There’s no "Laughlin Larry," but all of your other information is accurate. Even if you don’t know Vegas Vic’s name, you know who he is: the big galoot in the Stetson, perpetually thumbing a ride along Gliter Gulch. Although he fell on evil days in past decades, the rehabilitation of Fremont Street saw Vic get a 2001 spruce-up, including reattachment of the voice box that once vexed Lee Marvin.
Vic long rode shotgun on the marquee of the Pioneer Cub in downtown Vegas, but he wasn’t part of the original plan. The club itself opened in 1942 under the auspices of a quartet of Los Angeles gambling operators –- Tudor Scherer, Farmer Paige, Chuck Addison, and Bill Curland –- who saw Sin City as a refuge from the moral crusades of City of Angels Mayor Fletcher Bowron.
"With their experience and expertise," writes Huntington Press senior editor Deke Castleman in his book Compass Las Vegas, "these L.A. operators immediately gained respectability within the legal casino business and helped improve not only its management, but its image as well."
The Pioneer Club took over the old Las Vegas Club, built in 1907, the third floor of which had once been a brothel. As late as 2001, construction workers were known to be reluctant to visit the upper floors of the Pioneer, believing it to be haunted.
Over the years, Club ownership passed through myriad hands. At various times Samuel B. Diamond, Frank Schivo, Al Parvin, Lt. Gov. Cliff "Juice" Jones, and even Jackie Gaughan held a piece of the Pioneer action. The property was shuttered in 1995, subsequently operating as souvenir shop.
Vegas Vic entered the picture as the burgeoning city of Las Vegas sought an icon. In 1947, the West-Marquis ad firm had wrested representation of the city away from J. Walter Thompson’s agency. One of West-Marquis’ brainchildren was Vegas Vic.
Unveiled in 1951, the 40-foot-tall neon cowpoke beckoned passersby with the hitchhiker-like movement of his upraised thumb and a booming, "Howdy pardner! Welcome to downtown Las Vegas." His winking, cigar-clenching, neon visage not only adorned the Pioneer Club’s matchbooks, it soon became synonymous with Vegas itself. One of the most iconic photographs of the city’s Atomic Age shows Vegas Vic in the foreground while a mushroom cloud rises ominously from behind the mountains that mask the Nevada Test Site.
Vic also inspired odes like that penned by Lili Kakich, founding director of Los Angeles’ Museum of Neon Art. In a foreword to the book Neon Nevada, she writes, "The Pioneer Club’s glowing neon cowboy, which has loomed over downtown Las Vegas for nearly half a century, points to himself with one hand and to the club below him with the other. He is our secular society’s interpretation of the luminous painted images of the Christ pointing to himself with one hand and upwards to the heavens with the other." Lakich’s musings prompted our managing editor, David McKee, to title a 2002 essay on Vegas Vic, "Christ Stopped on Fremont Street," an allusion to Carlo Levi’s famous 1945 novel.
Vic’s "birth parent" was Thomas Young, founder of Young Electric Sign Co. (better known now as YESCO). He built his glass-tubed progeny for $90,000 and is rumored to have taken a bath on the project. To recoup his fortunes, he soon had younger brothers of Vegas Vic popping around Nevada. "Wendover Will" was leased to the Stateline Hotel-Casino in the Nevada border town on the strength of Young’s argument that, for $36 a day (the cost of an additional dealer), Will would generate more business than would having an extra table game.
To this day, Wendover Will –- a neon gunslinger unlike the peaceable Vegas Vic –- beams out into the night, denoting the Nevada border. He represents the first or last chance for motorists to stop in and sin, depending on whether they’re out of or into Utah.
When the Ensign family (late of Mandalay Resort Group; John Ensign, Republican Senator from Nevada, seems to be dipping his toes into the 2012 presidential race) purchased the Stateline Hotel-Casino in Wendover in mid-2004 and changed the name to the Wendover Nugget, they donated Wendover Will (worth upwards of $1.5 million) to the city of West Wendover, which restored him to his illuminating glory and moved him about a mile away from the casinos in the commercial district. Now, instead of waving and smiling at casinogoers and highway traffic, he stares down at a strip club, liquor store, and Pizza Hut (the top three male essentials, we suppose).
Another family member, "River Rick," tops the marquee at Laughlin’s Pioneer Hotel & Gambling Hall, as seen here and here.
Vic himself soon faced illuminated temptation from the fair sex, as his female counterpart, "Sassy Sally" (sometimes referred to as "Vegas Vicky"), was mounted across Fremont Street. Sheila Swan and Peter Laufer, authors of Neon Nevada, describe Sally as "a fading cowgirl kicking her long legs at Vegas Vic … as she lures men off the sidewalk to see the girls dancing topless in her club," also called Glitter Gulch.
In his nearly 60 years, Vic has experienced countless other indignities. Neon tubing is highly vulnerable to harsh weather (much of what is called "neon" in Las Vegas actually consists of wedge-based bulbs), as well as to kamikaze pigeons. The latter would alight upon the tubes, snuffing out the neon along with themselves as they fried to death. Soon dubbed "Vagrant Vic," the neglected sign was even pelted with stones by disrespectful urchins.
In 1966, actors Lee Marvin and Woody Strode were staying in town for the trouble-plagued shooting of The Professionals, which was being shot out at Valley of Fire State Park. The two complained that Vic’s hearty "Howdy, pardner" was keeping them awake. Local legend has it that Marvin (in some versions, Strode) even threatened to shoot arrows into Vic, whose mechanical larynx was disconnected and not restored for another 34 years.
In January 2004, the Las Vegas Review Journal’s Mike Zapler complained, "Vegas Vic needs surgery. He looks like he’s dying." The article went on to detail, "Only half of his body, including one of his two eyes, lights up at night. His waving arm hasn’t worked for years. His colorful clothes have faded and peeled." Vic was, it seems, at the center of a dispute between members of Neon Museum Corp., curators of historic Vegas signage, and Schiff Enterprises, owners of the former Pioneer Club. So downfallen was Vegas Vic that even the makers of the Sylvester Stallone turkey Get Carter has balked at filming him, in view of his dilapidated condition.
Luckily, an accommodation was soon reached. "He was in rough shape," conceded Schiff Director of Operations John LaFronz six months later, at the end of a restoration effort. "Hard living, I guess," he told the Las Vegas Sun. In a purported interview with the icon himself, Sun correspondent John Katsilometes quoted Vegas Vic as describing the repair effort thusly: "I was in a six-month rehabilitation. They cleaned me up, repaired my tubing, gave me back my original plaid shirt ‘stead of that yellow one I had to wear for a long time. I’ve had more work done on me than Cher."
To this day, Vegas Vic flourishes as the city’s "Best Old Neon Sign," according to Vegas.com scribe Geoff Carter, who lauded Vic as "the perfect Las Vegan ... Stands tall. Snappy dresser. Doesn’t drink, doesn’t have a gambling habit. Just look at that smile. Brad Pitt has gone farther with less."
