Word: las
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...midmorning in Las Vegas, and already the desert heat is shimmering wetly on a running track not far from the casino strip. Here Bill Cosby is hurling himself through a series of sprints, his sturdy 6-ft. frame showing the form that won collegiate championships three decades earlier. The stride is long and smooth, and the pace is brisk through 300 meters (43 sec.) and 600 meters (1:48). Cosby beats his target times and beams with satisfaction. He rewards himself with a Cuban cigar the size of a relay baton and sets a faster goal for tomorrow...
...Cosby is, as he would pronounce it, waaaaaay out front and still running hard. Already the most beloved and best-paid entertainer in America, he still works like a hungry journeyman: jetting from a movie set in San Francisco to a weeklong casino gig in Las Vegas to the taping of his TV series in New York to a benefit for black college students in Los Angeles. "Sure, sometimes I think I'm stretched thin," Cosby muses, pausing to pinch off the end of his Connoisseur Geant. "But I remember how my mother worked twelve- hour days cleaning other people...
...question of what constitutes a truly American icon has become befuddling. A Sohio gasoline station? British Petroleum owns that company now. An Allis-Chalmers farm tractor? The West Germans manufacture those. Ball Park franks are owned by a British conglomerate; so is French's mustard. The take from Las Vegas' Dunes Hotel and Country Club, one of the best-known American gambling and entertainment centers, will soon go to its new Japanese owner. The latest hit recording by Country Singer Kenny Rogers is a foreign-owned product; his record label, RCA, is now West German property. And what about breakfast...
Japanese bargain shoppers increasingly covet neglected American gambling casinos. Last April, Ginji Yasuda, a Korean-born Japanese, reopened the 1,100- room Aladdin Hotel in Las Vegas after buying the ailing complex for $54 million and spending $30 million more to restore its glitzy decor. He plans to shuttle customers from Japan in a posh jet equipped with sleeping cabins. Says Yasuda: "You have a lot of dreams still available in this country that you don't have in Japan...
Tokyo Billionaire Masao Nangaku, 68, had an expensive fantasy last month, when he outbid five U.S. companies for Las Vegas' struggling Dunes Hotel. The winning price: $157.7 million. Nangaku plans to virtually double the size of the hotel, to 2,200 rooms. Nangaku says he has wanted to buy a casino in Las Vegas for years. Backed by a vast recreation empire (bowling alleys, golf courses, hotels), he apparently had little trouble lining up the financing for the Dunes purchase through his Tokyo bankers. Boasts an aide: "Our assets are worth far more than the price of a Las Vegas...