Vegas Voice 4-19

Being in Vegas
By: Joey Kantor / Vegas Retrospective
Any Las Vegan knows that there is more to
this dried out watering hole then glitzy
casinos. We really lived our lives according to
streets, the grid.
In the olden days (for me that would be
the seventies) my Las Vegas life didn’t revolve around the Strip but
rather Sahara Avenue, Charleston, Decatur, Tropicana. We were a
small town.
Vegas Village, Wonder World, The Venetian (Italian restaurant),
Macayo Vegas, The Boulevard Mall, The Parkway Theatres, The
Boulevard Theatres, The Huntridge. These were some of the places
that we visited on a daily basis. Simple pleasures.
Sure, we’d go to the hotels too. How many times had my father
fought over the check with his visiting siblings at The Flamingo
coffee shop? How many times did my brothers and I get to lay out
at these pools, living in the lap of luxury?
All of us kids listened to one radio station: KENO. All the pop hits.
The 70s were alive and vibrant and colorful. I couldn’t imagine a
more modern era as I lived in a time when The Carpenters proudly
proclaimed the power of love, sometimes even at the Riviera Hotel.
It peeves me to this day when documentarians show the 70s in black
and white. The 70s were not a black and white era. We had definitely
transmogrified into a technicolor world by then.
True, I had the gift of childish vision to help me love this desert world
I was born into and perhaps this allows me now to merely imagine that
the world was a simple and pure place. The Vietnam War and Watergate
had thrown a monkey wrench into the whole simple and good idea
for the country at large, but here in Vegas we were getting along just
splendidly.
In the center of our town famous people headlined for monstrous
sums of money and everybody in the world wanted to be a part. We
lay our heads on our pillows at night knowing that something
internationally important seemed to be brewing amongst the twinkling
lights just a few miles away.
The world of yesterday is always in a bit of a fog for us. I know now that
my era of seeming Utopia may have been your era of incomprehensible
woe.
But we Vegans really seemed to have it all back then. We lived together
in this unique desert and breathed in deeply of the goodness of others
doing the same and in a very safe place no less.
Joey Kantor is a journalist and novelist. He writes fiction
under the name Fargo Kantrowitz. His Las Vegas based novel,
Babybirds, is available at Lulu.com.
20
April 2019