Audio clip from interview with Sonja Saltman, August 18, 2015

So what did you know about Las Vegas when you moved here in the seventies? Not a thing. About the history of it or anything? Only the one time when I visited a few years before then and we went to this property in Utah. There was the Strip. I thought it was awful. I wouldn't even set foot in hotels in the first couple of years without getting depressed. I never saw Elvis. I thought he was just awful. If I would get into a hotel or a casino, I found it so depressing. It was all so artificial. Both Michael and I came to the US with a healthy dose of European snobbery about America. Now the young people think everything in America is so hip and so wonderful. But this is almost forty years ago. So back then, no, it was the ugly America and Americans were uncouth or they weren't sophisticated or fashionable. And here was the casino and all that very artificial environment. We were both definitely snobs about it, me probably more because I had that in me from birth and Michael a little bit from so many years living in Europe. But we also loved the freedom that Las Vegas gave us. It was such an adventure, such an outpost, no tradition, no history, no limits really. You could do whatever you wanted here. There was a lot of freedom in that as well.