The Rat Pack Opened the Doors for Blacks in Vegas

I watch the television news each morning that I wake up in South Deerfield, since I’ve installed one of those racks that holds the TV way up on the wall like in a hospital room. My ritual is to flip it on and catch some scenes of news or turn it on late at night when I can’t sleep.

The other night at 3:45 am, I caught a show on PBS called The American Experience about Las Vegas. People in the early ’50s used to take bus excursions sponsored by the casinos and the city out into the desert to watch atomic bombs go off. The government blew up more than 120 atomic and nuclear bombs above the surface of the desert, and Americans watched like eager schoolchildren. They also featured all sorts of atomic menus and thought the whole thing was a gay affair.

The show also had footage of the famous Rat Pack, which was a casino show called The Summit, featuring Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr, Frank Sinatra, Peter Lawford and Joey Bishop. In 1961, a seat at a table at the Vegas Casino where this show was taking place was worth gold. Everybody wanted to be there, it was always sold out, and they’d bill it as Dean Martin, “Maybe Frank, Maybe Sammy,”so the audience never knew who might pop in for an impromptu performance. Actually the clips on this show were kind of lame, in an early ’60s kind of way, one showed Deano picking up Sammy, talking about how this ‘his attempt at affirmative action.”

But the interracial Rat Pack did break down color barriers, causing the casinos to drop their segregation policies. The show told about how Vegas owes its current status to the links of Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky, and how in the beginning, the casinos were charming desert roadhouses. It was not until 1989, when the Mirage opened, that the city began being known for collassal gambling palaces that got so over the top as they are today.