SEARCHING FOR THE RAT PACK

Driving along Las Vegas' famed Strip.

It's changed a bit since the original Rat Pack were here. Sinatra, Martin, Davis Jr, Lawford and Bishop. Legends of their time, and all time if you consider.

This was their playground. Their territory.

And it was an iconic time. A time which eventually gave way to corporations and planned entertainment. Towering buildings and towering egos.

Vegas then is not the Vegas now. For good and for bad.

(A fascinating comparison of the changes in Las Vegas - and of the changes in film style over the decades - is to watch Ocean's 11, and Ocean's Eleven back to back. Sinatra versus Clooney.)

My first exposure to Las Vegas was when I was ten years of age. During my first major road trip, a drive across country with my father. There are a number of very cool stories associated with that adventure, but one which I never really discussed with anyone was a fleeting glimpse of the Strip across the desert floor. 

At the time, 1971, I-40 was still incomplete through eastern California, requiring a bypass up across Hoover Dam to avoid the worst sections of what was left of Route 66. Plus, I think Dad wanted to see the dam and show it to me as well. Dad and I stopped to tour the dam, and then continued our route, bypassing Las Vegas ten or so miles to the south on Highway 146 - well within sight of the casinos - before tagging I-15 and heading down into California. 

It was only a short flash of Vegas, but I knew about it through repeated viewings of Ocean's 11 over the years, and wanted to visit that place even at a very young age.

My second glance happened just a couple of years later, on our return move to the Washington, DC, area. We passed through Vegas directly this time, stopping at a gas station on Las Vegas Boulevard...the Strip itself. I deeply wanted go and look at the casinos beckoning to me from just across the street, but was again turned down by my parents, who quite rightly felt that a casino was not a good place for a kid to explore.

It wasn't until I was in college, seven years later, that I got a chance to really visit Las Vegas. I stayed at the MGM Grand. The original one, now called Bally's. This was just a few years before the tragic fire which claimed 85 lives. I was there as part of a competitive ballroom dance group to attend an event at the MGM. 

It was a fun and memorable trip, in which we cheered sunrise with Tequila Sunrises. Ah, youth.

But in the years after that I got to know Las Vegas before the megacasino revolution started in 1989 by Steve Wynn's Mirage. I am fortunate to have seen (and visited) the legendary hotel casinos in the first Ocean's film. The Sands. The Desert Inn. The Sahara. The Riviera. All destroyed to make way for the leviathan complexes which dot the Strip today. The Sahara and Riviera both survived all into the 21st century. The Sahara still stands as the SLS Las Vegas. The rest are gone.

Their brethren The Dunes, The Aladdin, Hacienda, Thunderbird, 

the Frontier, and the legendary Stardust. 

All, well, stardust now.

It's a cool little part of me that remembers those days. A small bit of history that is gone, but not forgotten. A little bit of bygone charm, wistful memories if you're gray enough.