FLASHBACKS: JIMMY THE GREEK’S BIG HUNCH PLAY, ‘FAN MAN’ CRASHES FIGHT & LANDMARK IMPLOSION
November 1, 1987: Tall movie stars Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis, who fell in love while making The Fly, are driving through Las Vegas and decide on a whim to get married at 3 a.m. It lasts three years.
November 2, 1948: Jimmy the Greek, a Vegas wiseguy long before he became a TV commentator, makes $170,000 on a $10,000 bet that Harry Truman would upset Thomas Dewey in the presidential election. He based his bet on the hunch that women wouldn’t vote for a man with a mustache.
November 3, 2009: The Pinball Hall of Fame moves to bigger quarters on Tropicana Boulevard, doubling the original space that opened in 2006. The collection houses 400 pinball machines dating as far back as 1947, many of them still playable, with profits going to the Salvation Army.
November 4, 1967: The first Las Vegas Roundup, a celebration of sobriety sponsored by Alcoholics Anonymous, concludes with a banquet at the Showboat. Though the founder describes it as only a “mild success,” the roundup grows into a major four-day event with meetings, workshops and a golf tournament.
November 5, 1958: Las Vegas city commissioners vote to recommend that casinos not hire women as dealers. Women, usually relegated to jobs as cocktails waitresses and cashiers, don’t regularly take their places at the gambling tables until the 1970s.
November 6, 1993: James “Fan Man” Miller interrupts the Evander Holyfield/Riddick Bowe fight by swooping into the ring outside Caesars Palace in a motorized paraglider. Fan Man suffers a seventh-round knockout when fans beat him senseless. The fight resumes after 20 minutes.
November 7, 1995: The Landmark Hotel, which was featured in the movies Casino and Diamonds are Forever but closed five years earlier, is imploded to make way for a Convention Center parking lot. Footage of the destruction is used in the campy alien movie Mars Attacks!