Helldorado Days (Las Vegas)

"[1] The Las Vegas Elks hired an out-of-town promoter to create a fundraising event to build a lodge for the fraternal organization.

[1] In the March announcement, the Elks said they had "retained Clyde Zerby, one of the foremost celebration managers and pageant directors in the United States, to direct the show.

"[1] The Elks said the celebration would bring back "all the aspects" of life before Nevada became a state, including "a village resembling the early period to be constructed on a location of several acres.

Zerby's popular pitch to communities in the 1930s was to "get completely away from the idea of rodeo, barbecue, or any of the other time-worn free amusements," adding that "people want to be thrilled and are ever looking for something different and something out-of-the-ordinary.

Las Vegas Mayor Ernie Cragin issued a proclamation called on "all male citizens" to "allow their whisker grow and refrain from shaving.

"[6] Charles P. Squires, the publisher of the Las Vegas Age newspaper, recalled, "Barbers of the community were doing a novel business in trimming whiskers in fancy patterns on the faces of public-spirited men of the town.

Zerby also provided western costumes from Paramount film studio in Hollywood, California for the Elks as part of the contract with the organization.

"[10] Like the first Helldorado a year earlier, the 1936 version with a rodeo and a beauty contest was successful and became the most popular community event in Las Vegas for more than six decades.

Celebrating a mystical history of Las Vegas in the mid 1850's with parades, a rodeo, a beauty contest, and an old west-themed village, Helldorado was a popular public event through the 1930s and into the 1940s.

The early 1940s found the Las Vegas valley the home of two major World War Two defense projects; the construction of an Army Air Force base and a magnesium production plant.

The 1943 Helldorado days, featuring western movie stars Roy Rogers, Trigger, and Tex Ritter broke all previous attendance records.

Despite the city's rapid growth and the Las Vegas Strip, Elk's Helldorado and its rodeo began to struggle financially.

In 1961 the Clark County Sheriff's Mounted Posse staged the "Rodeo of the Stars" outside the city limits, two blocks from the Las Vegas Strip.

The Elk's organization, feeling it could turn Helldorado into a self-funding event, asked for and received funding from the city's Centennial Commission for more than a decade.