this robot needs guns
Canes, WTF? UCLA, WTF?? Tarheels, WTF??? ANTM, WTF??!!??
So, big ups to Spacegrrl for giving me something to ponder over besides the befuddling worlds of sports and reality TV. Friends of hers discovered some interesting history about their house. There is plenty of info about Major Riddle around on the interwebs. His lasting contribution to Vegas culture appears to have been the introduction of topless showgirls while he was running the Dunes. He also started several other casinos after moving on from the Dunes in the 60s, including the Silver Nugget. Coincidentally, we saw bits of old signage from both the Dunes and the Silver Nugget during our tour of the Neon Boneyard. I found a pic in one of my books (Fabulous Las Vegas in the 50s) that showed Sinatra and a couple of un-named guys at the Dunes opening. Further online digging, tho, indicates that neither of these was the elusive Major Riddle (One was Jack Entratter, owner of the Sands, who Sinatra's always joking about in his monologues). I did eventually find a site w/ some good info on the early years of the Dunes. I'm not linking it, however, cos it's a hot mess. Built to work in IE4 and only IE4 apparently. Won't even load the subpages in Firefox and when viewed in Exploder 5.whatever, has the photos dropped all over the page, usually obscuring the text. But, there were two pics of Major Riddle. One of him and his wife and the other of him and Virginia Hill. As in the notorious girlfriend of Bugsy Siegel. I'm sure it's too much to expect that Hill was the flashy dame who showed up in the Caddy w/ Major Riddle. Given the number of hot & cold running showgirls he would've been surrounded by, the possibilities are many.