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FINALIST
ForeWord Magazine’s History Book of the Year   |
Living in modern Las Vegas is almost too easy. A person can be here decades without really needing a winter coat, and if July is hell-hot, he can hole up all day in an air conditioned home, go to work at night in a casino, then buy groceries and prescriptions at 4 a.m. In a booming economy, nearly everybody who wants a job can have one. Seventy-five years ago, it was anything but easy. Most families didnšt have real air conditioning, and people lucky enough to have jobs worked in blistering broad daylight. The Las Vegas we know was conceived -- if anybody really conceived it -- in 1931, when Nevada liberalized its divorce and gambling laws, which would ultimately transform the city into Americašs playground for grownups. It was also the year an unprecedented engineering project began, that would turn the Colorado River from a wild killer stream to a reservoir that waters not only California vegetables but also sprawling Las Vegas suburbs. From 1905 to 1931, Las Vegas was still a tiny oasis in a big, dangerous desert. Its isolated people made their own swamp coolers, their own entertainment, and sometimes their own whiskey. The author, Joan Burkhart Whitely, enlisted older Las Vegans to help capture the memories of a Mojave Mayberry, where neighbors took care of each other, not merely because nobody else would, but because it was their hometown, and they cared. |
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