1) Helen Stewart -- In 1879, Archibald Stewart, a rancher in Pioche, Nevada, loaned some money to O.D. Gass, who owned the Las Vegas Ranch. Gass defaulted on the loan, Stewart foreclosed on the 1,000-acre property, and he and his family moved there. Archie Stewart was murdered in 1884, leaving the ranch to his wife. Helen Stewart ran it for the next 20 years, raising five children, hosting travelers, and amassing 1,800 acres and most of the water rights in the valley. In 1901, she sold all but a few acres to the railroad that founded Las Vegas. For the rest of her life, Helen Stewart lived on the land she didn’t sell, and so immersed herself in the society of the young railroad town that she has been known ever since as the First Lady of Las Vegas.
2) C.P. Squires -- If Helen Stewart was the First Lady, Charles "Pop" Squires was the Father of Las Vegas. Squires came to Las Vegas in 1904 when it was merely a few tents in the dusty desert. He was 39 and had $25,000, with which he planned to establish a bank, hotel, lumberyard, and realty company. Squires bought up property at the original auction for homes and businesses, started the first electric and telephone company, and owned the first successful newspaper, the Las Vegas Age. He was also one of the first southern Nevadans to start agitating for a nearby dam on the Colorado River and was instrumental in its initiation. Pop Squires lived to be 93, passing on in 1958, by which time his dream of a vibrant city was well on its way to being fulfilled.
3) Walter Bracken -- A 31-year-old civil engineer when he first visited southern Nevada in 1901 on a mission to survey the route of the Salt Lake-Los Angeles Railroad, Walter Bracken was part of the team that recommended buying the Las Vegas Ranch from Helen Stewart for its land and water. Las Vegas’ first postmaster, he also surveyed the town site, setting aside free land for churches, the city library, and the county courthouse. Bracken then became the railroad’s agent, in charge of the Las Vegas Land & Water Company, doling out property for development and directing the installation of the first water system. He virtually ran the town single-handedly for its first 35 years; he died in 1950.
4) Pat McCarran -- In his time, Pat McCarran was one of the most powerful politicians in the country. He was born in northern Nevada and attended the University of Nevada in Reno where he studied law. He was elected to the Nevada Legislature in 1902 at the age of 26, to the Nevada Supreme Court in 1912, and to the United States Senate in 1932. McCarran promptly built a political machine so large that it came to dominate political life in both Nevada and Washington, D.C. He was fiercely loyal to Nevadans and worked tirelessly on their behalf. He brought industry to Henderson during World War II, fought federal taxes on casinos, helped establish Nellis Air Force Base and assisted in establishing a civil-aviation system nationwide, for which he’s remembered as the namesake of McCarran International Airport.
5) Thomas Young -- Thomas Young was born in England, emigrated to the U.S., settled in Ogden, Utah, and exercised his love of drawing by becoming a sign maker. Starting out as an apprentice, in 1920 at the age of 25 he established the Young Electric Sign Company (YESCO). Young traveled the west, sketching signs for commercial customers on scrap paper. In 1931, Young was traveling between Utah and Southern California when he stopped in the remote town of Las Vegas, where gambling had just been legalized. He immediately foresaw bright neon signs to adorn the new casinos -- and YESCO never looked back. Today, it claims to be the largest sign company in the country, with more than 1,000 employees and nearly $100 million in revenues, more than a third of which comes from casino business.
6) Moe Dalitz -- Morris B. Dalitz started out in the family laundry business in Michigan and quickly showed his financial genius in steel, real estate, railroads, even ice cream. But he made his first fortune in bootlegged booze, which he parlayed into casinos in Ohio and Kentucky. When he returned from World War II, the heat was on the illegal gambling joints, so he moved to Las Vegas where casinos were legal, opening the Desert Inn in 1950 at the age of 51. He then proceeded to become a pillar of the community, building golf courses, hospitals, synagogues, and shopping centers; bankrolling Pat McCarran’s political power; advising Jimmy Hoffa on Teamster loans to casinos; and establishing a reputation as one of the most charitable men ever to live in Las Vegas. Moe Dalitz showed all the old-school bosses how to live a legitimate life and, in the process, helped legitimize Las Vegas itself.
7) E. Parry Thomas -- Parry Thomas, originally from Ogden, Utah, came to Las Vegas in 1954, sent there to manage the Bank of Las Vegas by his banker boss, who held a stake in it. Thomas quickly recognized the endless opportunities for a lone bank willing to loans capital to the casino business, at a time when no other banks would do so. He approved the first of them, $750,000 to Milton Prell to expand the Sahara, in 1955. And for the next 20 years, Parry Thomas and his partner Jerry Mack were the men to see about borrowing money for the casino industry. For example, Thomas was instrumental in Steve Wynn’s success early on, by helping him gain control of the Golden Nugget. The Bank of Las Vegas merged with Valley Bank of Reno and took its name; Thomas built the 17-story Valley Bank in downtown in 1975. To honor the partners for financing many UNLV projects, the Thomas and Mack Center was named for them. Las Vegas would have been a very different city if this one banker hadn’t capitalized the casino business.
8) Jay Sarno -- Writes A.D. Hopkins in The First 100, [link], "You can get an argument over who started the Las Vegas Strip, but there’s no question that it was Jay Sarno who changed it forever. The fast-living genius behind Caesars Palace and Circus Circus invented both the fantasy resort and the family resort, twin ideas that have guided the past three decades of Las Vegas growth." Sarno was a developer, entrepreneur, and degenerate gambler who got started by building motor inns in Atlanta, Palo Alto, and Dallas after WW II -- with loans from the Central States Teamsters Pension Fund. Then, a side trip to Las Vegas changed Sarno and Vegas forever. His design team came up with the concept for Caesars Palace, which was the town’s thematic standard for more than 20 years. A year later they designed Circus Circus, and dreamed up Grandissimo, a 6,000-room hotel that proved decades before its time. Jay Sarno died in 1984 in a suite at Caesars of a heart attack at age 62.
9) Kirk Kerkorian -- Kirk Kerkorian made his early money in aviation, but his destiny lay in Las Vegas, which he first visited in 1945, shooting craps and speculating in vacant Strip land. In the late ‘60s, he built the Las Vegas International, now the Las Vegas Hilton, at the time the largest hotel in the world. Then he bought MGM Studios, which he used as a theme for his first MGM Grand Hotel-Casino, now Bally’s. Then he built the Reno MGM Grand. Then the current MGM Grand. Then he bought the Mirage corporation. Then he bought the Mandalay Resort corporation. Today, Kerkorian’s MGM Mirage owns Mandalay Bay, Luxor, Excalibur, New York-New York, Monte Carlo, Bellagio, Mirage, Treasure Island, and Circus Circus, almost the entire west side of the Las Vegas Strip.
10) Steve Wynn -- He redesigned the Golden Nugget to add a touch of Hollywood to derelict downtown Las Vegas. He spent $650 million on the Mirage and launched what’s arguably the greatest building boom in the history of the world. He threw up Treasure Island almost as an afterthought. He designed and built Bellagio and the Wynn Las Vegas, the two most expensive hotels on Earth, and he’s currently working on Encore and a $3 billion urban village. Steve Wynn is without doubt the greatest casino visionary ever to live. And that’s all that needs to be said.
