1958-1961 The Hacienda in Las Vegas, Nevada held an ongoing promotional contest at its golf course, which was widely advertised, even on the back of the postcard above. Participants would pay 50 cents (about $4.25 today) per attempt at a hole-in-one from 165 yards away, and the casino would award $5,000 ($43,000 today) to anyone who accomplished…
1944 “Are you in favor of banning beano when played for prizes?” This was one of Massachusetts’ 1944 ballot questions. By the 1940s, beano — played with beans as markers, hence the name, and popular on the carnival circuit — had evolved into bingo. How? Brooklynite Edwin S. Lowe, after learning of beano at a Georgia carnival…
1953 On a weeknight in May, Louisiana state policemen surrounded a high-end home in the New Orleans suburbs. One of them knocked on a secret side door that contained a one-way glass window, allowing those inside to see out but not those outside to see in. A man in the house opened the door but…
1935 Singer and actress Judy Garland (neé Frances Ethel Gumm) was discovered while headlining with her two older sisters at the Cal-Neva Lodge at Lake Tahoe in Nevada. Theatrical agent Al Rosen was in the audience when The Garland Sisters sang, their mom Ethel on the piano. “Get that kid over here,” Rosen told the…
1950-1953 During the 1950 federal hearings on organized crime, two Northern California gamblers — Walter “Big Bill” Melburn Pechart and David “Dave” Nathan Kessel — were uncooperative, according to the questioners. They were Senators Estes Kefauver (D-Tenn.), Charles Tobey (R-N.H.) and Alexander Wiley (R-Wisc.), congressmen who comprised the Kefauver Committee, or the United States Senate…
1946 Mobster Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel’s wife, Esta (née Esther Krakower) filed for divorce in Reno, Nevada after 17 years of marriage. The two had wed when she was 18 and he was 23. In the divorce settlement, Esta got their Hollywood house, their New York apartment, Bugsy’s Cadillac, $600 a week in alimony ($7,500 today)…
1966 The Silver Nugget casino announced it would debut topless, female, 21 (blackjack) dealers during the midnight to 8 a.m. shift. This, too, was the gist of the complaints the Nevada attorney general (A.G.) received in April. Allegedly, the North Las Vegas business had hired women willing to work naked to the waist and told…
1964 When dealer Lue Dennis exited her work, Harolds Club casino, a man descended and hit the pavement in front of her. Reno resident, John Nahirney, age 79, had fallen from the Nevada casino’s fire escape into Douglas Alley; nobody ever determined whether it had been from the second or third floor. On landing, he…
1930s-1952 Salvatore “Tar Baby” Orester Terrano is one of numerous criminals whom Nevada gambling regulators approved to own a casino in the state. In May 1947, the tax commission granted the Northern Californian, then 43, a probationary, 30-day gambling license to offer roulette, craps, 21 and slot machines at the Twin States casino at Lake…