When my parents and I started driving to Las Vegas regularly in the late 1960s, the city was pretty much like it had been since the 1940s.
Oh, there had been some changes-mostly cosmetic. Some of the hotels along Las Vegas Boulevard-known as the Strip-had built towers to accommodate more guests, but the original motel-style structures were still intact.
Downtown, the neon had gotten brighter and high-rise hotels like the Fremont, the Mint and the Four Queens were open and there were large casinos like the Golden Nugget and Binion's Horseshoe, but most of the many joints in Glitter Gulch were relatively small and crammed with slots and few tables.
But change was coming to Las Vegas. And the first glimpse of the future could be found at the northwest corner of the Strip and Flamingo Road.
Caesars Palace-purposely spelled without an apostrophe to show that every man is an emperor while staying there-was the new kid on the block. It wasn't even a year old when we first saw it in 1967.
Everything about Caesars was different. All the big hotels had a theme. Some were fairly vague, such as the Palm Springs modern of the Desert Inn, Sands and Thunderbird and the Miami Beach flash of the Flamingo and Riviera. But some were more obvious. The Dunes, Sahara and Aladdin were all variations on the Arabian Nights. The Frontier had switched from Old West to space-age, but the Hacienda continued the "come as you are" cowboy tradition. The Stardust was just huge and gaudy.
But Caesars took the idea of a theme and ran with it. Big time. Caesar and Cleopatra were there to greet guests. Roman soldiers opened doors. All the staff were in costume. There were fountains and statuary and temples. The showroom and lounge were the biggest in town. There was even a disco on a floating barge.
It looked like heaven on earth to a kid in the 1960s. Looked that way to a lot of adults, too.
Las Vegas had never seen anything like it. And when the high rollers flocked to Caesar's giant suites, the other hotels started wondering what they had been doing wrong.
A few years later, the game changed again in 1973 when Kirk Kerkorian opened the MGM Grand, a monster of a structure with more than 2,000 rooms-the largest hotel in the world at the time.
Sleek and elegant, the MGM upped the stakes. And "more" became the universal theme in Vegas. More rooms, more restaurants, more entertainment, more shopping, more tables, more slots.
A building boom got underway. Hotels remodeled and expanded. New wings and towers went up. Some properties got rid of their old buildings entirely and rebuilt from the ground up.
The boom continued well into the 21st century, fueled by increasing corporate ownership of the hotels and casinos.
That started when Howard Hughes bought the Desert Inn in 1967. He spent the next couple of years taking over the Castaways, the Frontier, the Landmark, the Sands and the Silver Slipper before leaving town.
Aside from a few quirky orders-Hughes had the rotating sign at the Silver Slipper stopped because he thought a hidden camera inside was spying on him-the reclusive tycoon's spending spree didn't change much. Hughes and his executives knew nothing about casino operations so the same guys who had been running things before still ran them after. And the mob guys in Chicago and points east still got their skim money.
But over the years, the old guys died off and successful prosecutions ran off much of the hidden ownership of the gambling clubs.
And that's too bad-at least in my opinion. The mob knew how to run a casino.
They expected the casino to make money and didn't care if the rest of the place showed a loss. Give enough play at the tables and everything was free. But even the low-rollers who stuck to the nickel slots got a cheap room and cheaper meals. Drinks were free at the tables and machines and didn't cost much more at the bars.
Lounges adjacent to the gambling floor offered top entertainment with no cover charge. And I'm not talking unknowns. Acts like Louis Prima and Keely Smith, Don Rickles, Joan Rivers and Wayne Newton all played lounges. Well-regarded performers on the way up or on the way down.
Even the biggest of the big-name shows-Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Liberace, George Burns-wouldn't break you. The late show was usually just the price of a couple of cocktails.
The mob's focus was the casino. That was their money machine. Everything-the inexpensive rooms and food, the free-flowing booze, the entertainment-was designed up to lure customers from all over the country to Las Vegas and then to the slots and tables.
People say Las Vegas is a town built on greed. And that's true.
But while mobsters are ruthlessly greedy, they are mere amateurs compared to corporate America.
When the big corporations started taking over, the bean counters who ran them expected everything to show a profit. The hotel had to make money, the restaurants had to make money, the bars had to make money and the shows had to make money.
By the late 1980s, the mob was pretty much out and big business in. And a lot of what made Vegas such a great place to visit vanished.
I'm not saying you can't find bargains. High rollers are still comped. Drinks are still free in the casino. And even if you never drop big bucks at the tables, you can find a room deal or a fairly inexpensive meal.
But it's nothing like it was. Not even close.
I'm glad I was able to experience Las Vegas at its best, with my parents in the 1960s and 1970s and after I began going on my own in the late 1970s. Because just a decade later, a whole new Las Vegas would be born. And it all started with a Mirage.
But that story can hold until next week.