The history of the Bomb Card
A photograph published in Life Magazine in November 1951 showed the mushroom from an atom bomb as it appeared over the rooftops of Fremont Street. It was a perfect image of nuclear Armageddon. It would be the last sight we would see, a mushroom cloud on the horizon out of town before the next one landed on us.
Postcard producers in those days casually altered the photos they presented to suit their mood. There was a lot of lab work in postcards. One of those lab technicians had the insight that the atom bomb mushroom looked like an excellent Vegas neon sign. A sign as good as that deserved to be the crown of Fremont Street. The Atom Bomb was our friend.
In 1951, an anonymous commercial artist produced our first statement of a principle that might guide artists here. The evidence of experience was that our rules, in Las Vegas, for what objects might appropriately stand together, were going to be more relaxed than the rules that applied elsewhere.
I do not have a date on this issue of The Las Vegas Review Journal. I will set it in 1952. Someone at the RJ hated the idea of being assigned to cut out a collage. It was like he was back in grade school. To express his disgust he produced a terrible ripoff of the original card. As would occur on many other days, news about improved chances for sports bettors was judged as a fair balance for the fantasy incineration of Las Vegas.
This was a wall sculpture behind a bar in the Sands Hotel when it opened in 1952. The Sands identity as the Rat Pack hangout was still a bit ahead. Al Freeman, the Publicity Director for the Sands and later its president, was also the Publicity Director for the Nevada Test Site. Part of his job was to normalize our proximity to the blasts. It calls for a moment of reflection that the same man who convinced the country to tie Vegas with the Rat Pack also told the whole country that atom bombs in our back yard was fine with us. As Publicity Director for the Test Site, this is what he would say.
My first interest in using a color copier was to copy the original bomb card. If the copy was good, people might buy the print. The extraordinary quality of the copy suggested to me that I might make a new version of the card.
My 1989 revision of the original bomb card was sold as a fundraiser for American Peace Test. From the gates of the Nevada Test Site the cards were carried to Europe, Israel, Lithuania, Kazakhstan, Brazil, and Japan. On the Strip it was offered for sale at The World’s Greatest Gift Shop. The card is in the collection of the Nevada Test Site Museum.