. All the pictures were screwed into it. The Strip was very sparse. The big places were Caesars with the Grand Entrance. The Strip went all the way down to Fremont Street.

It was very minimalistic. You didn’t hear about it. There was not much going on for locals. There was nothing that enticed us to go there. We had regular performers, but nobody had residencies like they do today. The hotels were all owned independently, so no hotel groups.

Each hotel had a pretty big entertainment menu, so if your friends were coming into Las Vegas, you could look at these menus and say there’s Diana Ross, you got David Copperfield, you got David Brenner, and there was a million things to go do in the hotels. Locally, though, there was nothing that pulled locals. They really never pushed for that.

Bonfires on Sahara

If you went up Sahara, I think it probably passed Jones, from then on it was desert, there was a bar called Mad Matty’s at the end. We would all go to the top of Sahara, drive up there, and there on the weekends, people would meet with wheelbarrows with wood and bonfires going. Everybody would go there and drink beer and hang out. Homes at Red Rock weren’t even thought of as a future community. In the ’80s, you were really limited to where you could go.

Fremont Street was open, and we’d call it “Cruising Fremont Street.” You’d get in your car and drive from one end to the other in a loop. It was a two-lane deal, so you would drive by each other’s cars very slow playing music. You could high-five each other, see a hot girl and wait until the way back until you see her again. A conveyer belt. People would do that all night long.

Live piranhas

Caesars was very much the place to go for everything else: big events, road races, the Grand Prix, boxing, basketball, hockey. It had the outdoor arena, a sort of giant stadium at the time. Even if it was raining or sprinkling, the events always went on. I landed the role of Caesars in the Bacchanal Room in 1985.

I had always heard rumors that Jay Sarno wanted to kick off the evenings there putting a live pig or goat into the big fountain in the middle of the room with live piranhas! His son told me recently that it was a true story, but his father never got to do it although that’s what he always wanted to do.

Back then all the kids who were born and raised here worked for hotels on the Strip. Most of us were lifeguards during the summer at the pools. I was a lifeguard at The Aladdin and The Hilton. Those were the fun summer jobs.

You couldn’t just show up at a pool like now. Caesars was really an exclusive pool. You had to show a room key, they had security at the door. If you got to Caesars Palace pool and you weren’t staying there, you didn’t get in.

As kids, we were always out to find the best-priced buffets. For $4.95, you could eat all the eggs, sausage and bacon all night long. It was very, very inexpensive, so it was a big deal for all of us. We used to live at the buffets. The Mirage was the first hotel that took it to the next level.

Caesars was always the big deal, but when The Mirage came at the end of the ’80s, you realized that it was about to change forever. We were all stunned with the growth that followed. The state bird was the crane, and on the Strip there’d be 12 cranes for all the building going on. The openings became the norm, then implosions started, and they became the norm.

Thirty-five years later, you just marvel at the growth and progress. We have certainly built into a massive city that has everything.