Three photos from Jul-Aug. showing the three-sided 140-foot sign by Ad Art. Story from Kent Carmichael of Ad Art:

You see all those holes in the letters, in the Elvis? Colonel Tom Parker wanted to have big lamps, big hundred-and-fifty-watt lamps. When we figured the amperage it would take to put two such letters, the sign didn’t have that much current. We didn’t have that big of a substation. We told the colonel that we’d have to spend literally hundreds of thousands of dollars to get Nevada Power to get all this electricity out to us, and then we’d still have to get it up in the sign. This would take months and they wanted this done in a couple of weeks. One of our artists got the idea to drill holes in the letters, and those are just Masonite letters with holes in them. But it gave the effect that they were lights, and that’s how Elvis went up. It was never what Colonel Parker envisioned ... In fact, Colonel Parker didn’t talk to me much after that.

Wayne Cochran, Ike and Tina Turner, and 10th Story Window perform in the Casino Theatre lounge. The International's "Legitimate Theater" was the drama theater where HAIR later opened. The Youth Hotel, a “hotel within a hotel” day care or summer camp concept that allowed parents to book their children into an overnight dormitory, opened 8/17/69.

Photos: (1) Kodachrome, Vintage Las Vegas. (2) by Paul Gansky. (3) via NY Times.

Slide scan from the Gary Lenhart collection.