Gambling: The Bettor's Edge

Residents of the burgeoning metropolis were likely to be either new to the town or else recently relocated Las Vegans.

Such rootlessness, which was unusually high even for the modern Pacific slope, no doubt weakened the bonds that might naturally develop among long-term neighbors, and further detracted from residents' sense of community.

Transiency was integral to life in the forward-looking West during the twentieth century as it had been on nineteenth-century frontiers.

Living in Las Vegas generated residential patterns that paralleled the new patterns of leisure experienced by visitors on the Strip.

Both tourists and townspeople depended on autos and aspired to stronger feelings of individual identity, and both relished the risk taking and speculation that the unique, metropolis encouraged.

Residential subdivisions, complete with local shopping centers, resembled in their independence from the rest of the city the island palaces along the Los Angeles highway where players did not need to leave the self-contained complex.

Although Las Vegans often felt estranged from tourists, visitors derived from the culture of casino gambling a sense of self-determination that resembled the feeling of autonomy that local residents achieved in their subdivisions, autos, and unattached houses.

The resident and the tourist also experienced in common the relatively rapid unfolding of their destinies in Las Vegas.

Both anticipated the future eagerly, and both accepted the risks that it implied.

As bettors learned of their fates with a speedy flip of the card or a quick roll of the dice, and simultaneously proved something about their character, Las Vegans underwent a similar process of self-discovery in the face of the gambling resort.

The adopted city presented fateful choices through which residents established personal identity and learned of their destinies.

Las Vegans liked to point out that if 'something is going to happen to you, it happens quicker in Las Vegas.'

They regarded the hometown as a catalyst that accelerated the revelation of personal fate. Daily confronted with temptation and 'vice', with crowds of visitors bent on behaving in a fashion unpermitted back home.

Las Vegans learned rapidly about the mettle of which they were made. Those who overcame the resort city and stayed on despite its problems no doubt worried about how their children would survive for the experience.

Las Vegas challenged a resident's character in a way that few other cities could, and compelled him to prove himself, to learn quickly about his own strengths and weaknesses.

This process reinforced the desire for autonomy and the capacity for privacy that Las Vegans derived from the hometown they were building.