Interview with Don English conducted by Frank Wright for The Las Vegas I Remember, KNPR, c. 2005 https://web.archive.org/web/20060207012202/http://www.knpr.org/LVIR/transcripts/transcripts.cfm https://web.archive.org/web/20060207012202/http://www.knpr.org/LVIR/transcripts/donenglish.txt NEVADA STATE MUSEUM & HISTORICAL SOCIETY LAS VEGAS, NEVADA THE LAS VEGAS I REMEMBER INTERVIEW WITH DONALD ENGLISH Taken At KNPR Studios 5151 Boulder Highway Las Vegas, Nevada TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 2 MR. WRIGHT: Okay. First thing we want to have you do is tell us who you are, for the purposes of the tape. MR. ENGLISH: I'm Donald English. MR. WRIGHT: Okay. Don, most of the listeners of KNPR are fairly recent arrivals in Las Vegas, and almost everybody here came from somewhere else. So we want to know a little bit about where you were born, where you were raised, what kind of training jobs and so on you had before you came to Vegas. MR. ENGLISH: Well, I came from somewhere else also. I was born in Oakland, California. I was a Los Angeles boy. I served in the Army Air Corps. And I came to Las Vegas in 1949. MR. WRIGHT: What did you do in the Army Air Corps? MR. ENGLISH: I was in the cadet training program, but I got in at the tail end of it and qualified for pilot bombardier and navigator. But they started closing down all the schools, and they called us on-the-line trainees and let us out in two years, ahead of a lot of people that had more time in the service. MR. WRIGHT: So this was right after the end of the war? MR. ENGLISH: Yes, right after the end of the war. Then after I was out for a while, I went to the Fred Archer School of Photography. I was bent on learning TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 3 photography. And in the air corps, actually, while they were parading us from one field to another, not knowing what to do with us, I was able to take a photo course at Lowry Field. MR. WRIGHT: Did your air corps travels ever bring you to the air base in Las Vegas? MR. ENGLISH: No. MR. WRIGHT: Had you any experience at all in Las Vegas before you came? MR. ENGLISH: No, no experience at all in Las Vegas. I had heard of it, though. MR. WRIGHT: Okay. So you're in photography school. Did you get a degree in photography? MR. ENGLISH: Yes. Then I did free-lance magazine work for about a year and a half, and experimental work in underwater photography. One of the assignments that we had in photo school was to do a book on some kind of an industry. And a friend of mine was learning to be a deep-sea diver at the Sparling School of Deep-Sea Diving in San Pedro. And I got involved with the fellow that owned it, and we did experimental underwater photography. And actually, that led into a lot of interesting things. Life magazine did a story on the school, and I became involved with one of the Life magazine photographers. And through that and sundry things, I became interested in doing magazine stories. TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 4 MR. WRIGHT: That must have been fairly early stages of underwater photography. MR. ENGLISH: It was. There was no scuba gear. Everything was what they called "hard hat" deep-sea diving equipment. In fact, we worked two days for Life magazine on the ocean shelf off California, and that was $1,000 a day. That was a big deal. Of course, that included the costs of the diving boat and all kinds of other expenses, but it was a very fun project. And one thing led to another. And in fact, one of the fellows that I went to school with at Fred Archer's -- MR. WRIGHT: And where was Fred Archer's school? MR. ENGLISH: Fred Archer's school was in Los Angeles. And he had taken a job in Las Vegas. Joe Buck and Jim Swift were two of the first photographers at the Desert Sea News Bureau before I came. And they quit and went into business for themselves. The Review-Journal was their big account. And through some unexplainable reason, Steve Hannegan Associates contacted me and asked me if I would be interested in interviewing for a job in Las Vegas. MR. WRIGHT: Can you tell us about what time period this was? MR. ENGLISH: This is 1949, probably mid 1949. TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 5 So I took a portfolio of published magazine stories that I had done and so on, and by golly, I landed the job. MR. WRIGHT: What was your starting salary, just out of curiosity? MR. ENGLISH: Well, it was pretty good. It was $85 a week, and that was right up there with what newspaper photographers were making. And they said Hannegan paid -- you worked hard, there weren't any days off, but they paid well. MR. WRIGHT: Okay. So you came to Las Vegas in 1949, it's the first time you've been here. Any initial reactions to the town that you've decided to cast your lot in? MR. ENGLISH: Oh, yeah. I was amazed. It was a fantasy land. In fact, the night before the first day that I was to go to work, Bill Carneal, the one and only and chief photographer there, said, "Would you like to come with me on an assignment? We're covering one of the hotels." I can't remember who was playing. Anyway, Herb Mac Donald was the publicity director at the El Rancho Hotel. And we went in there, and he sat down for dinner, and he said, "Well, what would you like? A steak and a shrimp cocktail?" Well, I had never gone anyplace and had a steak and a shrimp cocktail, so that was a wide-eyed introduction into Las Vegas. MR. WRIGHT: Okay. You mentioned Steve Hannegan. And I know the Desert Sea News Bureau was formed before you TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 6 came, but can you tell us a little bit about who Steve Hannegan was and what the idea was of the Desert Sea News Bureau? MR. ENGLISH: Right. Steve Hannegan was known as the father of travel publicity. At the time I came here, Steve Hannegan's accounts were Sun Valley, Idaho, which incidentally, he named Sun Valley. They thought it was crazy. You know, it's a ski resort. How can you name it Sun Valley? He had Miami Beach, Union Pacific Railway. He had Pepsi-Cola and Admiral TV or Admiral. I guess they were just starting in television at that time. Because of his connections with the Union Pacific, they helped promote train travel to the destinations that they serviced. And actually, Union Pacific contributed quite a bit of money to Las Vegas, and to any of the other cities on the routes, and formed the publicity organization through Steve Hannegan. MR. WRIGHT: And so he was under contract, then, to whom? MR. ENGLISH: As I understand it, he formed the publicity department, the Desert Sea News Bureau, for the Chamber of Commerce. And the Chamber of Commerce, through their Live Wire efforts, assessing hotels on some kind of a formula, they chipped in to support the news bureau. And TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 7 Steve Hannegan, through Union Pacific, supported it financially. MR. WRIGHT: Okay. Now, I think one thing I'd like to try to do is sort of set the stage in 1949, 1950, the early years that you came here. The Las Vegas Strip was nowhere near what it is today, obviously. What was the raw material you had to work with? What were you publicizing? MR. ENGLISH: Okay. Basically, we were trying to get the name Las Vegas outside of Las Vegas in any way, means possible. We had four hotels. Let's see. We had the Flamingo, the El Rancho, the Last Frontier, and the new Thunderbird. The Sahara Hotel was the Bingo Club. And all of the stories originated out of New York. Anything that we did, we sent the photos to New York, and New York would plant them with the wire services or with magazines and newspapers. One of the biggest things that we did was called hometown art. And in fact, my first assignment, the first day was to go with Bill Carneal, who was the chief photographer to the Flamingo Hotel. And he said, "Now, listen. Walk around the swimming pool and see if you can find an attractive couple, and ask them if they'll pose for a picture, and get their name, their hometown, and we'll do a little story on them and send it to the newspaper." And hometown art was one of the key methods that TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 8 Steve Hannegan used for resort publicity. And we would shoot these things. We made a hometown run every day to every hotel. Sometimes you'd only have one or two; sometimes you'd have four, five, six, eight pictures. You'd write a caption, send it to the hometown newspaper, and they would get planted. And swimming pools in those days were a big deal. Everybody didn't have one in their backyard, and it spelled resort, spelled fun, sun, all that sort of thing. And we would pose the people -- and always with the hotel sign in the background -- usually on a diving board. And we'd send these pictures out, and we got an amazing return from them. And Hannegan's thought was if the picture runs in the paper and someone sees it, their neighbor has their picture in the paper, they can go to Las Vegas, it's okay, then it's okay for us to go. We were fighting a little imagine problem in those days, the Sin City kind of thing. And that's the way it worked. MR. WRIGHT: And the diving board and swimming pool might make an especially effective picture in January, February. MR. ENGLISH: Yes, yes. In the fall and spring, even in the winter, yeah, we really went to town. MR. WRIGHT: Now, who devised the strategies, the daily working kinds of things? How did you decide what you TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 9 were going to do on any given day? Did you have assignments? MR. ENGLISH: We had assignments. Neil Regan was the bureau chief. Ken Frogley, at that time, was the chief writer. And everybody would just try to dream up some kind of a thing. There would be a National Grape Week. And so they would pose the idea to New York and say, "Is it okay to shoot a picture of a girl holding some grapes?" And they, "That's fine." We would go out, we'd shoot a photograph of one of the showgirls with grapes, holding them up for National Grape Week. And then we'd print up a set of pictures. We'd send them to New York. New York would tell us which ones that they liked. We'd print additional photos, and then they would send them out and try and place them. MR. WRIGHT: By New York, you mean headquarters for Steve Hannegan and Associates? MR. ENGLISH: Headquarters, yes, was in New York. Now, at the end of 1949, when Hannegan lost the Union Pacific Railroad contract, Steve Hannegan no longer served. Chamber of Commerce could no longer afford to keep Steve Hannegan. So they just hired the staff and carried the publicity department forward. MR. WRIGHT: So from that point on, you were your own masters in terms of creating strategies and themes? TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 10 MR. ENGLISH: Yes. And one of the things that we learned quickly was -- this was particularly Ken Frogley's thoughts. He said, "Listen, there's no way that we have to send pictures to New York, we can send them to Los Angeles. All the bureau managers are right down there in Los Angeles as well as New York. They're closer to us." So we printed the pictures with the ideas and cheesecake and so on, and mailed them directly to Los Angeles. MR. WRIGHT: You mentioned cheesecake, was that a particularly big -- MR. ENGLISH: Cheesecake was supply and demand in those days. It's a totally different thing now. A cheesecake picture would be meaningless. In the early '50s, '40s, even into the '60s, cheesecake was one of our biggest commodities. Unashamedly, we would use anything for an excuse for a cheesecake photo. One time Eisenhower was running against Stevenson, and Harvey Diederich was the publicity director at the Frontier. So we went out with really nothing in mind, but had a Stevenson poster and an Eisenhower poster, and posed the girl on the diving board, Frontier sign, two posters. And we named her Miss Bea Suren Vote. So that's pretty bad, but it went. It went all over the country. Abe Schiller was the PR guy at the Flamingo Hotel, TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 11 and he was a great fisherman. And he had two, six- or seven-pound bass that he had caught. And there were some twins that were showgirls there, and we had the twins in bathing suites holding the fish. And the fish looked exactly alike, nose to nose. And we had twins and fish. And it went all over the country. MR. WRIGHT: Now, who thought up these slug lines, was it just everybody? MR. ENGLISH: Everybody, yeah. It was a joint effort. Everybody. MR. WRIGHT: One of my favorites had to do with an old Christmas song, "All I Want for Christmas." MR. ENGLISH: Oh, okay. MR. WRIGHT: Were you involved in that one? MR. ENGLISH: Yes. That was okay. Spike Jones came out with "All I Want for Christmas is My Two Front Teeth." I don't know how many people remember that song, but it was a big hit. It was an absolute favorite. And I can't remember. This was, I think, in the early, about mid '50s. And so we got the bright idea of getting all of the kids that we could in town missing their two front teeth. We ran an ad in the Review-Journal. We wanted to do a picture to honor Spike Jones, and any children with two front teeth missing, if they'd please report in front of the convention center. Oh, I guess this was the '60s. TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 12 MR. WRIGHT: The convention center was open in '59. MR. ENGLISH: Oh, okay. So, gosh, we had about 30 kids out there. And we put one freckle-faced kid right in the foreground, all of them grinning. We took the photo. We ran it. We put it on the wire photo machine. And the next day on the front page of the Los Angeles Mirror was spelled like this: "Gueth What They Want for Chrithmuth." MR. WRIGHT: Maybe you could give some idea of just how widely distributed these photographs and captions were. MR. ENGLISH: We had a clipping service that would clip anything on Las Vegas. And photos like this and similar shots would just come pouring in by the hundreds. We got a tremendous response. MR. WRIGHT: So they would be from newspapers all over the country, and perhaps even all over the world? MR. ENGLISH: Yes, yeah, yeah. In fact, I was trying to think. In the very old days, they used to have a Live Wire kickoff lunch in which Max Kelch and some of the community leaders would expel on the merits of the Las Vegas News Bureau and what we were doing, and how we had to keep publicity rolling and that sort of thing. And to get the point over, we had, oh, I don't know, about a 200-foot roll of paper, three foot wide, and we pasted newspaper clippings on it. And at the end of the program, two showgirls grabbed -- this is at the Thunderbird -- grabbed the end of the paper roll and TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 13 started marching with it around the lunch room. And they justify that and say, you know, the cost of publishing pictures like this would be something like 20 times our budget. And that's only one method of publicity that we were using to publicize the town. MR. WRIGHT: You weren't involved in the marketing side of it? MR. ENGLISH: No. MR. WRIGHT: Just the free publicity? MR. ENGLISH: Exactly. MR. WRIGHT: So you got a huge bang for the buck in terms of notice for Las Vegas. MR. ENGLISH: We really did. MR. WRIGHT: Would it be safe to say that in the very early days, '49, '50, early '50s, that Las Vegas was not very well known until these kinds of photos started really hitting the press? MR. ENGLISH: You know, I think that's right. There were a few times when people had us confused with Las Vegas, New Mexico. We thought that by just this concentrated effort of getting the name outside of Las Vegas -- and so many things happened. We started having celebrity weddings in Las Vegas. That was another big thing. Elizabeth Taylor married Michael Wilding. And we got a tip from one of the newspaper reporters that they were TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 14 getting married, and it was a chapel downtown. MR. WRIGHT: Do you remember which one, which chapel? MR. ENGLISH: I don't. I can't remember the name of it. And we pulled in there and said, "We've got to take pictures, and if you'd cooperate and let us get a couple of nice pictures, that'll be the end of it." And they did. The Crosby weddings, Bing Crosby, it was the same kind of thing. That was an unannounced wedding. And in fact, I was painting the fence. It was my day off, and I got a call from Jim Deitch, who was the bureau manager then. He said, "Look, I don't care what you're doing, get out to the Sands Hotel. I'm going to bring the motion picture camera. Joe Buck's coming with me, he's going to shoot stills. Meet me there. I'll tell you what it's all about when you get there." And by gosh, Bing Crosby and Cathy came out of one of the rooms there at the Sands Hotel, and we got all kinds of pictures. There was Nancy Sinatra waiting there. There was just a raftum, all of the Crosbys. MR. WRIGHT: On the Crosby wedding, Don, wasn't there a story about you had that film developed and sent to Los Angeles before the wedding couple got home or something like that? TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 15 MR. ENGLISH: Yeah. Bill Kellogg was the manager at Western Airlines at the time, and we had the movie footage and the stills, but particularly the news reel footage that we wanted to get a Las Vegas dateline on it. They were going to the airport and were going to land in Palm Springs. So all the Los Angeles press were already alerted and had gone to Palm Springs to shoot the pictures. And Bill swapped planes and actually got our film into Los Angeles before Cathy and Bing Crosby arrived in Palm Springs. So the footage that they used was the footage they could get the fastest, and that was the news bureau footage. And we get Las Vegas instead of Palm Springs for the publicity on it. MR. WRIGHT: That's pretty fast action. MR. ENGLISH: Yeah. MR. WRIGHT: There's another story. I don't know, again, whether you were involved with it, a similar kind of story involving Zsa Zsa Gabor. It was not quite a wedding story, but there was a wedding involved there. MR. ENGLISH: Yeah, right. Well, let's see. How did the story go? Okay. Rubirosa was getting married in New York and had jilted Zsa Zsa Gabor, and in the scuffle, she ended up with a black eye. And Zsa Zsa Gabor was out here at the El Rancho Hotel performing, and UPS said, "Listen, we're going to cover the TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 16 Rubirosa wedding in New York. And what we would like to do, if you can possibly do this, we'll wire photo a picture of the wedding to you. In fact, with the first shot that we get, we're going to have one of our photographers leave the wedding. We'll get the picture to you. And if you can, get the photo out and show it to Zsa Zsa Gabor and get photo back to us." MR. WRIGHT: You should mention probably you're using a photo transmitter here. MR. ENGLISH: We're using a photo transmitter, right. So we got the photo. We made an 11 by 14 print, ran it out to the El Rancho. Of course, this had been set up with the PR people there. And Zsa Zsa held the photo up with the eye patch over her black eye with a big laugh. And we got that back on the UPI transmitter before the wedding was over. So that was nifty. That was great. MR. WRIGHT: Now, who thought up all these things? That one came out of New York, I guess. MR. ENGLISH: That one did. MR. WRIGHT: But going to work at the office must have been a lot of fun, just coming up with these kinds of things. MR. ENGLISH: It was. We just tried to be creative, and everybody came up with ideas. TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 17 MR. WRIGHT: You started to tell about maybe some other celebrity weddings. Elvis and Priscilla. MR. ENGLISH: Yeah, Elvis and Priscilla. Was it the Aladdin Hotel? And of course, there was press from all over the world for that. And everybody was scuffling trying to get pictures and this and that. And one of the nicest things, Elvis said, "Listen, I would like all of you to be my guests for a wedding lunch, but no pictures, no questions, no interviews or anything. After the lunch, we'll have a cake, and everybody can shoot pictures and ask questions and anything at that time." And it worked out beautifully. It was wonderful. Everybody behaved like a gentleman. MR. WRIGHT: Any other weddings that may come to mind? MR. ENGLISH: Well, there's tons of them. Paul Newman. He married -- MR. WRIGHT: Joanne Woodward. MR. ENGLISH: -- Joanne Woodward. MR. WRIGHT: Yeah. MR. ENGLISH: In fact, I remember when we were doing it, we knew who Joanne Woodward was, but we didn't know Paul Newman. He didn't have the star stature that Joanne Woodward did at the time. MR. WRIGHT: Any other stories that occur to you at the moment, and we can go back later if you like, about TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 18 interaction with any of the celebrities that you were photographing? Any unfortunate experiences? MR. ENGLISH: You know, I can't remember an unfortunate experience. Particularly in the early days, the celebrities wanted publicity, and we wanted publicity for Las Vegas, and they cooperated with us. They did amazing things for photos. Gene Nelson was a dancer. One time during the atomic series, he went up with us in the early morning up to Angel's Peak and did interpretive dancing to the mushroom cloud, if you can imagine, things like that. Jane Powell went out to the lake. We'd do water ski photos. She'd go out in the desert and pose in a bathing suit. Another thing that happened that gave us an awful lot of publicity were movie magazines. And in those days, the movie magazines were just a rage. And we did a story on Ronald Reagan in the Frontier Village gagging around. They used to have antique trains and carriages and wagon wheels and all that sort of thing. And he went out there and posed for all kinds of pictures. MR. WRIGHT: Was he a headline performer there? MR. ENGLISH: He was one time. He was a headline performer at the old Frontier, and I guess that was his one and only time venture into nightclub entertainment. TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 19 MR. WRIGHT: Okay. Could you give some recollection of the time period when I ask you, for example, about when was it, do you recall, when Ronald Reagan was -- MR. ENGLISH: That's tough for me. That was in the '50s, because it was still the Last Frontier. MR. WRIGHT: It would have been before 1955, then. MR. ENGLISH: Yeah, yeah. MR. WRIGHT: Okay. I'm going to ask you about the nuclear test site specifically in a moment; but before I do, there's several, I think, very famous pictures that are so widely known outside of Las Vegas that were created by the Desert Sea or Las Vegas News Bureau. And I'll just mention a couple, maybe you can tell me the story behind them. One had me hooked before I ever came to Las Vegas, that was the floating crap game. Can you tell us the story behind the floating crap game? MR. ENGLISH: I will, but let me just grasp one thing. As soon as the Chamber of Commerce took over the news bureau, they changed the name from the Desert Sea News Bureau to the Las Vegas News Bureau. And the thought there was every time we identified a picture, it would have the name Las Vegas in it as opposed to Desert Sea, which was kind of hard to understand. MR. WRIGHT: The floating crap game. MR. ENGLISH: The floating crap game was the dream of TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 20 Al Freeman who was the publicist at the Sands Hotel. In those days, the hotels would do anything for the publicity department to get publicity. And Al had the carpentry crew and maintenance people, they put a crap table in the swimming pool. And I think they also had some 21 tables. They had a whole casino set up in the swimming pool. MR. WRIGHT: They just literally picked up a crap table and took it out? MR. ENGLISH: They floated it out there, yeah. So we took a photo of this thing with the floating crap game, Damon Runyon theme. It did, it went all over the country, all over the world, I guess. It made a great one. We had a guy diving off the diving board, and it was pretty well set up. MR. WRIGHT: The nuclear test site, atomic test site, is a whole category of sort of what the news bureau did. How did Las Vegas publicize the bomb? MR. ENGLISH: Well, it was a wonderful thing for Las Vegas in terms of publicity. Not only did we publicize the bomb with photos and anything we could, but all of the national press, international press were here for weeks on end. And one side-bar on this thing, the bomb detonations would be canceled day after day if the atmospheric conditions were not just right. And here were all these top-notch news TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 21 people from all over the country here on big expense accounts, and so they themselves would dream up stories of all aspects of Las Vegas. So we had all kinds of copy going out of town during that period. But we did everything we could to get photos of the bomb. That was the introduction of the wire photo machines here. We had International Press. We had Acme, which later became UPS, which became UPI. We had Associated Press. And at one time we had all three of those wire services in our office. And so we did anything we could to get the pictures and get them back to them fast. A lot of times they've sent their own staff up to Las Vegas also. But most of the time we would shoot from Angel's Peak on Mount Charleston. And later they started having what we called "open shots," which were at News Knob, which was seven miles from the proving grounds. And we'd go out there and shoot photos. MR. WRIGHT: A couple of things here, you mentioned News Knob. I think I've seen pictures of Don English claiming News Knob. MR. ENGLISH: We had a sign up there that said, "News Knob." And I don't know, I can't remember what all was on it, but it explained that it was seven miles from the blast. It was awesome to shoot pictures from an area like that. MR. WRIGHT: Well, a relatively small number of TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 22 people have experienced, witnessed an above-ground atomic blast. Tell us a little bit about what it was like. MR. ENGLISH: Okay. First of all, they issued extremely dark glasses that we would use. But even at that, when the initial blast went off, you wouldn't look at it. After it went off, then you would turn around and view it with the dark glasses. Oh, I remember one blast, one detonation, and all the cactus in the desert caught on fire, and it was ethereal. It looked like a village burning, and it was just awesome. However a sidelight to that, we had banks of photographers and everybody with all kinds of equipment photographing the bomb. You didn't dare foul up on this, you had to bring back pictures. And in those days, we had what they were called Hulchers, which was an automatic camera. And the photographers, some of them had photo sensors. So as soon as the bomb went off, the light would set off the photo sensor, and you'd hear this monstrous clacking of cameras and oaths from cameramen trying to change slides and trying to set their apertures. And it was a hubbub of noise and interaction with the photographers as well as the atomic bomb going off. MR. ENGLISH: Then of course, after the initial detonation, then the mushroom cloud would rise. And it was a magnificent view. MR. WRIGHT: And it was the mushroom cloud that you TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 23 did the series of ballet photos that you mentioned earlier. MR. ENGLISH: Yeah, I did it once with Gene Nelson, and then we did one time with a classical ballet dancer. She was a showgirl, but she was a ballet dancer. And those pictures had a surrealistic look to them. But they were in Photo Gravure and magazines and newspapers, all over the country. MR. WRIGHT: There was one, I think, very famous photo that is still very often shown, and it's a Don English photo, and it shows Vegas Vic, the neon cowboy, in the foreground. Can you tell us about that picture and its inspiration? MR. ENGLISH: Right. I'd always thought about, you know, if there was a possibility of seeing the mushroom from Las Vegas. And if you did that, you would have to be elevated and be on top of a building. Well, I overslept one morning and missed the bomb, or at least in time to get out to Angel's Peak to photograph it. So I rushed downtown and got on top of a building. I think it was a drug store at that time. And naturally, you'd see the blast when it went off, but it was daylight, and you could still see the ignition. And I waited for a little bit, and by gosh, the mushroom came floating up. And it was the first time an atomic mushroom was ever seen over an American city, and it got picture of the week in Life. TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 24 In fact, it was really interesting. When I was on the building shooting it, there were some workmen repairing a transom on the building below, and they were curious. And they said, "What are you shooting?" And I said, "Well, I'm shooting the atomic bomb." I said, "The shock wave is going to be here any minute." It took about seven minutes, I think, for the shock wave to reach there. And they said, "Oh, come on." Anyway they walked out to the edge of the building to see what I was shooting, and right about that time the shock wave came, and it shattered the transom. The glass flew all over the place. So, luckily, they missed that. MR. WRIGHT: There was even a group called the Atomic Bomb Watchers Society, wasn't there? MR. ENGLISH: There was. MR. WRIGHT: Bob Considine. MR. ENGLISH: Yeah, Bob Considine, the Atomic Bomb Watchers Society, headquartered at the Sands Hotel in the Emerald Room. But it was, it was the Atomic Bomb Watchers Society. I have a card to prove it. MR. WRIGHT: There was a famous comment of Bob Considine, but, first of all, you might explain who Bob Considine was. A famous comment that maybe you can tell us whether it was true or not, that somebody's gambling, playing TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 25 craps at a casino, and there was a loud shaking and rattling and windows breaking or whatever, and the crap dealer says, "It must have been an atomic bomb, next shooter." MR. ENGLISH: I didn't witness that, but I'm sure it's possible. By the way, Bob Considine was a syndicated columnist, very prominent. MR. WRIGHT: So he must have spent quite a good deal of his time cooling his heels out here waiting for the next blast. MR. ENGLISH: He did, with a lot of national press. MR. WRIGHT: And in fact, I think I understood once upon a time that sometimes the test was delayed so much that the wire service may not have a reporter or photographer on hand, and it was actually news bureau photos that went out as hard news. MR. ENGLISH: Yeah, a lot of them. They just canceled day after day, and they finally had to go back. They relied on the news bureau to do that. And one of the things was that by doing hard news like that, it had a Las Vegas dateline on it, but it wasn't particularly publicity for Las Vegas. But by doing things like that for the wire services and for the newspapers, we gained quite a bit of credibility with them. And I will say that a cheesecake picture, a feature TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 26 story that's coming from a lot of different resort areas, I'm not saying that they would run ours over theirs, but all things being equal, if all stories or all features were about as good as one another, I think maybe sometimes we got a little edge. MR. WRIGHT: First of all, what time period are we talking about with the test site, the coverage? MR. ENGLISH: We're talking the '50s and '60s. MR. WRIGHT: So people today might think it's a little bit strange that here we're making a big deal out of something that killed people, was a weapon of mass destruction, and even in some ways sort of joking around with it. Did any of that come up during those years? MR. ENGLISH: You know, there was a commenting on it, and a lot of things that were done were frivolous. But truly, I don't think people or anybody were aware of the dangers of radiation at that time. It was an age of innocence, I think. And we did things like we had Miss Atomic Bomb. We did a cheesecake picture of a girl in a bathing suit and took cotton and emanated the shape of a mushroom cloud, and the bathing suit looked like a mushroom cloud. And you know, what could be more frivolous than that? But we certainly were guilty of frivolity, but we just didn't realize the seriousness of what was going on. MR. WRIGHT: Anything else about the test site? They TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 27 had so-called "doom town experiments" out there. Were you out there for any of those? MR. ENGLISH: Well, I missed one. At one time they had a tower explosion. I think the bombs were about, I don't know, about 1 or 200 feet above the floor on a tower as opposed to an air drop, and before they had the underground blast. And all the media were here. It was what we called an open shot. And we all went out to News Knob to shoot it. And they said, "Well, we'll let one photographer go in, and he can shoot from the trenches," which are one mile from the blast. And the wire services, the TV guys pointed to me and said, "Hey, English, you're neutral. You're with the Las Vegas News Bureau, and we know that your footage and your pictures, everybody will have equal access to them, so you're it." So I went out on that. And I remember the general out there said, "Men, when you go into those trenches and we have the countdown," which is over the speaker, "when they get down to one, that last second is going to be the longest second you've ever encountered." So we were in the trenches. I had the camera on a tripod, and I had my hand on the release button. I had everything set to go. And they counted it down. And I thought, well, they're not going to fool me, I count seconds every day -- one thousand one, one thousand two. And they got TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 28 down to one, and I thought my gosh, you know, this is long. This is the longest second I've ever encountered. Well, it was a misfire. So after about a half hour, they notified us and we were out of there. MR. WRIGHT: That's a pretty long second. MR. ENGLISH: That was a long second. MR. WRIGHT: One area that we haven't talked about, and I don't know whether you did much with it or not, is the role that sports photography and sports celebrity and the news bureau's role in capturing some of that, whether the Tournament of Champions and golf and that kind of thing. MR. ENGLISH: Oh, the Tournament of Champions was just a great opportunity for us. Every player that entered was a champion and had won another event, and that was sponsored by the Desert Inn. And it was just general coverage. We did news reels on that and stills. In fact, that was around the end, just before color TV was coming in, and it was still black and white. On Sunday night was the final day of the tournament, and so we would shoot all the footage on that. But in order to get it placed in Los Angeles -- the labs were closed on Sunday. So we finally got ahold of some war surplus equipment, and we processed the film and made about ten prints and sent them down to Los Angeles. And we distributed them for Monday release on the winners of the golf TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 29 tournament. They had a raft of other kinds of sport tournaments during that time. And Herb Mac Donald, at the Sahara Hotel -- he recently was with the Las Vegas events -- really pioneered most of this. And we had bow and arrow championship contests. They had quick draw contests. That's where two gun fighters would oppose each other and then draw against a light. When the light went off, they'd draw and fire. And they had electronic devices there to see who was the fastest. And we had a lot of celebrity cowboys and so on that would participate in that. We had the unlimited hydroplane races out at Lake Mead. Tennis. MR. WRIGHT: Did you take the Tony Traver picture, the one with the model sitting on the racket, or was that somebody else's? MR. ENGLISH: No, that was somebody else's, but that was a great shot. One of the showgirls -- and I think that was Jerry Abbott's shot. And what he did is that she jumped off of a ladder and tucked her feet in. Tony Traver put the racket right under her seat, and there she was sitting on his racket. MR. WRIGHT: Did that take a few shots? Well, you weren't there, I guess. MR. ENGLISH: Oh, I'm sure they did it several times. TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 30 MR. WRIGHT: I was going to ask you about some of your photographer colleagues. One name that I'm sure you'll recall is Dave Lees. MR. ENGLISH: Yeah. Well, this is in the very early days. There was Bill Carneal, who's the bureau manager, and I was the photographer, and we hired another photographer, Dave Lees, who had done some Hollywood publicity work in Los Angeles. And Dave actually started the news reel photography at the news bureau. And unfortunately, one of the things he was photographing for the first movie that Las Vegas put together was a shot of some Nellis airplanes. I think they were B-25s in formation. And one of the planes clipped the airplane that Dave was photographing from, and everybody in that plane was lost. And so Dave was the first casualty of the Las Vegas News Bureau. MR. WRIGHT: Another fellow who has recently passed away is Jerry Abbott. And he had been there for a long time also; is that correct? MR. ENGLISH: Well, we consider those guys newcomers, you know, with the 35-year tenure and so on. Yeah, Jerry was a long-time news bureau photographer and ended up working with the news bureau at the convention center. And he passed away a few months ago. MR. WRIGHT: It's a great picture, and I think it was your picture, correct me if I'm wrong, of Jerry Abbott at TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 31 work. MR. ENGLISH: Oh, that was, I think, in the studio, "A Long Day's Work." We were photographing some showgirls in the studio and had the lights and so on. It's a shot of Jerry down there adjusting the dress on one of the damsels. MR. WRIGHT: So you took a lot of just kind of -- for some -- horsing around photos -- MR. ENGLISH: Oh, yeah. MR. WRIGHT: -- that were not designed, necessarily, go out over the wire services? MR. ENGLISH: Exactly. MR. WRIGHT: Let's see. What else? What am I missing? You tell me now what I'm missing in terms of asking you about. I've still got a summary question or two that I might want to get you into. MR. ENGLISH: Well, we got the movie magazines and the hometowns, and the atomic... One thing I'd like to say is, you know, by doing all this, creating these photos, creating stories, Las Vegas started to emerge as a news imagine, and we created a news imagine. And something would happen in Las Vegas and, fortunately for us, it would be news, whereas if it happened in Anaheim, it wouldn't be news. And it really worked for us. It worked to a great advantage for us. MR. WRIGHT: Yeah, I've opined in public in times TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 32 past that in a very -- now is your chance to tell me that I'm all wet, if you wish -- that the Desert Sea News Bureau and later Las Vegas News Bureau, actually created the idea of Las Vegas before very much of it really existed in fact. Am I sort of correct there? MR. ENGLISH: Well, you know, you're the first one that brought that to mind to me. And I had never analyzed it or thought about it that way, but I think it is right. Particularly in the early days, the view that the people outside of Las Vegas had of Las Vegas was what they saw in the newspapers and on the news reels and magazines. And a lot of that, all of it, emanated from the Las Vegas News Bureau. MR. WRIGHT: Literally, millions of people who would never have given a second thought to Las Vegas, if they had even ever heard of it, would see it over their coffee on Sunday morning. MR. ENGLISH: Yeah, whether it be cheesecake or a celebrity wedding or a sporting event. Whatever it was, we tried to keep it fun, light, humorous, just a great place to be and have a lot of fun. MR. WRIGHT: That's sort of why I asked at the top -- and I didn't quite ask it in this way. In 1949 was Las Vegas really glamorous, or did you and the other news bureau photographers in a sense add the glamor? MR. ENGLISH: You know, we really did think that it TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 33 was glamorous, with top-named performers performing there. I don't think we made it. We tried to. We showed the best side of it. But I think that we really had the feeling that although we were a very small town, there was a lot of glamor and a lot of excitement going on here in Las Vegas. MR. WRIGHT: How long did you work for the news bureau? MR. ENGLISH: Well, let's see. 43 years. When I was hired with Steve Hannegan organization by Paul Snell in Los Angeles, it was a four-month trek. I was going to be here for four months, and it ended up over 40 years. MR. WRIGHT: It seems like, from talking to you, now and in the past, that going to work must have been a real kick. I mean, there must have been something new, something exciting, something really interesting to do almost every day. MR. ENGLISH: It really was. I think every photographer at the news bureau, every writer couldn't wait to get to work. We'd kick around ideas, and it was really a trip. You'd think of an idea, you'd work it out, figure out how to do it, shoot the pictures or the stories or whatever, and then go out. And then you'd see them come back, and you'd see results of what you did. You could view it. It was wonderful. MR. WRIGHT: Any thoughts about leaving the news bureau? I'll sort of leave that one up to you. I just TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 34 thought I'd throw it out there and put a bracket around it. MR. ENGLISH: Well, Las Vegas changed, the news bureau changed. As years went on, we still did a lot of exciting things, but it wasn't what it was during the '50s and '60s and '70s. And when the Chamber of Commerce let the news bureau go and the convention center took it over, and at my stage of the game, I thought that would be a good time to wrap it. MR. WRIGHT: Is it correct to say that with the large corporations that now are mostly involved in Las Vegas gambling, that they more or less took over their own publicity and sort of made the news bureau a little less central than it once had been? MR. ENGLISH: That's very true. Not only that, Las Vegas, in the early days, it was so hard to -- not that it was so hard, but our whole concentration was getting publicity, doing publicity, doing publicity. And all of a sudden, Las Vegas, because of what the entrepreneurs and what was going on here, became news. And I think, actually, there was less demand for what we were doing than in the early days. Right now there's so much about Las Vegas nationally that really what you would be doing is aiding correspondence and helping these people in their endeavors and the way they're covering Las Vegas. TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 35 MR. WRIGHT: This is kind of going back to an earlier subject and back to about the time that you came to Las Vegas, but there were only four or five hotels then. Of course, they started to come along rapidly. But you dealt mostly, I assume, with the publicity directors, but these were run by some pretty interesting people. MR. ENGLISH: That's true. MR. WRIGHT: Did you have much contact with them as a working photographer? MR. ENGLISH: Hand in glove. The PR people, particularly in the early days, were so respected by the hotels, and the hotels wanted publicity. And these guys were innovative. Well, as an example -- that's the only way I know how to do this -- Hank Greenspun was the publicity director at the Desert Inn when it first opened. This is before he had the Sun newspaper. And he wanted to get a swimming pool picture to send out just for general publicity for a picture of the hotel. And he said, "Have you got any ideas? What can we do?" And I said, "Well, listen, if we're going to do a swimming pool picture, we should try to make it different, or have an unusual angle, an unusual approach to it. And I've got an idea, but it would take an awful lot of work." He says, "What is it?" TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 36 And I said, "Well, if we could" -- well, the high diving board at the Desert Inn wasn't all that high -- "but if you could build a platform on top of that so that I could get above the top board, and we'd have a girl out on the spring board, the high spring board, and shoot through her to this view of the whole pool." And he said, "You've got it." He went to the maintenance department, and they built that framework over the diving board. But they would go to absolutely no end to do anything for a publicity picture or for any way to get the hotel mentioned. MR. WRIGHT: Sort of like the Al Freeman shot? MR. ENGLISH: Like with Al Freeman and the floating crap game. And Al, he had all kinds of innovative things. MR. WRIGHT: Could you get publicity directors nowadays to do that kind of thing? MR. ENGLISH: I think it would be tough. I think it would be very difficult to do it. The publicity directors are also quite involved in advertizing and marketing, and it's just a different structure now. I don't want to be down on what's going on now, you know, because it's not -- MR. WRIGHT: Of course. MR. ENGLISH: -- because obviously -- MR. WRIGHT: Tim says you wouldn't be the first. MR. ENGLISH: It's just that it was so different. TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 37 Then, it was camaraderie. I'll give you an instant, here's the thing. Al Freeman and Harvey Diederich were kind of the deans of publicity out there, along with Herb Mac Donald. But Herb called me one night. We had a fierce thunderstorm, and the power was lost at the hotel. And Al (sic) called me and he said, "We just missed the greatest shot that ever happened." He said, "But there's no way anybody would have ever known." He said, "Red Skelton was on stage. In fact, he's still on stage." He said, "The lights went out. They had a candle lantern at each table. He asked everybody to bring them up and put them down for footlights." And he said, "It was unbelievable." I said "Listen, he's still on?" I said, "Could we reenact it?" He said, "Well, the lights are on now." I said, "Well, we'll turn them off." So I was at home. I had my camera at home. I rushed over there to the hotel, went backstage, came out. They cleared it with Red Skelton's PR guy. This is all while he's on stage. This was in a matter of 40 minutes. So they lit all the little candles again, took the photograph. I went back to the news bureau, sent it out on the wire. And the next day on I think it was the L.A. Times, "The Show Must Go On." But you know, for someone to do that now, I don't TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 38 know. I don't know if they'd have that kind of connections with the owners and with the entertainers' managers. I don't think you could do it. MR. WRIGHT: And if you tried to buy that kind of advertizing -- MR. ENGLISH: This is better than paid advertizing, price-wise anyways. MR. WRIGHT: Tim, says you don't learn that kind of thing in marketing classes in school. What about the guys that owned the hotels, the Dalitzes, and the Goffsteins, and some of these people? Did you have much contact with them at all? MR. ENGLISH: Well, the names that you mentioned, we did. Particularly with Goffstein and, oh, like Marion Hicks, a lot of these people, they would attend the Live Wire meetings. Max Kelch would preach in the old days. And our contact mainly was with the PR people, but we did a lot of one-on-one with the hotel owners. In fact, Goffstein, when I was married in 1952, he said, "Hey, kid, I hear you're getting hitched." I said, "Well, yes, Benny, I'm getting married." He says, "Well, listen, unless you're going to a church or something like that," he says, "I want you to get married at the joint." And he says, "We got the chapel out there in front." And he said, "I want you, all your friends, TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 39 the whole news bureau, everybody, the dinner is on me." You know, I mean, that's the way it was then. MR. WRIGHT: I suppose then, since I mentioned his name, I could get you to tell us in a sentence or two who Benny Goffstein was. MR. ENGLISH: Well, Benny Goffstein was one of the owners in the Flamingo Hotel. And later he and his group, they sold the Flamingo, and I believe they were owners in the Riviera. And when they sold that, then, Ben Goffstein had the Four Queens downtown. MR. WRIGHT: Another member, sort of in that same circle, or other people would have been like Gus Greenbaum, Moe Sedway. Did you have much to do with them as well? MR. ENGLISH: We ran into them, and they were acquaintances. We'd see them, but they weren't so closely associated with the publicity and what we were doing as the others. MR. WRIGHT: Now, these people doing documentaries about Las Vegas, the imagine projected back is these were the grand old days of the Mob in Las Vegas. Did you feel that you were hanging out with mobsters when you were here in the '40s or early '50s? MR. ENGLISH: Well, we knew the reputations, but we didn't feel that they were mobsters because it was legitimate business here. And we didn't see any bulging guns. Mostly TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 40 our interest and their interest was what they were doing and producing and creating. MR. WRIGHT: Going back to almost the very beginning, if you can, expand a little bit about -- oh, I wanted to ask you about Max Kelch too, and this goes along with that same thing. The beginning of the Live Wire Fund, that was before you came obviously, but, if you can, talk about its inception and so forth. MR. ENGLISH: Well, Max Kelch was very influential. I guess he really spearheaded the whole thing. And when I first came to Las Vegas, this was in '49, they had an advertizing agency and did advertizing as well as publicity. But even after that, after the Chamber completely took over, for a number of years, and I can't remember how many, they had a Live Wire kickoff luncheon, which I told you about, where we had the girls with the roll of paper with all the publicity clippings on them. And they would make an appeal, I guess, as to the hotel owners to contribute to the Live Wire so that we could continue this publicity campaign. MR. WRIGHT: So this was funded directly by the resorts, then? MR. ENGLISH: Directly by the resorts, and then a small percentage of the Chamber of Commerce dues. MR. WRIGHT: And they called it the Live Wire Fund? MR. ENGLISH: They called it the Live Wire Fund. TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 41 When the $25,000 from Union Pacific backed out, that's when they really started pushing the Live Wire. MR. WRIGHT: The answer to this question, I think, might surprise a few people. What was the logo of the Live Wire Fund; do you remember? MR. ENGLISH: Boy, you got me. MR. WRIGHT: Wasn't it a cowboy with a cigarette in his mouth? MR. ENGLISH: Oh, oh, the logo. Oh, yeah, it was Vegas Vic. MR. WRIGHT: So the origin of that neon cowboy on Fremont Street is more or less directly tied to the -- in fact, wasn't Vegas Vic a creation of -- MR. ENGLISH: Of the Live Wire Fund? MR. WRIGHT: -- or was it before Hannegan? But I think that part of the advertizing campaign became sort of a logo of the Live Wire Fund and an emblem of Las Vegas. MR. ENGLISH: Frank, you're the historian. I really thought that the Vegas Vic was there first, and they adopted Vegas Vic. But I don't know. MR. WRIGHT: Yeah. I think before Hannegan came in, I think the earlier ad agencies had created the cowboy. You raised the question, and I'm not going to bet the farm on it right now. Anything else, any stories that have occurred to TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 42 you? MR. ENGLISH: I'll think of them as soon as I leave. MR. WRIGHT: Oh, sure. Herb Mac Donald, who has been interviewed on tape already, told the story about the Beatles. Were you involved with Herb Mac Donald, the Beatles or anything in that area? MR. ENGLISH: I was only involved in that I shot photos of it. I wasn't involved in the planning or anything. MR. WRIGHT: Could you sort of describe what it is, because I'm not familiar with it. I wasn't here for that part of the interview. MR. ENGLISH: Well, see, the Beatles landed at McCarran Airport, and they were ushered from there, I believe, over to the Sahara Hotel. And then they had the concert at the convention center. But I can remember one thing about that that's made a lasting impression. The night they were playing, of course it was a full house, and all the photographers were up front to shoot pictures of them. It was pandemonium. Then all of a sudden, the crowd rose and started walking towards the Beatles. I've never experienced or seen anything like this in my life. And they had a ring of guards in front of the Beatles on stage. And these guys linked arms. In fact, I talked to one of them later, and he said he's never been so scared in TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 43 all his life. He'd never seen anything like this happen. They melded back. It didn't end up in any kind of a riot or anything like that. But they just started moving forward, and it was scary. MR. WRIGHT: That raises another thing that I wanted to ask you about. Elvis Presley performed here, what, 1955, something like that, on the Strip? MR. ENGLISH: Yeah. MR. WRIGHT: And there's a couple of cute photos. MR. ENGLISH: Yeah. Presley appeared at the Frontier, and his reputation hadn't gotten out here, and people did not know who he was, and really, it was a dud. Now, after that, of course, it was history. But we had kind of a famous picture. Liberace came over. Now, I can't remember whether Liberace was opening and Presley came over -- no, I think it was at the Frontier. Liberace came backstage to greet Presley. Presley sat down at the piano, and Liberace picked up the guitar, and we just got great photos that went all over the country. MR. WRIGHT: I think that's one of the most famous also. They sort of switched roles, Elvis and Walter Liberace, although I guess he dropped the Walter by then. Sounds good, unless you've got another story that pops into your mind. I'm sure we could go on and talk about celebrities forever and ever. TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 44 MR. ENGLISH: Yeah. (End of tape.) * * * * * ATTEST: The foregoing transcript of the interview was transcribed fully and accurately from the audio tape provided by KNPR Radio. Eunice G. Jones, Transcriptionist TRIPLE J STENO - 702-648-5584 3420 EDGEHILL WAY, NORTH LAS VEGAS, NEVADA 89030 ??