Silver Slipper & Thunderbird Hotel History: Neon, Howard Hughes & Early Highway 91

How Did Marion Hicks and Lt. Gov. Cliff Jones Build the 1948 Hotel Thunderbird?

On March 11, 1946, general contractor Marion B. Hicks, who had built San Diego's El Cortez extensions and moved to Nevada during the wartime construction boom, joined powerful Democratic kingmaker and Nevada Lieutenant Governor Clifford A. Jones to purchase a North Strip tract from Guy McAfee, Art Ham, and J. Kell Houssels for roughly $85,000. Initially proposed as the Nevada Ambassador, the project pivoted to a Southwestern Pueblo and Navajo motif after Hicks chose the mythical sacred bird of desert rainstorms as its emblem.

Opening on September 2, 1948 as the fourth full resort on US Highway 91, following El Rancho Vegas (1941), Hotel Last Frontier (1942), and the Flamingo (1946), the $2.2 million Thunderbird featured 79 low-slung air-conditioned rooms, rustic stone-and-timber interiors, the Navajo Room showroom (where Rosemary Clooney and Eartha Kitt built early Strip followings), and a towering blue-and-red neon Thunderbird roadside pylon that greeted motorists arriving from Salt Lake City.

How Did Jake Lansky's Secret $160,000 Thunderbird Loan Spark the 1955 Gaming Control Board?

Postwar materials shortages and tight bank credit pushed Marion Hicks into a fateful private financing deal while finishing the Thunderbird in 1947–1948. Through casino pit boss George Sadlo, Hicks quietly accepted a $160,000 construction loan supplied by Florida syndicate boss Jake Lansky, brother and operational lieutenant of national underworld financier Meyer Lansky, in exchange for undisclosed beneficial equity slices that never appeared on Hicks and Jones's sworn Nevada Tax Commission license filings.

In 1954, Las Vegas Sun publisher Hank Greenspun hired undercover investigative reporter Pierre Salinger (future press secretary to President John F. Kennedy) and exposed the concealed Lansky interest across front-page headlines. Embarrassed before federal Kefauver-era critics who were threatening a punitive federal tax on legal Nevada wagering, Governor Charles Russell and the Nevada Legislature acted in 1955 to create the professionalized, full-time Nevada Gaming Control Board as an investigative enforcement arm inside the Tax Commission.

The Control Board's very first high-profile disciplinary action suspended the Thunderbird's license until Lansky-linked interests were purged. Although the Nevada Supreme Court partially modified the revocation order in 1957 on evidentiary grounds, Clifford Jones resigned his public political posts, and the Thunderbird affair permanently established the principle that hidden underworld creditors invalidated a Nevada gaming license.

Why Did the 1950 Golden Slipper Rename Itself the Silver Slipper and Draw a 1964 State Raid?

Half a mile south at 3100 Las Vegas Boulevard South, architect Bill Moore (nephew of Last Frontier founder R.E. Griffith) had assembled the authentic Old West ghost-town buildings of the Last Frontier Village along the highway frontage of the Last Frontier Hotel. In late summer 1950, Moore teamed with Downtown operator Jackie Gaughan and publicist Hank Greenspun to open a standalone two-story saloon and gambling hall at the edge of the village called the Golden Slipper, designed with input from architect Martin Stern Jr.

Downtown's Golden Nugget immediately filed suit for unfair competition, arguing that "Golden" confused tourists into thinking McAfee's Fremont Street powerhouse backed the Highway 91 club. Rather than fight a protracted injunction, and after buying out the name rights from a tiny pre-existing local tavern, Moore rebranded the building in November 1950 as the Silver Slipper Gambling Hall and Saloon. YESCO fabricated its signature rooftop beacon: a 13-foot-long, three-dimensional high-heeled slipper encrusted in mirrored glass mosaic and outlined by nearly 1,000 clear, pink, and blue incandescent bulbs, rotating continuously above the Strip.

Upstairs inside the intimate Minsky-style burlesque theater, legendary fan dancer Sally Rand, exotic headliners like Jacqueline Fontaine, and gravel-voiced slapstick comic Hank Henry, whose roaring catchphrase "It's Silver Slipper Time!" echoed over local late-night television, packed crowds for low-minimum blackjack and dime slots. Yet scandal struck on April 14, 1964, when Nevada Gaming Control Board agents stormed the Silver Slipper pit, confiscated altered "flat" (shaved) craps dice and doctored roulette equipment, padlocked the tables, and forced longtime lessee Wesley "Tex" Whitson out of Nevada gaming.

Why Did Howard Hughes Pay $5.4 Million in April 1968 Just to Stop the Revolving Neon Slipper?

Directly across Highway 91 from the Silver Slipper stood Wilbur Clark's Desert Inn, where billionaire aviator Howard Hughes had barricaded himself behind blackout curtains on the ninth-floor penthouse since Thanksgiving 1966. Already controlling the Desert Inn, Sands, Frontier, and Castaways, Hughes fixated during sleepless nights in early 1968 on the Silver Slipper's 13-foot rotating shoe directly outside his west-facing windows.

In handwritten yellow-pad memos to chief Nevada lieutenant Robert Maheu, Hughes insisted two things plagued him: first, the rhythmic strobe of the rotating jeweled heel bled through gaps in his penthouse drapes; second, and far darker, Hughes became convinced that CIA operatives or syndicate spies had secretly mounted telescopic surveillance cameras inside the hollow toe of the slipper so the lens swept across his penthouse every time the shoe completed a rotation.

When Silver Slipper owners refused Maheu's requests to switch off their best roadside advertisement, Hughes took the direct billionaire route: in April 1968, Summa Corporation bought the tiny, hotel-less Silver Slipper outright for $5.4 million. Within hours of closing, Hughes's engineers climbed onto the roof, welded and disconnected the rotation motor, inspected the empty sheet-metal toe, and sealed the cavity shut.

What Happened to the Silver Slipper (1988) and Thunderbird / El Rancho (2000)?

Both Highway 91 pioneers vanished during the Strip's shift from low-rise gambling halls to 3,000-room megaresorts, though one left behind a museum centerpiece and the other a 23-year high-rise saga.

Summa Corporation sold the Frontier and adjacent Silver Slipper in early 1988 to Margaret Elardi, who shut the Silver Slipper on November 28, 1988 and bulldozed the two-story building for Frontier surface parking (a parcel that still sits vacant opposite Resorts World following the New Frontier's 2007 implosion). Fortunately, Elardi donated the 13-foot YESCO slipper to preservationists; after painstaking bulb-by-bulb steel and neon restoration by YESCO craftsmen, the glowing Silver Slipper was relit in September 2009 atop the Las Vegas Boulevard North median outside the Neon Museum.

Up at 2755 Las Vegas Boulevard South, Del Webb (1964) and Caesars World (1972) sold the Thunderbird to Dunes veteran Major Riddle, who renamed it the Silverbird in 1977 before Riviera investor Ed Torres remodeled the facade into a country-western motif and resurrected the historic name El Rancho Hotel & Casino in 1982 (unrelated to Thomas Hull's 1941 El Rancho Vegas up at Sahara Avenue). Shuttered in July 1992, the rotting 13-story tower stood boarded up for eight years until Turnberry Associates imploded it with 700 pounds of dynamite on October 3, 2000, clearing the 24.5-acre North Strip site where Jeffrey Soffer's stalled 67-story Fontainebleau Las Vegas finally opened on December 13, 2023.