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Yes, we've had questions we can’t answer – like this one! It must have been more than a few years ago, too, because several local experts drew a blank when we posed this question. The nearest we were able to pin it down was thanks to KVBC-TV News Director (and part-time Vegas historian) Robert Stoldal, who noted, "If you are counting on me, you will have to go insane.
"There were lots of small clubs-restaurants along that section of paradise," he recalls, "as well as running a few blocks east from Paradise on Flamingo and Tropicana: jazz clubs, small restaurants. As the strip grew, the Strip workers looked for nearby places to [relax] after work...and created a cottage industry along Paradise. There was a plane for a long time. It think it was called a guppy because of the odd shape of the plane. It would have been near the southwest corner of Paradise and Flamingo. The plan was all along to turn the plane into a restaurant but it never happened."
The Nevada State Museum's Dennis McBride thinks it might have been tied in with one of the two casinos at that corner: the then-Continental (now Terrible's) or the then-Ambassador (later the Key Largo and now just plain closed). He also notes that there's a brothel in Beatty – Angel's Ladies Brothel – which has a cracked-up Twin Beech sitting out front, having crash-landed nearby back in 1979, when the establishment was known as Fran's Star Ranch. 'I'm sure,' he adds, "they served great...meat."
