Quick Vegas Vows Last a Lifetime
Half a century later, my grandparents revisit their wedding chapel. The 91 Club, where they danced as newlyweds, and its owner coined the route to his saloon "The Las Vegas Strip,” had been long gone.
👋 Hello, I’m Kevin Ferguson, author of 🍷 Rain on the Monte Bello Ridge,🍷 my forthcoming memoir about health, aging and winemaking. (Read the origin story of the book.) 🍇 The Centenarian Playbook is my newsletter, which features longevity tips and stories from Grandma Kay’s long life. It also includes stories of the Gemello Winery, which her late husband, Mario, ran for nearly half a century. 📖 I’m sure you’ll find my maternal grandparents are quite lovable characters. You can subscribe by clicking on this handy little button.
Below is an early chapter. Hope you enjoy it!
A Vegas Wedding & 64 Years of Marriage
Grandma Kay met my grandfather in grade school, when her family moved to Mountain View from Oakland in 1927. She was six-years-old. Her older brother Pete started class with Mario, and they quickly became best friends.
Years later, Pete became confused when Mario came over to the house — not to see him.
“Wait, what? He’s here to see my sister?”
On her sixteenth birthday, Mario offered to take her to an Alice Faye movie. Kay loved Alice Faye. At the end of the night, Mario gave her a kiss. Unbeknownst to him, the kiss cast a spell over Kay. Drama would unfold later when Mario would come over to hang out with Pete.
Kay would be furious that Mario wasn’t visiting to see her. He didn’t ask her out or call her until several months later.
“I hated him!” Grandma Kay has said, countless times when this story would resurface at family gatherings.
But after much urging from her brother Pete, Kay would agree to go on another date with him. To where: another Alice Faye movie, of course, “365 Nights in Hollywood.”
Another fond memory involved Mario’s empathy and compassion towards Kay’s other brother, Mitch, who she would lose to kidney disease at the age of 19. Mitch first became sick in high school, causing him to miss a lot of school and eventually stay back a grade.
“On one of our dates to San Francisco, your grandfather invited Mitch to come with us,” Grandma Kay told me one day during the pandemic. “I was very touched.”
November 17, 1940 - Las Vegas
Mario often kept her laughing, too. In their early courtship days, she’d be sitting shotgun as Mario would drive along the sloping Santa Cruz Mountains. “See over there,” Mario would say, pointing to a cluster of cows munching on the hillside grass. “Those are those hillside cows you’ve probably heard about.”
“Hillside cows? No, what kind are those?” Kay would say.
“You know, the types of cows that are raised on a hill. As a result, they grow up to have one leg shorter than the other, so they don’t fall over.”
She’d giggle. “Wait, really?”
“You haven’t heard of hillside cows?”
Wow! She laughs at all my jokes. This is the kind of gal I could marry, my grandfather would tell me years later.
They would marry Nov. 17, 1940. They drove 540 miles to do so, getting married at St. Joan of Arc Church in Las Vegas, decades before people even considered combining slots with vows. Las Vegas was barely even a gambling town by then. It had only been legal for the past nine years with little fan fare.
1940 photo from the family scrapbook
A long way from "What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas" The allure of a Las Vegas wedding for my grandparents was the ability to combine an out-of-town wedding and honeymoon on the cheap. Mario’s cousin, John Vinassa, managed the Union Hotel in downtown Las Vegas, across the street from the Union Pacific train depot.
Las Vegas was simply a train stop connecting Los Angeles and Salt Lake City. It was such a small town in 1940, just under 8,500 residents, that when Vinassa’s mother died a year earlier in her hometown of Moncucco, Italy, the news was splashed across the front page of Las Vegas’ leading newspaper, the Las Vegas Age:
Vinassa’s Mother Is Dead In Italy
It was important enough to be on the front page, but yet only worthy of two paragraphs. The article led with:
Johnny Vinassa, manager of the Union Hotel in Las Vegas, received a
cablegram advising him of the death of his mother in Moncucco, Italy. However, the article failed to mention her name or cause of death. Other prominent front page headlines that day: Scouts To Stage Carnival Parade and Few Fight Fans See Nine Bouts.
The weekend of my grandparents’ wedding, Vinassa took them for dancing, drinks and a little gambling at the 91 Club on Highway US-91, the dusty road connecting Los Angeles to Las Vegas. The 91 Club had a storied history, starting as The Pair-O-Dice Nite Club, a private club (Knock. Knock. What’s the password?) during Prohibition. It was the first night club on US-91, later renamed Las Vegas Boulevard. When Nevada legalized gambling in 1931, its owner was granted a license to operate roulette, craps and black jack tables.
The year my grandparents danced the night away as newlyweds, it had recently been renamed the 91 Club by its new owner, Guy McAfee, a former commander of the Los Angeles Police Department vice squad. He used to drive from downtown Las Vegas to the 91 Club so frequently, he would call it The Strip, coined after the Sunset Strip. Ultimately, it became the Las Vegas Strip.1
The honeymoon continued for Mario and Kay, touring the newly built Hoover Dam, Mount Charleston and off to Southern California to visit Kay’s relatives, before heading home to the orchard-rich Santa Clara Valley.
By that year, 1940, Mario was six years into helping his father run the Gemello Winery, just off the El Camino Real in Mountain View. This was not far from where a year earlier two young Stanford grads, Bill Hewlett and David Packard were formalizing Hewlett-Packard in a Palo Alto garage. At that time, the phrase “Silicon Valley” would be three decades away from being spoken, and the Santa Clara Valley was known more for fruit orchards and canneries than anything else.
By the time Mario and Kay would return to Las Vegas - six decades later - the 91 Club would have been bulldozed, replaced by the New Frontier Hotel-Casino. The Union Hotel was also long gone.
My grandparents returned in 1998, to visit me. I was working as a newspaper reporter, covering the rise of one mega-resort and the implosion of another what seemed like every month. The Bellagio, Mandalay Bay, The Venetian, among others, went up. The El Rancho, The Dessert Inn and Evander Holyfield’s right ear disappeared.
The one structure that did still stand fifty-eight years after Mario and Kay’s nuptials’ weekend, was their wedding spot. St. Joan of Arc Church is one of the very few Las Vegas landmarks to live on past its centennial. It opened in 1910. It still lounges in the shadow of the Golden Nugget casino, just off the glittering lights of the Fremont Street Experience.
Visiting St Joan of Arc was the one thing on Grandma Kay’s agenda that weekend, besides taking me shopping to fill my fridge.
When they entered the church, my grandparents were overwhelmed by a flood of memories. Some of those tales were shared with me over dinner that night. But even more priceless were their faces as they gazed around the church. Their expressions revealed more than what they were able to say in words.
Do you like this newsletter?
Then consider subscribing here:
There are three buttons at the bottom of every post: “like,” “comment,” and “restack.” Restacking is sharing in digital form. It goes out to the Substack community. If you enjoy the content and click “Restack,” it helps a lot.
Guy Macafee and the 91 Club: Fun Fact: In 1942, the 91 Club would be torn down and rebuilt as The Hotel Last Frontier, the second Las Vegas resort to rise in the desert during the 1940s. The first: the El Rancho in 1941. For the next 66 years of its history, The Last Frontier would go through a series of renovations, rebranding (e.g. - The New Frontier), and new owners, including Howard Hughes and Steve Wynn, before it was imploded in 2007. Source: UNLV archives