1984 in Las Vegas
Looking Back 40 Years to See What I Missed
By Geoff Schumacher
In the spring of 1984, I was a senior in high school, and like most high school seniors, I wasn’t paying much attention to anything beyond the narrow confines of my personal life. I had a serious girlfriend, I was on the baseball team, and I was doing some writing for the local newspaper. A plan to study journalism in college and become a reporter was starting to come into focus. But mostly, we were all having a good time drinking beer and listening to loud music at parties out in the desert.
I was aware of the presidential race. I was 18 and registered to vote. A handful of Democrats — Walter Mondale, Gary Hart, Jesse Jackson — were campaigning for the nomination to take on Republican President Ronald Reagan. I thought Hart would be the best option, and I even attended the local party caucus to support him.
The Las Vegas Strip in 1984.
It’s still not clear to me how at that early age I decided I was a Democrat and didn’t like Reagan. My parents were conservative, and Reagan was a very popular president. A lot of young people at that time supported him, none more so than Alex P. Keaton, the character played by Michael J. Fox on the sitcom Family Ties, which I watched regularly.
Some of it was rebellion — against my parents, against the “Greed is good” wave of the 1980s — but mostly it was a conviction that I was choosing the right side. I often have attributed the formulation of my political views to reading John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. I still stand by this as my inflection point, as that novel still resonates for me as a powerful look at the struggles of people living on the lowest economic rungs of society.
So, while I was paying some attention to the presidential race, I still was mostly a clueless kid who spent most of his time listening to music and goofing off.
The 40th anniversary of my high school graduation — 40 years! — triggered a curiosity about what was actually happening in Las Vegas in that infamous year immortalized by George Orwell. Today, I’m a historian, with a particular focus on Las Vegas, so I relished the opportunity to dig into the archives and discover what I missed.
Let’s set the stage. In 1984, there was no internet and no social media. There were no cell phones (we will come back to this). The cassette tape was the primary device for listening to music. People got information from newspapers or from the evening news broadcast on one of three networks. (This might sound nightmarish to some younger folks, but I assure you, there are valid reasons to look fondly on this pre-connected era.)
Geoff Schumacher in the 80’s.
In Las Vegas, this was before the megaresorts took over the Strip. There was no Mirage, Excalibur, MGM Grand, Luxor, Rio, Venetian, Paris or Bellagio. The big boys in the casino business then were Caesars Palace, Sands, Flamingo, Tropicana, Bally’s, Las Vegas Hilton, Frontier, Stardust, Dunes, Riviera and Circus Circus.
The Las Vegas metropolitan area is a lot bigger today than it was in 1984. Today, the metro area has about 2.4 million people. In 1984, it was 540,000. If you’re looking for a visual way to understand this, I recommend checking out this site.
What was happening in Las Vegas in the spring of 1984? The biggest news was a raucous, sometimes violent hotel strike. More than 17,000 workers from four unions — the Culinary, Bartenders, Musicians and Stagehands — walked off their jobs at 34 hotels and maintained picket lines on the Strip for several months.
Photo of Culinary Workers Union members on the picket line on the Strip, from the UNLV Special Collections & Archives.
This was front-page news every day. The police were constantly arresting people. In the early days of the strike, the hotels had to close restaurants and cancel shows because they didn’t have anyone to operate them. Non-striking workers were struggling to perform tasks they didn’t know how to do.
Bombs exploded several times at Strip hotels, including at the Tropicana and Frontier. Fortunately, nobody was hurt, but the explosions caused property damage. The culprits were never apprehended, but it was clear that the bombs were strike-related.
I don’t have any memory of this unfolding drama.
The lingering mob
Neither was I particularly aware of the mob’s presence in Las Vegas. By 1984, the mob no longer had the influence it had enjoyed on the Strip from the 1950s through the 1970s. RICO prosecutions and other enforcement measures had taken a heavy toll. But some mobsters remained, including Chicago Outfit enforcer Tony Spilotro, who, against all odds, was still walking the streets. His time would come two years later when he and his brother were beaten to death and buried in an Indiana cornfield. The feds never got Spilotro; his so-called friends did.
The main reason Spilotro remained free in 1984 was the work of defense attorney Oscar Goodman. Oscar whom I came to know later, was a talented and relentless advocate for his clients, and no one benefited more from his efforts than Spilotro. Goodman’s name was in the newspapers all the time, attacking federal agents and prosecutors for what he called harassment and misconduct. No one in their right mind at that time would have predicted that Goodman one day would serve three terms as Las Vegas mayor.
One of the great pleasures of looking through the newspapers in 1984 is reading columns by Ned Day. Day had been a thorn in the mob’s side for several years, first at the Valley Times and then at the Las Vegas Review-Journal and KLAS Channel 8. He exposed their criminal activities, yes, but what really got under their skin was his fearlessness, his willingness to poke fun at them. A great example of this was his column from May 23, 1984, about a longtime mob associate named Dominic Spinale.
A few days before, Spinale’s name had appeared in Day’s column. Then Day ran into Spinale in a restaurant, and Spinale wasn’t happy with what Day had written about him.
“From his body language, the tone of his voice, and from what he said, I got the feeling he didn’t like my profile of him,” Day wrote. “I deduced this when he began the conversation by calling me a bunch of names, suggesting that I am a drunkard, sexual pervert and several parts of the human anatomy that carry unflattering connotations.”
Day goes on to say that Spinale threatened that if he wrote about him again, “the quality of my life might suffer.” Day noted that Spinale was accompanied by a “very large gentleman” known to be closely associated with Tony Spilotro. This most likely was Herbie Blitzstein.
The column was cleverly fashioned as a memo to Day’s boss in which he explains that he isn’t being paid enough to keep writing about Spinale. “The long and short of it, boss, is that my encounters with Dominic and his friend last Saturday have left me quaking in my loafers. I can’t keep my teeth from chattering or knees from knocking. My quality of life has gone to hell.”
This is a Ned Day classic, tweaking an underworld figure who, in some circles, expected to be treated with a degree of respect.
Article from the Las Vegas Review-Journal, May 23, 1984, Page 23.
The harbingers
There was other news of note in the spring of 1984.
• Construction was underway on a highway — U.S. 95 — between downtown Las Vegas and Henderson. It is very difficult today to imagine what getting around Las Vegas was like before that stretch of highway existed. If you wanted to go to Henderson, you took Boulder Highway.
• Developers announced plans to build the 27-acre Wet ’n Wild water park on the north Strip. Wet ’n Wild is gone today, but it was a major presence in the lives of many thousands of young people here between the mid-1980s and 2004, when it closed. Lots of plans for the site have been promoted in the years since, but nothing has been built. The latest announcement promises a resort and arena.
Wet and Wild Aquatic Park, Las Vegas, Nevada: panoramic photograph from the UNLV Special Collections & Archives.
• Robert Maxson was hired as the new president of UNLV. The announcement did not warrant big headlines at the time, but it probably should have. Maxson would prove to be a major player in the growth of UNLV over the next 10 years, although he is perhaps most remembered for his bitter conflict with beloved basketball coach Jerry Tarkanian, who left the university under a cloud in 1992.
• Citicorp announced plans to build a big credit card processing center in Las Vegas. This was a huge deal. Nevada officials from Governor Richard Bryan on down worked hard to lure the company to Las Vegas. State laws were changed. Locals saw the facility as the beginning of a new wave of economic diversification for Las Vegas. The massive Citycorp facility was built in The Lakes, on West Sahara Avenue, and employed 1,000 people for many years. Citicorp did one thing that really annoyed people. Because of our Sin City reputation, it feared its customers would not send their payments to a Las Vegas address. Instead, it secured permission from the U.S. Postal Service to have correspondence addressed to “The Lakes, NV.” The Citicorp center had a good run in Las Vegas but shut down in 2014.
• With the Summer Olympics coming to Los Angeles that summer, the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police took the opportunity in May to assure the world that downtown and the Strip were free of prostitutes. This had been a big issue for Sheriff John McCarthy, who was criticized in the early 1980s for not cracking down on prostitution. His successor, John Moran, fulfilled a campaign promise to address the matter. “Shortly after Moran took office, vice officers started arresting prostitutes on the street,” the Review-Journal reported. “Certain areas, expecially the Strip near Flamingo Road, received extra attention. When the hookers retreated into resort hotels and casinos, vice officers followed. Prostitutes routinely are arrested at casino bars after approaching undercover officers.”
• Steve Wynn unveiled a new $50 million tower at the Golden Nugget. In classic Wynn fashion, he laid on the hyperbole in describing the tower. “We did our best to build the most blatantly elitist facility we could,” he said. “Not one square inch is the same as another square inch. Everything is original. It’s a project without compromise.” Wynn was a brash rising star in the Las Vegas casino business, but he was just getting started.
• I mentioned earlier that we would come back to cell phones. In the spring of 1984, Centel, the local phone company, announced plans to bring the “telephone of the future” to Las Vegas. In the following year, Centel said it would introduce a “breakthrough in telephone communication that could foreshadow the end of telephone lines. The cellular radio telephone is the coming rage in telephone communications.”
Article from the Las Vegas Review-Journal published on May 13, 1984, page 22.
The article noted that businessmen in Chicago and Washington, D.C., were already using cellular phones. At that time, cell phone use was primarily seen as occurring in one’s car and only by those who could afford the high price tag ($2,000-$3,000). The notion of the cell phone being as ubiquitous as it is today was still viewed as occurring years in the future. “The day is not far off when a businessman can stay in a Las Vegas hotel room and make all of his calls, including long-distance calls, on his portable cellular phone,” according to the article.
The entertainment scene
The 1980s were not a high point for Las Vegas entertainment. Elvis Presley’s last Las Vegas show was in 1976. His heir apparent, Wayne Newton, filled plenty of seats but could never stack up to The King.
Robert Goulet was a staple at the Dunes, while Lola Falana played the Sands and Toni Tenille the Riviera. The orangutan trainer Bobby Berosini was the big draw in the Lido de Paris show at the Stardust, while Siegfried and Roy were paying their dues at the Frontier. Burlesque shows dotted the Strip at the Holiday, Maxim and Silver Slipper. The top-draw comedians included Rich Little and Redd Foxx.
Obviously, these performers and productions appealed to a considerably older demographic, and they weren’t exactly pushing any boundaries.
Naturally, my friends and I were not interested in any of those acts, but we did catch a number of rock concerts at the Aladdin Center for the Performing Arts and the Thomas & Mack Center. Thanks to the wonders of internet archives, I can tell you the exact dates of a few of the shows I saw that spring:
• Ozzy Osbourne and Motley Crue, March 16, 1984, Thomas & Mack Center. Takeaway: The opening act outplayed the headliner.
Ticket from Ozzy Osbourne courtesy of Geoff Schumacher.
• Scorpions, March 29, 1984, Aladdin Center for the Performing Arts. Takeaway: Probably the most engrossing concert experience of my youth.
• Van Halen, May 15, 1984, Thomas & Mack Center. Takeaway: Incredible experience, and David Lee Roth would leave the band the following year.
Those were all great, sold-out shows that I remember fondly – and none of them was covered by the local press.
Looking back, looking forward
In late June of 1984, the big casino strike was finally winding down. Most of the casinos reached agreements with the Culinary, Bartenders, Stagehands and Musicians. The consensus seemed to be that there were no winners. Tourism revenue losses were pegged at $60 million. During the 75 days of picketing, 900 people were arrested. Jackie Gaughan, owner of the El Cortez hotel-casino, summarized the ordeal: “It was bad for everybody, bad for the unions, bad for the hotels, and most of all bad for the people.”
My general state of cluelessness about what was happening in the world did not change that summer, but it would, eventually, as I embarked on a career in journalism. In just a few years, as city editor of the Las Vegas Sun, it would be my job to know about everything that was happening in the community, and to make judgments about what was newsworthy and how it should be reported. Eventually, I discovered that I was more interested in the origins of things and pursued a second career as a historian. Breaking news was replaced by writing books and creating museum exhibits.
”Looking back at 1984, I wonder if anybody could envision a future Las Vegas of 2.4 million people and counting. A Las Vegas of megaresorts and master-planned communities, of major professional sports teams and residencies by the world’s greatest entertainers. My sense from studying the newspapers of that time is that Las Vegas was treading water. It worried that Atlantic City would seize its title as the nation’s premier gambling destination, but nobody was offering a compelling vision to counter this trend.”
This would change, and the primary catalyst would be Steve Wynn. Wynn recognized the potential for the Strip to be bigger and better — to draw many more visitors than it was seeing in 1984 and to fend off the threat from Atlantic City. He raised $600 million – an astonishing sum at the time — and built The Mirage. When it opened in 1989, and when it succeeded, it changed everything. Las Vegas was emboldened and off to the races.
Still, 1984 did sow a few seeds of our future. On April 22, 1984, the Review-Journal printed a feature story about a young man named Anthony Curtis who had recently started publishing a newsletter called the Las Vegas Advisor. Anthony’s mission was to find the best deals in town for visitors, such as the 49-cent breakfast at Palace Station and the 50-cent shrimp cocktail at the Golden Gate.
I met Anthony some years later and have worked with him on a couple of projects. He started a book publishing company, Huntington Press, and has printed dozens of good and important books about Las Vegas. And guess what, he’s still finding the best deals in town and sharing them in the Las Vegas Advisor — now available online, of course.
On a larger scale, 1984 was the year the public started learning about a massive residential development planned for the western edge of the city. Summa Corporation, owned by the heirs of the late billionaire Howard Hughes, sold off most of his holdings, but they kept a 25,000-acre parcel sprawling along the border of Red Rock Canyon. Hughes officials weren’t talking yet, but Las Vegas Councilman Ron Lurie declared that the development would be “one of the most popular places to live in the next 15 to 20 years.”
Lurie was right, though it would be several years before the development, later named Summerlin, started to take shape. Like The Mirage, Summerlin had a transformative effect on Las Vegas.
The stories of Steve Wynn and Summa Corporation suggest that in 1984 there were, in fact, a few people thinking positively about the future of Las Vegas. Still, I doubt they could have imagined the city ever hosting a Super Bowl or building The Sphere.
Pondering the past in this way naturally leads me to wonder what Las Vegas might look like 40 years from now. Considering how different the Las Vegas of 1984 and 2024 are, you have to expect the Las Vegas of 2064 will offer attractions that seem inconceivable today. It’s not hard to imagine development spilling out of the valley and linking up with Pahrump, Indian Springs, Boulder City, Primm. Perhaps advances in transportation will make traveling to other Western cities as easy as motoring across the valley today. Maybe we’ll build a Sphere that covers the entire city, with flashing corporate logos visible from colonies on the moon.
Then again, Las Vegas could be a ghost town in 2064, with extreme drought and unrelenting heat driving people to cooler, wetter places. This is a gloomy thought, and probably unlikely, considering our community’s prodigious survival skills and knack for reinvention. Surely, Mother Nature is no match for wily Las Vegas!
Geoff Schumacher is the vice president of exhibits and programs at The Mob Museum and the author of Sun, Sin & Suburbia: The History of Modern Las Vegas.
