So Long, Mirage

In 1995, I was attending two different campuses of Purdue University for one semester. I started Purdue-North Central in 1993 after graduating from high school and in spring of 1995 I started at Purdue-Calumet (the two campuses have since merged and it’s Purdue-Northwest). I was taking three classes on each campus at the time. My degree was Restaurant, Hotel, Institutional, and Tourism Management or RHIT for short (now just called Hospitality Management I believe). At PNC we had a lot of Organizational Behavior classes thrown in where we didn’t have our own in-house classes. If I thought better of it at the time, I would have gotten a second degree in Organizational Behavior at the same time and been duel major. That’s how many classes we took towards that class work. One semester I had two Total Quality Management classes back-to-back; one for Hospitality Management and the other for Organizational Behavior. The chapters even followed each other so much that I’d always skip one because I just heard the same lecture in the other class. 

 

Around this time, we started getting riverboat casinos in Northwest Indiana and Chicagoland so at Purdue-Cal, I took a Casino Management class and I loved it. I’m not sure if it was the first semester that it was offered or not, but having been in front of a classroom myself since I was in college, it seemed rather last-minute now that I think back to times I was told I would be teaching a class they just created. Like we didn’t even have any exams planned. Attendance and participation were our grades (no wonder I made Deans List that semester). For someone who doesn’t get excited over gambling itself, I sure enjoyed learning about it. In a Human Resource class at PNC we found out half way through the semester that we had a thirty-minute presentation to give on the last day of the semester and could do it as groups of six people or fewer. My group picked sexual harassment. Unless I can be the example of how to do it, boring! And seriously? On the last day of school for the summer? In Casino Management, our professor, a great guy we affectionately called Uncle Dave (because he reminded us of that cool uncle) did an entire two hour class on the Mirage in Las Vegas. He said it was informative and we wouldn’t be tested. I was enthralled! But wait, the actual function of opening was a process of the HR department…hmm! Without an exam looming over the content of his day’s discussion, I still feverishly took notes. My classmates thought I was insane, but I explained my stroke of inspiration. If this all around great guy could talk for two hours about it, surly I could do 30 minutes alone discussing the HR aspect with some filler facts and figures. I informed my sexual harassment group that I was out and they were pissed. I informed our Human Resources professor and she was intrigued because most students prefer the safety net of a group. I normally do, but in this case, I inspired!

 

Human Resources

For months before opening, you could be out drinking with your buddies and call an HR representative at 2 AM to ask about benefits for your job class before your official first day. They were the first large scale property to do a hard opening. My critique of Las Vegas is that it has no history but that is untrue and unfair. The history just isn’t that old and it’s more of a living tapestry of history. The Mirage is part of that so the first time I stayed in Vegas I stayed…directly across the street at a place I could afford with a great view of the Volcano Show every night. The first chance I had I walked across the street to see a place I wanted to see for… 2023 – 1995 = holy shit I got old! 28 years. A friend of mine since we were five was in the same Human Resources class and I saw her a month later and we compared hour experiences in the class. She got a B and said “I hear Professor Brown doesn’t give out A’s.” I responded with, “Really? She didn’t have a problem giving me one.” I had something around ninety-eight percent on that final project. I was rattling off stats and figures like it was important to me. Maybe it was hyper focus, but I actually strongly considered focusing on casinos at that point and heading that direction upon my seemingly distant (2 more years) graduation and perhaps I should have and the Mirage is where I would have headed first. It was just something I fell in love with reading about and at the time, I was rather obsessed.

 

It opened in 1989, which was six years prior to my classes at the various Purdue University campuses and when it opened, everything changed for the better. It was the first mega resort in Las Vegas and paved the way for the future. 

 

History

My biggest critique if Las Vegas is the lack of history. You can talk about the Rat Pack but that was 50 or 60 years ago. There are no 120 year old buildings or old Victorian homes, which I love. Las Vegas still has history and just as much as a lot of other places, but simply more compressed time frames. The coolest casino in the country or maybe the world opened in Vegas in 1989 and now it will be something new in 2023. That’s thirty-four years only. It makes me sad but I see the history of Vegas is something that is current and can truly be experienced because there is so much change so frequently with some cool throwbacks to fifty or seventy years ago.

 

Though now somewhat dated, it was impressive and a piece of the history of the casino industry. I loved it and it will be missed. I am excited about Hard Rock and a big ass guitar going up but the Volcano Show being gone will hurt. Just getting to see that property specifically has been one of my highlights of my various visits to Las Vegas and I will miss seeing it when I’m there in the not so distant future. 

 

I also found a pretty cool article while looking up something while writing this so check it out: https://www.theringer.com/2021/7/20/22584803/new-old-las-vegas-mirage-megacasino. Its a tad pretentiously written but I really loved the flow and learned a lot about the 1980’s Las Vegas and casino industry that I didn’t know.

 

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