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An Excerpt from At the Sands: The Casino That Shaped Classic Las Vegas, Brought the Rat Pack Together, and Went Out With a Bang By David G. Schwartz
M
y latest book, At the Sands, traces the history of the famous Las Vegas Strip hotel from before its December 1952 opening to after its June 1996 closing. There’s a reason that chips from the Sands are consistently worth more to collectors than those of other casinos of the era: the Sands has an incredible mystique around it. It was my job as the author to try to capture some of that mystique and explain what made the Sands so special. The Sands is most famous today as the home of the Rat Pack, even though Sinatra loathed that name, which only became popular in the 1980s. But the Rat Pack (or the Clan, as Sinatra preferred) didn’t coalesce until 1960, more than seven years into the Sands’ history. In the first several chapters of the book, I look at what made the Sands the place where the definitive icons of classic Las Vegas came together. The answer is a lot of hard work by three men in particular: Jack Entratter, who made the Copa Room an entertainment mecca; Carl Cohen, the casino manager par excellence; and Al Freeman, a publicity maven who wooed the media and presented an image of the Sands as a place where fun happened. The story of Frank, Dean and Sammy and their friends at the Sands is an incredible one, but there is much more to the Sands than the Rat Pack. After Howard Hughes bought the casino in 1967, the Sands began its second chapter. While the Hughes years don’t have the same “cool” aura as the earlier days, they are nevertheless important to history, and necessary for a real understanding of the Sands; Hughes and Summa, his successor corporation, owned the Sands for longer than the original owners. In 1988, the Interface Group, chaired by Sheldon Adelson, acquired the Sands. At the time, Adelson was a Las Vegas outsider and something of a maverick. Comdex, the computer show that brought more than 100,000 visitors to Las
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Global Gaming Business NOVEMBER 2020
Vegas, was a behemoth, but many in the industry lamented the fact that convention-goers gambled much less than other visitors, looking past the boost they gave the bottom lines of other departments. This excerpt from At the Sands looks at how Las Vegas reacted to Comdex 1990, and how the Sands played a critical role in bringing conventions to the forefront in the gaming industry.
