Question of the Day - 06 May 2021

A number of time capsules have been buried around Las Vegas down through the years and none, from what we can tell, have had much luck in staying put long enough to be found and retrieved on the intended dates anywhere from 25 to 100 years forward. Or they were buried permanently with the properties themselves.

The Desert Inn, for example, had buried three time capsules by the time it closed in 2000.

The first was in 1985 to celebrate its 35th anniversary and was due to be opened on April 24, 2020. In 1992, when the hotel was theoretically rebranded the Stars Desert Inn & Country Club, another time capsule was buried to honor Frank Sinatra’s 77th birthday. It was supposed to be opened on Dec. 12th, 2020. Finally, in April 2000, the resort celebrated its 50th – and what turned out to be its final – birthday. To mark the occasion, a third time capsule was buried in a custom-built granite chamber right in front of the casino entrance. This one was due to be opened on April 25, 2050.

Only three days later, however, Steve Wynn bought the property. By the end of August that year, the DI had closed for good and the following year, the dismantling process commenced, culminating in the final implosion in 2004. As far as we know, unless someone secretly retrieved them, all three capsules now lie buried beneath the Wynn somewhere, where most likely they'll remain unless or until some future construction work should happen to unearth any or all of them.

As for the Sands' time capsule, that one has an even more ignominious ending. According to a short article in the Reno Gazette-Journal dated December 22, 1977, "In the early 1960s, the front lawn under which the time capsule was buried became the lobby of the hotel during a major renovation and the capsule evidently got lost in the shuffle."

Then, when the Sands was celebrating its 25th anniversary in 1977, the time capsule was again mentioned. The publicity prompted Elmer and Ada Conn, Kansas transplants to Las Vegas, to come forward with the capsule. They'd fished it out of a local dump in 1963, when evidently it had been tossed into the trash and wound up in the landfill. The Conns were looking for antiques there and kept the capsule, returning it to the Sands 14 years later. 

A number of the items, from Louella Parsons, Tallulah Bankhead, Lee Mortimer, Frankie Lane, and a couple of well-known newspaper reporters of the day, remained intact. 

What happened to those items, along with the capsule itself, which Ada Conn said "looked like an old bomb," is unknown. But if the original disposition of the capsule is any indication, they all went right back to the dump.