Late 1840s-1858 A list of Western United States’ gamblers would be incomplete without William “Lucky Bill” B. Thorington.* A thimblerig master, he plied his craft in the Western mining camps and towns from Sacramento to Ragtown, Hangtown to Salt Lake City, during the late 1840s and ’50s. Thimblerig, also known as the shell game and…
Today Bally Manufacturing Corp., at one time decades ago, was heavily involved in the gambling industry. It owned six hotel-casinos in the U.S. It was a major producer of state lottery games and developer of slot and video poker machines. After its peak, the corporation divested all of its various but its hotel-casino (some still…
1963-1970s With assorted help from Mobsters starting in 1963, a small Chicago, Illinois-based pinball game maker, which had begun as Lion Manufacturing Co. in the 1920s, grew into the world’s largest slot machine developer, Bally Manufacturing Corp., by the 1970s. And those underworld relationships later would damage its image and jeopardize some of its existing…
1968, 1969 Bally Manufacturing Corp. got its name from Ballyhoo, the first coin-operated pinball machine (a penny got you seven plays) created in 1931 by Raymond Moloney, owner of Chicago, Illinois-based Lion Manufacturing Co. Lion became Bally in January 1932. The company also made slot machines, video poker machines, video games and state lottery games…
Allen Smiley “was one of the most powerful gangsters in [California],” wrote author Gerald Horne in Class Struggle in Hollywood, 1930-1950. He was Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel’s partner and best friend and subsequently, Johnny Rosselli’s* right-hand man. Somewhat in the shadow of these famed men and a private person, his story is less well known. So…
1971 Actress Jane Fonda and renowned activists led about 900 people down the Las Vegas Strip on March 6, 1971, a Saturday, in protest of welfare cutbacks. “Today we launched a spring offensive and a national campaign against repression,” said participating civil rights leader Rev. Ralph Abernathy (Reno Evening Gazette, March 8, 1971). Starting…
1950-1956 A novel, animated gambling device began to appear in Nevada casinos in 1950. It debuted in the lobby of Reno’s Mapes hotel-casino in the fall and “got a big play from visiting Shriners,” reported the Nevada State Journal (Nov. 12, 1950). They were one-armed bandits, or life-sized outlaws whose torso was a slot machine…
Hi, Wonderful Gambling History Blog Subscribers, I hope all is well with you! I’m so thrilled to announce that It Really Happened! is back up, and I’m generating new posts for it. I apologize for the recent, lengthy period of inactivity and thank you for your patience during it. It was caused by efforts…
1938 Gambler Tony Cornero Stralla offered to donate a day’s worth of revenue from his Southern California casino boat, the Rex, to Zoo Park at 3800 Mission Road in Los Angeles. The attraction, then owned/operated by the California Zoological Society and formerly the Selig Zoo, was teetering on bankruptcy and its animals were facing starvation.…
1938 During a preliminary hearing on the felony charge of using a cheating device while playing cards at a Las Vegas gambling house, Walter Eccles of Los Angeles explained that he’d used a holdout worn on his arm for “protection against a crooked gambling game” (Nevada State Journal, April 24, 1938).