1958-1959 Clarence Thayer grew ill with flu-like symptoms on Thanksgiving Day in 1958 while visiting his sister in Oakland, California. He was a well drilling contractor who lived in South Lake Tahoe. He and his wife Norma also owned a dry cleaning business that adjoined their home, which she ran and where he sometimes worked.…
1956 She wouldn’t budge. C. Johnson was playing a slot machine from a stool that was blocking the aisle in a downtown Reno, Nevada casino. When employees asked the Oakland, California resident to please shift a bit so others could pass, she adamantly refused. They offered to move the game to a spot with a…
1949 Casino owners balked when the question of going on daylight saving time (DST) arose in Nevada in 1949. Gamblers’ Outcries Charles Mapes, owner of the Mapes hotel-casino in Reno, made a few arguments: • “It’s difficult to put on a floor show at 9 p.m. with the sun just going down. A spotlight can’t…
1934 When police raided an illegal gambling den in Kingston, Washington, one of the players present, Raymond Johnson, swallowed the dice. In court after his arrest, the judge gave him 30 days to “digest” and produce the dotted cubes. Unfortunately, it’s unknown how everything turned out in this case. Photo from freeimages.com: by Katinka Kober
1931 Twenty-six miles southeast of Las Vegas, the United States government, in 1931, developed Boulder City as the place to house men working on the Hoover Dam (originally Boulder Dam). The Bureau of Reclamation required the town to be a model community that afforded a clean living environment. To achieve this, federal legislators officially designated…
1840s-Today Gambler Francois Blanc, at his casino in Bad Homburg, Germany, introduced roulette in the early 1840s with only 0 and no 00 on the wheel and table layout, a choice he stuck with when he assumed control of the Monte Carlo in Monaco two decades later. This roulette version became the European standard. In…
1913 During this year, the tail end of the second wave of massive Polish emigration, about 3.5 million people, primarily peasants from poor rural provinces, was taking place. Looming on the horizon was the outbreak of World War I, when Poland would become the locale for much of the Eastern Front’s operations. Gambling had become…
1960-1961 Singer Tony Martin applied for a gambling license to acquire a 2 percent interest for $50,000 ($410,000 today) in the Riviera hotel-casino in Las Vegas. Investigation into his background revealed he’d served two days in a Los Angeles jail in 1947 after having pleaded guilty to speeding. Consequently, Nevada’s gambling regulators required he explain…
1950-Today When people are on the Las Vegas Strip, they’re really in Paradise — the town, that is. In 1950, a rumor surfaced that the City of Las Vegas’ boundaries would be expanded to include the then multimillion-dollar luxury resort area on South Las Vegas Boulevard. Disliking the idea, the proprietors of the hotel-casinos there…
1934 After hiding somewhere in the building, a person robbed the Bank Club casino’s safe of $500 in silver change (about $9,000 today) between 4 and 6 p.m. on a Wednesday in early December. This particular Bank Club — a common name for Nevada gambling houses — was located in the town of Elko. The…