VEGAS MYTHS BUSTED: This Woman Sat Atop This Famous Las Vegas Sign

Posted on: May 12, 2025, 07:21h. 

Last updated on: May 12, 2025, 10:09h.

Corey Levitan Read More
Expertise: Commercial Gaming, Entertainment, Expert Insight, Las Vegas, Restaurants, Vegas Myths Busted.
  • An iconic Vegas photo has long left viewers asking how LaVeeda Varley pulled off the dangerous stunt of sitting atop the 90-foot tall Las Vegas Club sign
  • The fact is, she didn’t
  • The “photo” was created by pasting a real photo of Varley atop an illustration of the sign

“How did she get up there, let alone keep her balance?” asked a member of the Golden Age of Las Vegas Facebook group, after the photo below was posted there on May 4. Another member ventured a guess…

This image shows cocktail waitress LaVeeda Varley teetering dangerously atop Las Vegas’ tallest sign in 1949. The Las Vegas Club operated from 1930 through 2015. The casino was torn down in 2017 to build the Circa Casino Resort. (Image: UNLV Special Collections)

“Just to the left of the lady appears to be a shadow of an airplane. Could that be where the photo was taken from?”

The Las Vegas Club at 18 Fremont St. is shown at street level in 1950, a year after it relocated from across the street at 21-23 Fremont St. (Image: UNLV Special Collections)

Someone else had their own eureka moment: “Helicopter or crane. I’m guessing crane, as the photographer would have remained on board.”

Actually, there was an elevator installed inside what was the tallest sign in Las Vegas when it was completed in 1949. That was how maintenance workers changed the hundreds of incandescent and neon bulbs that rose up to 90 feet above the newly relocated Las Vegas Club at 18 Fremont St. (and 100 feet off the ground).

But LaVeeda Varley never rode that elevator to pose for this photo because she never sat atop that sign.

Tall Tale

The aerial “photo” of the Las Vegas Club was an illustration by Hermon Boernge, the YESCO sign company’s art director, who co-designed the casino’s sign with YESCO senior sign designer Kermit Wayne in the Art Moderne Style.

Boernge added a real photo of Varley at the top of his illustration. Shot by Vegas News Bureau photographer Joe Buck in 1949, it featured Varley enjoying a sandwich and a bottle of Coke in a bikini at the El Rancho pool.

Boernge cut and pasted Varley’s image (the literal way) into his illustration, adding shadows where the ones for her legs and the Coke would have naturally fallen.

But you can tell it’s an illustration because of the unnatural upward tilt of the “LAS VEGAS CLUB” letters at street level, and especially on the parking lot sign at the upper left (a capitulation to branding at the expense of realism).

YESCO art director Hermon Boernge’s signature, cut off in the digital conversion process, appears in the bottom left of his illustration. (Image: UNLV Special Collections)

You can also tell because the illustration is signed “HBoernge” at the bottom left.

The illustration was featured in national print ads for the casino, and a colorized version was sold as a Las Vegas Club postcard.

That’s the smallest number of words we’ve ever taken to bust a myth. So why are we still bothering to write? Because the true story of why LaVeeda Varley was chosen to be immortalized like this, and why her famous husband would live to regret it, is better than most myths…

This color version, featuring a significantly more airbrushed Varley, came from a Las Vegas Club postcard. The back is captioned, “The highest sign west of the Rockies … each letter is eight feet tall and inside the sign is a special elevator that was installed to service this mammoth sign.” (Image: vintagelasvegas.com)

Livin’ LaVeeda Loca

On July 30, 1951, Varley, 27, became the third wife of Luther Bacon “Tutor” Scherer, who was 44 years her senior. They met in 1950 at the El Rancho, where he was the casino president and she served cocktails. At the time, Scherer also owned a piece of the Las Vegas Club, explaining Varley’s appearance in the famous “photo.”

Their wedding was a lavish ceremony at Las Vegas’ Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Dubbed the social event of the season, it was attended by 4,000 guests and cost $25K ($300K today.)

On July 7, 1952, three weeks before the happy couple’s first anniversary, Varley caught Scherer with another woman at their home on 10th Street and Charleston Boulevard.

Varley shot her husband in the leg. He lived. Both of them told police it was an accident. They believed them — or at least pretended to.

Varley wasn’t arrested and no charges were brought.

LaVeeda Varley and Tutor Scherer are photographed at their July 1951 wedding. (Image: Las Vegas News Bureau)

A day or two later, a poem about the event ran in Las Vegas Sun publisher Hank Greenspun’s column: “Mrs. Tutor Scherer/No Annie Oakley/she aimed for the groin and hit the knee.”

It was an intentionally bad poem, meant to mock the poems that Scherer, Nevada’s 1950 Poet Laureate, published regularly in local magazines.

Varley and Scherer quietly divorced by the year’s end. He married another cocktail waitress — his fourth wife, 24-year-old Judy Cauley.

History recorded no shots fired during their marriage, which lasted until his 1957 death.

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