A Hot Springs hot spot

The Vapors promises return to prominence

Hot Springs was thriving when I was a kid growing up next door in Montgomery County. It was the largest city in the Ouachita Mountains, a place with a diverse economy, where people came to vacation, to take the baths and to gamble.

When I was a senior in high school in 1966, I attended a graduation dinner at a nice restaurant in Hot Springs. Wandering about in search of a restroom, I opened an unmarked door only to discover a small casino operating in a haze of cigarette smoke. No one challenged me at the door, but I made a hasty retreat. Within little more than a year, newly elected reformist governor Winthrop Rockefeller and his director of the State Police, Lynn Davis, would put an end to illegal gambling in the spa city.

Three casinos operated in Hot Springs when I was growing up. The Southern Club, located on Central Avenue near the iconic Arlington Hotel, was the oldest. The Belvedere County Club, located just outside the city, had a thriving casino. But it was the Vapors Nightclub, situated at 315 Park Ave., which brought Las Vegas style gambling and entertainment to Hot Springs.

The man behind developing the Vapors was Dane Harris. After graduating from Fountain Lake High School and attending the University of Arkansas — but not graduating — Harris helped his widowed mother operate a liquor store. He later served as a pilot during World War II.

Harris supported the GI Revolt following World War II, when a group of young veterans led by his friend Sidney S. McMath declared war on the legendary political machine of Hot Springs Mayor Leo McLaughlin. When McMath ran for governor in 1948, Harris served as pilot for the campaign.

While Harris was associated with the anti-gambling reformers initially, by the mid-1950s he had become part owner of a casino when he invested his savings in the Belvedere Country Club. By that point, Orval Faubus was governor, and he was more than willing to turn a blind eye to illegal gambling.

By 1959 Harris was able to put together funding for his signature venue, the Vapors Nightclub. In addition to Harris, other major investors were liquor distributor Harry Hastings and Owen “Owney” Madden, a noted gangster and former owner of the Cotton Club in New York City, who had moved to Hot Springs in 1934.

The ultra-modern Vapors, with its futuristic sign out front, was a magnificent place when it opened in 1960. Michael Hodge, author of the entry on the Vapors in the Encyclopedia of Arkansas History & Culture, described the place as having “the Vapors Coffee Shop; the Monte Carlo Room for meetings, events and luncheons; a large lobby; a dance floor, a theater restaurant with tiered seating and a retractable stage big enough for an orchestra; and a casino that opened late in the evening. Entertainment included two shows every night featuring some of the most popular entertainers in the country.”

Philip Leigh, the author of a new book on Hot Springs during the gangster era, has written that Dane Harris excelled at booking well-known entertainers, stars such as Mickey Rooney, Edgar Bergen, Patti Page, Les Paul, Phyllis Diller, Liberace, the Smothers Brothers and Tony Bennett.

The nightclub gained a footnote in American musical history when Tony Bennett first sang “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” while performing at the Vapors. Bennett recalled in his autobiography that he first sang the song in Hot Springs while rehearsing for an upcoming appearance at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco.

On the morning of Jan. 4, 1963, the Vapors was rocked by a bomb explosion. Though no one was killed, 12 people were injured, and three were hospitalized. A hole 30-feet wide was blown into the club’s roof. Among those present were about 40 people attending what a reporter termed “a school for gamblers” — a program established to train gambling devices operators “because new federal laws prohibit bringing persons across state lines to run gambling devices.”

Speculation began immediately as to those behind the bombing, with many blaming organized crime syndicates from out of state. Harris tried his best to tamp down speculation, while working feverishly to reopen the club. “If it was a bomb planted in the club,” Harris was quoted as saying in an Associated Press report, “I believe it was the work of someone mentally sick.”

Another bomb soon exploded at Harris’ home, and soon after a third device destroyed the porch at the home of Circuit Judge Plummer Dobbs. A fourth bomb exploded three months later in the unoccupied car of Prosecuting Attorney David Whittington. No one seems to have noted that Harris’ Belvedere County Club, which contained a casino, had been bombed four years earlier on March 11, 1959.

The bomb explosion at the Vapors blew down a wall, exposing the casino to the street. As Rex Nelson has written in his blog: “Reporters covering the bombing for the Arkansas Gazette managed to snap a photograph of the slot machines and craps tables against the orders of police officers securing the area. The photo appeared on the front page of the next day’s edition, providing clear proof of illegal gambling in Hot Springs.”

The Vapors soon recovered, and it prospered until Gov. Rockefeller decided his new administration could not look the other way — especially since voters in 1964 had rejected a constitutional amendment to legalize gambling.

Harris managed to keep the Vapors afloat for a few years after the casino was closed in 1967. For a time it operated as the Cockeyed Cowboy and later as Apollo Disco. Dane Harris died in June 1981 at the age of 62. In 1998 the building was sold to the Tower of Strength Ministers for a church “serving the Holy Spirit rather than serving ‘spirits.’” The building has been unoccupied for several years.

Recently, I was informed that the Vapors building is being renovated as a dinner theater and special event venue. According to Robert Raines, director of marketing and entertainment at the “new” Vapors, the club will reopen in the spring. The famous Vapors sign has already been restored to the streetscape, and that is a welcome development.