This was when Comdex filled all of Las Vegas. The Director got us a room at a hotel on I think Fremont Street through her travel agent "connection." My wife and I got there and it was the Downtown (er) hotel. The 'e' and 'r' were burned out. The street had been widened and so there was a wide sidewalk and a little space between the door of our room and the vehicles driving by. A bus stop was just to the side of our door. We go inside and turn on the TV and there is a news story about a rally being held a little ways away. We then hear the story interrupted by several different handguns going off, multiple shots from each. It turned out that someone shot up the "Rally against gun violence in the minority community" that was going on. Later we heard a bus noisily brake and someone get off just outside our wall. We then hear the police put the guy up against the wall and question him. It seemed like we actually could hear/feel his hands hitting the wall outside. One of the questions was "when did you get out?" The next morning I went to Comdex and she had the car. When I got back she told me that in the morning she walked out of the room to get to the car and some guys were rummaging around in the dumpster. They saw her and got out and started walking towards her, and she turned and sprinted into the office.

Anyway, my wife had said she really wanted to go to Vegas to get out of town, and I had tried to tell her that it wasn't going to be very nice with this hotel, etc. She now wanted me to drive her back to SLC.

Luckily I met a fellow member of a professional training org who worked for a large MLM at that time. He told us that they had rented a bunch of rooms for Comdex and were not filling them all for the last day, and the Luxor was talking about taking back anything not used. He asked if we wanted to use a room. My wife said, "bless you." So our sojourn in the DownTowner was over.