1947-1962

A wild burro sauntered into the popular gambling spot, the El Rey Club in Searchlight, Nevada at about 11 o’clock every morning. It approached the proprietor, Willie Martello, who always fed it something he had in his pocket. Then the donkey retreated back into the desert.

Photo from freeimages.com: “The key is the donkey,” by dimitri_c

1961

This ad for the El Rey Club invited people to escape one sunny desert town (Palm Springs, California) for another (Searchlight, Nevada), as the enticement ran in the former’s newspaper, The Desert Sun.

Owner Willie Martello began chartering groups of people to and from his casino this same year after he paid about $1 million of his own money to build a landing strip in the middle of town.