If you asked most people, they’d tell you that the most famous animals on the Las Vegas Strip are Siegfried and Roy’s white tigers, closely followed by the denizens of Mandalay Bay’s Shark Reef. But there was a time when the best known beast on the Strip was Tanya the Elephant, an exclusive guest of Jay Sarno’s Circus Circus.

Tanya was a real elephant who did more than just stink up the back of the house—though she did that, too. She played keno, pulled the handle of a giant slot machine, posed for photographs and served as a goodwill ambassador for the hotel.

In Circus Circus’s first years after its 1968 opening, Sarno tried many gimmicks not seen on the Strip before—or since. Circus acts flipped and flopped above the casino and kids tried their luck at a games on the midway while their parents played craps and slot machines. Vividly rendered in Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Circus Circus was the wildest casino in town.

But it wasn’t the most successful, at least not right away. Opening without a hotel tower, the casino struggled, and only really prospered after Sarno leased, then sold, it to William Pennington and William Bennett, who turned it into one of the most profitable casinos in the world. It was the foundation of Circus Circus Enterprises, which in 1999 became the Mandalay Resort Group and was acquired by MGM Mirage in 2005. Though Tanya has long since departed, Circus Circus lives on as a pink-and-white monument to fun.

Photo Credit: Photo courtesy UNLV Special Collections Photo Collection

By David Schwartz

David G. Schwartz an Atlantic City native and the director of the Center for Gaming Research at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. He is the author of Roll the Bones: The History of Gambling. His web site can be viewed at www.dieiscast.com.

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