Pit boss recalls The Strip's glory days

SANDPOINT — Before the Bellagio or any of the other mammoth hotel-casinos crowded in with their towers and fountains and disparate architectural themes, there was only The Strip. 

It was an unlikely furrow of smoke-filled gambling halls notched into the very sands of the Nevada desert, not the glitzy showcase and tour destination it has become.  The Las Vegas of old was run by the Mob, populated by the brightest stars of the day and, according to one Sandpoint resident who spent years there as a dealer and casino pit boss, a lot nicer place to live and work.

“When the Mafia owned it, they called it Sin City — now they call it Adult Disneyland,” said John Pymm with a rueful shake of his head.  “Las Vegas was a good place to work when the Mafia was there.  They took care of their customers and you could always get a job.

“Everything changed when they left,” he added.  “The Gaming Commission came in and all they were interested in was money.”

Pymm, 80, first experienced Vegas in the early 1940s, when Howard Hughes was running the El Rancho and Last Frontier casinos and Bugsy Siegel hadn’t moved his act into town.  By 1946, the Mob was in the building mode, and the first large-scale casino, The Flamingo, began construction, followed shortly by classics like The Sands, The Stardust, The Thunderbird and The Desert Inn.

With the expansion came hotel rooms, floorshows and an influx of stars like Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Sammy Davis, Jr.  Add Kennedy family in-law and actor Peter Lawford to the mix for early 1960s glamour and you have the famed Rat Pack — a group of rounders that Pymm met regularly as he worked in the casinos.

“Frank Sinatra was a big gambler; he lost a lot of money,” Pymm said.

“Dean Martin wasn’t the drinker he pretended to be, but he sure did like to gamble,” he added.

Sinatra, Pymm said, played a behind-the-scenes role in the civil rights movement when he insisted that the casino bosses end segregation in their hotels, at least where it concerned his running buddy and co-star Sammy Davis, Jr.

“One night, Frank told them ‘Sammy is going to stay here with us tonight after the show,’” Pymm said, recreating the conversation.  “They told him it couldn’t be done and he said, ‘Well, goodbye then — you can cancel my contract.’  Sammy stayed there that night and colored people were allowed in the casinos after that.”

Race discrimination in Vegas was dealt a blow when Sinatra took a stand, but the casinos had a tougher time figuring out how to deal with a 16-year-old singer who was a hit with audiences long before he had a hit song.  Wayne Newton and his brother started doing as many as six shows-a-day in Las Vegas in the late 1950s, appearing regularly at the El Cortez Hotel.

“They had to escort him to the stage by going in and out the back way, because he was too young to be in a casino,” Pymm recalled.  “The first time I heard him sing, I thought it was a girl because his voice was so high.  Then he had a big hit with ‘Danke Schoen’ and went on to be known as Mr. Las Vegas.”

Pymm’s work history would easily qualify as colorful: He ran heavy equipment and was on the crew that installed the last generator at Hoover Dam, worked at the Area 51 test site for atom bombs and was employed at a nursery next door to the Paramount lot in Hollywood, where he spent his lunch hours watching James Garner and David Janssen shoot episodes of TV programs like “Maverick” and “The Fugitive.”

“Once they found out I had been a dealer in Vegas, we talked a lot when they weren’t shooting,” Pymm said.  “Both of them loved to gamble.”

John Pymm, on the other hand, did not.  Even though he had been in the epicenter of gaming — dealing the cards or standing watch over the casino floors — he was never ensnared in the addiction that claimed many of his co-workers and Las Vegas visitors.

“I saw so many people lose their cars, their homes, their wives, their families — they lost everything they owned to gambling,” he said.

Pymm keeps a mental inventory of what he calls the “interesting incidents” that took place during his time on The Strip.  One of them stands out as a tragic cautionary tale that helped convince this card dealer to become a lifelong non-gambler.  It happened at the craps table, which Pymm warned is always a sure-fire bet if you’re in the mood to lose money.

“I remember one particular incident at the Horseshoe Club — that was the only casino that had no-limit betting,” he said.  “A guy from back east put a million dollars on one roll of the dice — and he won.  A few minutes later, he came back with all the money he’d won and bet all of that on one roll and lost it.

“He went out and jumped off a building and killed himself.”

If there is any truth at all in the marketing slogan “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” it is that the thing that really stays there is the money, according to Pymm.  It’s not that there’s anything fishy about the tables; the Gaming Commission sees to it that things are on the up-and-up.  It’s just that, by its very nature, gambling is built on odds that favor the house.

“They don’t build those casinos with winners,” he said. “The casinos want you to win the first time you come to Vegas so that you’ll think, ‘This is easy.’ And then you keep coming back and coming back until you lose it all.”

From the time he first encountered Las Vegas to the point when he moved out for good, Pymm watched it grow from a small town of 35,000 in the 1940s to a city of more than 2 million, “with houses that go straight across the desert until they run right up against the mountains.”  The smaller casinos that glittered in the Sixties have been demolished to make way for the high-rise hotels and block-long extravaganzas that command the desert landscape today.

“A lot of the hotels I worked in have been torn down,” Pymm said, rattling off the names of former gaming palaces in a eulogy to casinos that were reduced to rubble as part of the Las Vegas reinvention process.  “The new hotels buy them and blow them up so they can keep building higher.”

One of the best bets he ever made, he said, was making the move to Sandpoint to be close to his daughter, Pixie Vasquez, and her husband Yogi. 

“I’ve got more friends here than I ever had in my life,” said Pymm, who lives full-time at Luther Park.  “And a lot of the ladies ask me if I’ll sit with them in the dining room.  That’s something I never had happen to me before.  I kind of like it.”