The following is the background information of Warren "Doc" Bayley as told by his friend and associate Dick Taylor. For more of Dick's memories, please visit his site at Las Vegas History Books.

Warren Vance Bayley was born in 1900 in Platteville, Wisconsin, and at one time, wrote a syndicated travel column, for various subscribers (newspapers coast to coast). I never did see any of them but he mentioned this part of his life often. As he traveled from place to place, he stayed in various motor courts, then motels, sometimes hotels. Doc was usually got "comped" because of his column's reputation.

Doc often said that someday he would build a motel to have all the advantages that were missing in places he stayed.

Doc married a lovely lady from Texas, Judy Belk. The newlyweds moved to California and started a fruit cake business. I don't know how or why he started the fruit cake business but I have seen some of his literature on it. Bayley got the idea that his fruit cake company could be a stepping stone to bigger things so he incorporated.

By selling stock in the fruit cake company, he bought some raw land just north of the city limits and built a spectacular motel called Fresno Hacienda. I was hired to be the sales manager to fill the banquet rooms, meeting rooms, hotel rooms from the growing intrastate convention business between companies in San Francisco and their offices in Los Angeles. It was a boom time for Doc. The more I booked, the more rooms he added to the Fresno Hacienda... soon we became a major influence in the area... the place to be.

Doc was introduced to a Texan named Frank Hoefus who was having trouble with a hotel he was building in Las Vegas called "The Lady Luck" on the Las Vegas Strip. Doc agreed to lease with option to buy the rooms at the Lady Luck. Doc then went out with some very high pressure sales people and sold stock in the Lady Luck operation which he re-named the Las Vegas Hacienda ...

Doc's marriage did not produce any children, but he did have possession of a young boy that lost his father in an army air corps accident during World War II and he and Judy raised him like he was there own. But there was not a typical "family circle" nor much love or affection between them.

"Doc" died on December 26, 1964. The publicity department of the Hacienda told local reporters that he died at his desk in his office at the Hacienda. Actually, he was having dinner with one of his staff members at the Aku Aku Restaurant located in the Stardust Hotel. He started feeling sick and asked his assistant to drive him back to the Hacienda so he could go to bed. Enroute he collapsed and the assistant drove him directly to the emergency room at the Sunrise Hospital where he was pronounced dead on arrival.

Bayley was a legend in his own time. He came to Las Vegas with no gaming history and within 10 years had bought the Hacienda, New Frontier Hotel, the Mt. Charleston Lodge, and surrounding 1,400 acres of land, the Del Rey Club in Searchlight and much of the frontage land there.

Judy Bayley died in her suite at the Hacienda on December 31, 1971 of cancer.

I have been able to find out that in 1959, Bayley and County Commissioner Art Olsen's combined efforts activated the City of Hope flight from Las Vegas to Los Angeles. Bayley also donated the Hacienda's 70 passenger DC-4, the pilots and all other personnel necessary to make this precedent shattering and unique flight a remembered occasion.