las vegas bet
Las Vegas is convention central. Orthodontists go there, as do architects, computer geeks and gynecologists, TV preachers and township clerks, postal workers and pathologists. There's an abundance of good hotel rooms, cheap eats, agreeable weather. Coming and going is reasonably painless. There's golf and gambling and ogling of girls -- showgirls of unspeakable beauty -- and, of course, the mountains, the desert, and the sky.
The National Funeral Directors Association advertised its 116th Annual Convention and International Exposition there in the trade press as "A Sure Bet." Debbie Reynolds was talking to the Spouse's Luncheon. Neil Sedaka was singing at the Annual Banquet. There was a golf outing, a new website, the installation of officers. I called the brother and the brother-in-law and said, "Let's get our funeral homes covered and go out to Vegas for the convention." Pat and Mike agreed. All of us are funeral directors. All of us were due for a break. Here's another coincidence: All of our wives are named Mary. The Marys all agreed to come along. They'd heard about the showgirls and high-stakes tables and figured Pat and Mike and I would need looking after. They'd heard about the great malls and the moving statues and the magic shows.
My publisher paid for my airfare and our room at the Hilton. "A Sure Bet" is what they reckoned, too. My book, The Undertaking -- Life Studies from the Dismal Trade, was being featured in the Marketplace Booth at the exhibit hall. The association would be selling and I'd be signing as many copies as we could for a couple of days. So there I sat, behind a stack of books, glad-handing and autographing, surrounded by caskets and hearses, cremation urns and new computer software, flower stands and funeral flags and embalming supplies. Some things about this enterprise never change -- the basic bias toward the horizontal, the general preference for black and blue, the arcane lexicons of loss and wonder. And some are changing every day. Like booksellers and pharmacists and oncologists, many of the small firms are being overtaken by the large consolidators and conglomerates. Custom gives way to convenience. The old becomes old, then new again.
Five thousand undertakers made it to Vegas -- the biggest turnout since the last time here, in '74 -- and 2,300 sales reps and suppliers. It was bigger than Orlando or Kansas City or Chicago, or the next year in Boston.
Las Vegas seems perfect for the mortuary crowd -- a metaphor for the vexed, late-century American soul that seems these days to run between extremes of fantasy and desolation. Vegas seems just such an oasis: a neon garden of earthly delights amid a moonscape of privations, abundance amid the cacti, indulgence surrounded by thirst and hunger.
Or maybe it's that we undertakers understand these games of chance -- the way life is ever asking us to ante up, the way the wager's made before the deal is dealt or dice are tossed, before we pull the lever. Some people play for nickels and dimes, some for dollars, some for keeps. But whatever we play for, we win or lose according to these stakes. We cannot, once winning is certain or losing is sure, change our bet. We cannot play for dollars, then lose in dimes or win in cash when we wager matchsticks. It's much the same with love and grief. They share the same arithmetic and currency. We ante up our hearts in love, we pay our losses off in grief. Baptisms, marriages, funerals -- this life's casinos -- the games we play for keeps.
Oh, we can play the odds, hedge our bets, count the cards, get a system. I think of Blaise Pascal, the 17th-century French mathematician who bet on heaven thus: "Better to believe in a God who isn't than not to believe in a God who is." Figure the math of that, the odds. Pascal's Wager is what they called it. All of us play a version of this game.
I came downstairs in the middle of the night and lost 200 bucks before it occurred to me that this is how they built this city -- on folks like me, on what we'd be willing to lose. The next night my Mary won $800 on one pull of the lever on the slots. They paid her off in crisp C-notes. We laughed and smiled. She tipped the woman who sold her the tokens. She went shopping the next day for a pair of extravagant shoes and came home, as they say, with money in her pockets.
We undertakers understand winners and losers. Our daily lives are lessons in the way love hurts, grief heals, and life -- always a game of chance -- goes on. In Vegas we get to play the game as if there's no tomorrow. And after a long night of winning or losing, it's good to have a desert close at hand into which we wander, like holy ones of old, to raise our songs of thanks or curse our luck to whatever God there is, or isn't.
Las Vegas residents and visitors have witnessed previous fires in various hotels. They include:
2005 – A three-alarm fire at the Aztec Inn, just north of Sahara Avenue on the Strip, forced the evacuation of the casino and caused an estimated $200,000 in damages but no injuries. At the time, it was the third fire that the hotel suffered in several weeks, but fire investigators did not connect the trio of blazes.
Feb. 18, 2003 – A pre-dawn smoky fire at the Aladdin hotel and casino, sparked by a lit cigarette in a laundry chute, caused the evacuation of the 21st and 22nd floors and resulted in six people being treated at the scene for smoke inhalation.
2003 – The historic Moulin Rouge hotel and casino on West Bonanza Road burned to the ground in May. It was the first hotel in Las Vegas where African American entertainers who performed on the Strip could stay. Fred Ball, 45, and John Antwan Caver, 29, were arrested on arson charges.
July 1998 – Fire investigators believed that lightning sparked a fire that erupted at the Palace Station, after flames blasted through the 21st floor during a torrential thunderstorm.
1998 – The Las Vegas Hilton Hotel reported $1 million in damages from a fire that forced the evacuation of six floors during a two-alarm fire, but no one was injured.
1993 - The under-construction Stratosphere Tower catches fire.
1986 – Thomas Edward Little Owl, born on a Montana Indian reservation, was convicted of setting a string of fires at Strip hotels in early 1986. He was sentenced in December 1986 to 10 years in prison for an arson blaze at the Sands Hotel. He no longer is imprisoned in Nevada. His whereabouts are unknown.
1981 – On Feb. 10 an arson blaze at the Las Vegas Hilton Hotel killed eight people and injured scores others. A busboy torched an eighth-floor lobby curtain with a marijuana cigarette. Philip Bruce Cline was convicted of arson and is serving eight life terms plus 15 years in state prison.
1980 – The second worse hotel blaze in United States history, the MGM Grand Hotel fire (the worst was at Atlanta’s Winecoff Hotel), took 87 lives and injured 200 people. Nevada enacted statewide regulations protecting high-rise hotels with sprinkler systems and alarms after the Nov. 21 blaze. (Sun Coverage: MGM Fire May Mean Billion-Dollar Loss MGM Nixed Improved Sprinkler System in ‘73 Additional Coverage: Burned Into Memory)
1970s – A Holiday Inn manager died after falling asleep while smoking in bed at the Strip resort.
1969 – Clark County Fire Capt. Frank Testa suffered a heart attack while fighting a fire at the Stardust Hotel. Seventeen others were injured.
1960 – The El Rancho Vegas burned to the ground on June 17, as entertainers Pearl Bailey and Betty Grable fled the flames. The hotel’s famous neon-lit windmill toppled in the blaze.
1943 – The Meadows Hotel and Casino, built in 1931, burned down when the Las Vegas Fire Department ignored the alarm, because the Meadows was outside the city limits, east of Fremont Street and Charleston Boulevard.Sen. Hillary Clinton has been criticized by political opponents for innocuous comments she made last week about President Lyndon B. Johnson’s work to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
This is what she said:
“I would point to the fact that Dr. (Martin Luther) King’s dream began to be realized when President Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, when he was able to get through Congress something that President Kennedy was hopeful to do, the president before had not even tried, but it took a president to get it done,” she said. “That dream became a reality, the power of that dream became real in people’s lives because we had a president who said we are going to do it and actually got it accomplished.”
That comment has been wrongly transformed by some into an insult to the legacy of the slain civil rights leader. That view has been fanned by political opportunists, who see this as a chance to take voters from her, especially in South Carolina and in Nevada as well.
Democratic presidential contender Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., asked about the racial tenor of the campaign, told the Sun on Sunday: “I am puzzled by it. She made a statement about Dr. King that I think was ill-advised. But I said nothing about it. Suddenly she is blaming us for distorting her words. I don’t know how I could distort her words since I hadn’t commented on her words since she made the statement.”
Former Sen. John Edwards told a church congregation in South Carolina this weekend that he was “troubled” by the “suggestion that real change came not through the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King but through a Washington politician. I fundamentally disagree with that.”
What Obama sees as unfortunate and what Edwards disagrees with is the truth. King stirred the nation and rallied people to the civil rights movement, yet it took Johnson to use his considerable influence to get Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act the following year.
Clinton is not insulting King’s memory on Sunday she said he should receive the lion’s share of the credit she is pointing out the reality: It takes a president to make things happen in Washington.
On Monday both Obama and Clinton called for unity, saying they were on the same side in terms of diversity and civil rights, and that is another good point. This should not be an issue.
After George W. Bush’s failed presidency, the focus should be on which candidate has the know-how and ability to get things done if elected president.
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