“It's when Vegas came to Akron,” recalls longtime owner Ed J. George, 85. “We started out with Tina Turner and Ray Charles and some of the great entertainers. We had over 2,000 over the years. … We moved into the Righteous Brothers, James Brown and Joan Rivers. … A lot of people that came in were guests, came in for dinner, like Paul Anka, Danny Thomas and Tony Bennett. … We had the president of the United States there: President George H.W. Bush. We had about 50 Secret Service people, dogs on the roof, guns. It was really something. We had 800 people for lunch that day. … That was a great honor for the Tangier.
Jerry Lee Lewis … showed up two hours late. That was a crazy night. People sat there two hours. … But when he got there, the people stood on top of tables and clapped for him. They were so excited to see him!
LeBron James bought it. But when he was in high school, he used to be there all the time. My daughter would bring him from St. Vincent [-St.Mary High School], they'd sit there, and I'd get him hamburgers. … We used to have functions for him. He had tournaments. He'd have different functions for charity. He’d bring in all the basketball players.
Everybody knew the Tangier from all over the world. … People came from miles. It was phenomenal. And I used to have deck parties up on the [parking] deck. I used to have bands up there and boxing up there at night. … I used to have happy hours there after work. People come up there and drink. I'd serve food up there. … We had everything. We had Jello wrestling. We had mud wrestling. We had lingerie shows.
We're of Lebanese heritage. … We served a lot of the Middle Eastern foods that you see out today, like hummus. … But a lot of the décor, when my dad built it, came from the president’s summer home in Lebanon. They call it Beit ed-Dine palace. The lobby and a lot of the Tangier was authentic, from the dome to all of it, and it was kind of copied from that part of the world.
People thought when we built the Tangier that it would never make it. They thought we were crazy, because we built a big parking deck. … Why would you build it in Akron, Ohio? Wouldn’t you go build it in Chicago or a big city? We built it in Akron, Ohio, because that's where we live.
When we were busy, we had a couple thousand people in that building. It was phenomenal…. Most of the shows were sold out, and there was just a buzz in the place that was exciting.”
Summit Memory / Akron-Summit County Public Library
