Thursday, July 4, 2024

Las Vegas, 1969


Will always love the Vegas of the 1960s, where we'd drive through to get to Denver with Dad, Mom, and siblings.  We'd make a stop for beverages and snacks, and I'd go inside the store with Dad to check out the 3 slot machines like three abandoned or renegade outlaws poised to take your coin.  But there was something saintly about their isolation from the casinos.  Maybe, just maybe, they held the promise, at astronomical odds, of delivering you from bad luck.  And for novelty effect, Dad would pick up a few of those travel-sized booze bottles to prove that he'd stopped in Vegas without really stopping in Vegas.  To a kid, these things were magic.  How did they put booze in tiny bottles like this?  Was the booze real?  Were you supposed to save the bottles, unlike the regular-sized bottles?  Where were they manufactured?  Silly queries of a kid along for a long-distance ride on the Interstate across the West to Denver.

The song playing is called "Riot," 1969 by Hugh Masekela

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