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Tales of Vegas Past: The verse kind of luck

By Gregory Crosby

Literary fame is the slipperiest of greased poles. The winds of capricious time will blow the laurel from heads once crowned in glory with no more thought than an autumn breeze tumbling a dead and curling leaf down a deserted street. Writers and poets famed in their lifetimes oft take their words into the oblivion of the grave. For a purely local example, look no further than the fated forgetting of Louis Beacon `Tutor' Scherer, GAMBLER and poet laureate of Nevada.

I emphasize gambler over poet laureate because that's how it appears on the cover of the curious cultural artifact Reminiscing in Rhyme, a self-published tome that Scherer put out in 1956. Gambler is emblazoned in bold green type, and the title of poet laureate in small type as rather an afterthought. And that's probably as it should be. For though it appears that, somehow, Scherer was in fact appointed Nevada's poet laureate by Gov. Charles Russell in 1950, it is the fact that Scherer was a gambler and early casino operator that is the salient point.

Scherer, along with three other California gamblers, in 1942 founded the Pioneer Club on Fremont Street, which soon became home to icon Vegas Vic. Scherer later became president of the El Rancho Vegas on the Strip, and had stakes in the Las Vegas Club, the Thunderbird and the Sahara, along with plenty of other real estate interests around town. As a casino and gambling boss during the transformation of Las Vegas from railroad town to America's playground, he was perhaps the last person you would expect to find writing this:

Her love is like an autumn leaf

The stem is frail, her dates are brief

She's a cloudy day, the sun's pale ray

So quick to fade, then pass away.

More unexpected was the fact that in the early 1950s, not one but two Las Vegas magazines published Scherer's verse (one hesitates to call them poems). Scherer had a full page of short quatrains in the weekly Fabulous Las Vegas, and a single poem with elaborately mediocre illustration on a full page in the monthly Magazine Las Vegas. The illustrated poems that make up Reminiscing in Rhyme are actually these pages, drawn by the magazine's art director, Crosby DeMoss, who would create the appropriate image to go with such deathless works as "One Little Star," "Storms Have Passed," "I Ride Alone," "Golden Wedding," "The Cottonwood," etc. To see Scherer's work in this context, his small and ever-rhyming attempts at profundity next to the magazine's cheesecake "Girl of the Month" shot of a nearly naked showgirl, is to experience the cognitive dissonance that only a vanished cultural era can bring. Imagine for a moment turning the pages of What's On or Showbiz and finding a poem by Steve Wynn.

Of course, it's likely Wynn's attempt wouldn't be any more wretched than the bulk of Scherer's output, which flows along the expected courses, a sort of Ogden Nash without the redeeming wit or cleverness. Scherer was an accidental poet, according to Magazine Las Vegas publisher Tom Magowan in the book's foreword: "His first poem was written on the challenge of a friend. The year was 1948 and the setting--beside the pool at El Rancho Vegas." Sure enough, the only way to get a 63-year-old gambler to become a poet was on a bet. Having won the mysterious challenge (hard to picture the conversation that led to that wager), Scherer went to town, composing on every subject that poets with a capital P were expected to write about: love, hope, despair, the picturesque (including such Western folderol as an ode to the Cisco Kid and Chinese cooks), nature and death. It's as wretched as you might expect (yet oddly better than Rae Turnbull's poetry corner that ran forever in the Review-Journal). Scherer, alas, rarely touches on the subjects nearest to his experience: gambling, Vegas and what it was like to swim through all those wiseguys.

But here and there, a faint echo, an oddity: "Atomic Dawn" (And then a giant mushroom rose/ Floating gracefully in repose), three travelogues of Aztec and Mayan ruins, and a strange, dark poem called "Hell on Earth." Scherer is on firmest and least offensive ground when tossing off two or four lines of doggerel here and there (Much happiness life uncovers/ because life and I are lovers). But the simple fact that an old gambler could discover poetry late in life, and dive into it with such gusto, is the better testament to poetry than verses justifiably consigned to oblivion. Clearly Scherer took his sudden calling seriously: Bad though they may be, these verses show no sign of bad faith, only love of an unexpected vocation. In a way it's most fortunate that "Tutor" Scherer came to the muse late in life, when he was a successful casino mogul. Otherwise, it would have been as he simply if precisely described in verse any poet, from highest to lowest, understands too well:

I am broke, haven't got a cent

What I haven't spent, I've lent

My landlord knows my good intent

But writing poetry won't pay the rent.