Longtime visitors will call back that Vegas Vic formerly had a voice. group A recording within the smiling Ne signal greeted passersby with a piercing “Howdy Podner!” every 15 transactions around the clock.
This element of the Vegas attraction, installed to a higher place the Pioneer Club casino in 1951, was non wildly pop with guests trying to sopor interior The Mint’s 26-story hotel tower, which opened direct crossways Fremont Street in May 1965.
According to a relentless Vegas myth, histrion Lee Yuen Kam Marvin was ane of those guests. He was inward town cinematography “The Professionals” on location in the nearby Valley of Fire State Park in December 1965, when he worked himself into a sleep-deprived passion and barb Vic inward the vocalism package with an arrow.
This rendered the 40-foot atomic number 10 cowpuncher dumb for 20 years.
It ne'er happened — at least non like that.
First of all, if a mechanical sign up breaks — especially a famous 1 that tourists follow to regard because it famously speaks if they hold back long plenty — it gets fixed. That should get been the 1st scarlet flag.
Myth Understood
Arrows were gibe at Vic. But Richard Henry Lee Marvin didn’t pullulate them, and they ne'er silenced Vic.
On Dec. 11, 1965, a drunken, late-night political party raged inward the 16th trading floor Mint room rented for “The Professionals” actor Woody Strode and stuntman Tony Epper. The partiers included any bartender, cook, and maidservant who was away tariff and caught current of air of it, as well as several dancers from the Wild Topless Watusi troupe performing at the gambling casino hotel.
When the subject of Vegas Vic’s teasing quarter-hourly greeting came up, Strode — whose type inwards the picture was an expert bowman — grabbed his obeisance and arrow and did something around it.
“It was a five-foot bow, and I had to crawling out the window to receive the angle,” Strode wrote inwards his 1993 autobiography, “Goal Dust.” “The Mint Hotel had ledges and I was 16 stories up standing on one. Tony reached and grabbed me past the belt at the indorse of my pants. I found the angle, set, allow slack an pointer and hit Howdy Podner rightfulness in the mouth. The whole statue started crackling. Sparks were fast everywhere. Then Howdy Podner blacked come out and came to a stop.”
Vaughan Cannon, the YESCO mark manager responsible for(p) for maintaining and fixing Vic, later recalled the impairment modified to broken in Ne tubing. Since Vic’s recording only played intermittently, Strode may feature been under the effect that the pointer silenced him, but this was apparently non the case.
Arrow Dynamic
Following the attack, Strode and Epper raced upward several flights of steps to Marvin’s room, where they woke him up to enquire if they could stash the bowknot on that point before constabulary arrived. (Note that Marvin was sleeping, which the myth claims Vic wouldn’t earmark to happen.)
“Well, that weirdo boy of a bitch got so excited, he fired a shotgun come out of his window,” according to Strode. The knock down — which was aimed at the sky, non Vic — forthwith summoned police to Marvin’s room, where they found the scattergun and the bow.
Why no charges were filed was ne'er made clear. Maybe the Las Vegas police gave Marvin a literal “get out of poky free” scorecard because he was a decorated soldier who fought and was in earnest maimed during the Battle of Saipan inward World War II.
Maybe 1 of them was among the throngs of immature people inspired to proceed into jurisprudence enforcement past his enactment of Lt. Frank Ballinger in NBC-TV’s “M Squad” from 1957 to 1960.
It’s non beyond the realm of possibility for some autographs to experience been signed inwards exchange for sounding the other way — a resolution that neither company would feature wanted publicized.
Or maybe the police just now didn’t want the negatively charged international publicity associated with trucking to poky ace of the day’s hugest and most dearest stars. (Earlier that year, Marvin won the Academy Award for topper doer for his carrying out inwards “Cat Ballou” paired Jane Fonda.)
It’s also possible that the police never came at all; that the responding uniformed officers only worked for hotel security.
While this fact appears to follow lost to time, another becomes clearer as more research is performed…
“Lee didn’t have anything to do with that incident at all, which both Woody and Tony confirmed to me,” Dwayne Epstein, author of the exhaustively researched 2013 life story “Lee Marvin: Point Blank,” told journalist Jeremy Bartholomew Roberts inwards 2017.
“Lee had passed come out in his hotel way hours before. Being a large star and recent Academy Award winner, he took the fault to dungeon his buddies from sledding to jail.”
The Robin Hood Party
The 1st advert of the pointer onslaught occurred in journalist Sir James Augustus Murray Hertz’s Las Vegas Review-Journal gossiper pillar of Dec. 12, 1965. Gustav Hertz coined the incident “The Robin Hood Party,” though didn’t advert any of its participants past name. But the word before long distribute that Marvin was responsible.
“Lee was so proud,” Strode wrote. “It got to live the biggest jape in town.”
Marvin wasn’t laughing inward 1979, however. That’s when actress Michelle Triola, his former live-in girlfriend, used the story as grounds during a palimony fit intentional to make the player seem come out of control.
There are other permutations of the Shelton Jackson Lee Marvin/Vegas Vic myth, including a kind of oil production one on the sign’s current Wikipedia page: “Marvin complained that Vegas Vic was too loud, so casino executives silenced Vegas Vic and it was left hand that path for nearly ii decades,” it declares, in reality citing as a source a faux-interview with the signalize that ran in the Las Vegas Sun inwards 2000.
But what really happened to Vegas Vic’s vox is even to a greater extent irksome than that, and has zip to ut with gambling casino executives. It was explained past a Las Vegas Review-Journal story published on Jan. 25, 1968…
“City Commissioners voted to instruct the Pioneer Club to discontinue the audio frequency portion of its famous Vegas Vic sign on on downtown John C. Fremont Street. The well known ‘Howdy Podner’ has been keeping sleepers inwards nearby hotels awake … Commissioners emphasize that the contract itself testament bear on to run in its familiar spirit manner, waving at passersby, but voiceless.”
No reference of Marvin was made, though that doesn’t mean value the legend wasn’t on city officials’ minds.
Legend Printed
Vic regained his vocalise on May 17, 1980, only when to lose it for unspoilt during expression of the Fremont Street Experience canopy in 1994. That’s when the Pioneer Club became a souvenir shop and the building’s unexampled owner decided to canful the recording.
After “The Professionals,” Robert Edward Lee Marvin — who died of a mettle lash out inward 1987 — went on to dramatic play the statute title role in a practically larger western. And the last shot in 1962’s “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” featured a newspaper publisher editor making a declaration that couldn’t apply more perfectly here…
“When the fable becomes fact, print the legend.”
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