Jay Sarno Collection, MS 2009-03. Special Collections, UNLV Libraries, University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
Donated by Jay C. Sarno in 2008.
Su Kim Chung, February 2009.
This collection is open for research.
For permission to reproduce or publish from this collection, please contact the Director of Special Collections.
Jay Sarno (1921-1984) is known as a hotel and casino developer whose innovations had a major impact on the Las Vegas casino hotel industry. Born in St. Joseph, Missouri, he served in the armed forces in World War II and earned a bachelor’s degree in business from the University Missouri. Inspired by the hotels of Miami Beach, particularly the Fontainebleau, he began his career as a hotel man in 1958 with the Atlanta Cabana, a full-service convention hotel that, as he put it, had the convenience of a motel. Cabana hotels in Dallas and Palo Alto followed in 1962; in these projects, his investors included actress/singer Doris Day. Though Sarno developed these three hotels, he did not manage them past the mid-1960s.
In 1966, Sarno opened Caesars Palace, the first truly themed resort on the Las Vegas Strip. Two years later, he opened Circus Circus, another themed casino that opened without a hotel. In 1969, Sarno and his associates sold Caesars Palace to Lum’s, a Florida-based restaurant company that subsequently renamed itself Caesars World. In 1974, while under indictment for allegedly offering a $75,000 bribe to an IRS agent, Sarno and his partners in Circus Circus leased the casino to Bill Bennett and Bill Pennington. Sarno, who was represented by attorney Oscar Goodman, was acquitted of the bribery charges in a 1975 trial. He then unsuccessfully attempted to develop the Grandissmo, which would have been a 6,000-room hotel casino near the Las Vegas Strip. Within a decade of his death several themed mega-resorts had opened in Las Vegas, vindicating Sarno’s confidence in the Grandissimo.
This collection is comprised primarily of publicity and promotional materials documenting the Caesars Palace Hotel and Casino Resort and the Circus Circus Hotel and Casino Resort. Both resorts were the brainchild of hotel and casino developer Jay Sarno, and there is a small amount of material on Sarno in the collection such as newspaper clippings and a press release. The collection includes property ephemera, magazine and newspaper clippings, informational brochures from the two properties and press kits. There is a small amount of correspondence but none that was actually composed by Sarno. It also includes a rare prospectus and stock offerings on Sarno’s never-realized Grandissimo Hotel and Casino resort that was to have been built on Interstate 15 to the west of the Las Vegas Strip. Photographs of Caesars Palace, Circus Circus, Slots-A-Fun (another Sarno property) and portraits of Sarno were removed and placed in UNLV photograph collection 0347. Although the collection is small, it does provide a contemporary glimpse of the properties as portrayed by their respective public relations firms and in the Las Vegas press.
Materials are arranged alphabetically according to property name and then by type of material.
All photographs in the collection were removed and placed in the existing Jay Sarno photograph collection (UNLV Collection 0347) which consists primarily of digital scans.
For related topics and further information see the following collections:
• Promotional and Publicity Material: Circus Circus Hotel-Casino : HD9999.G25 C4
• Promotional and Publicity Material: Caesars Palace Hotel-Casino : HD9999.G254 C356x