1926-present By 1963, major casino owners in Reno, Nevada thought the downtown fixture was outdated and ugly compared to their modern buildings on Virginia Street. They even offered to pay for it and its maintenance for five years. That was the Reno Arch, a famous city landmark. They probably had a point. The arch originally…
1958-1961 The debut of topless showgirls in Las Vegas roused disapproval — not surprising given it occurred early in the Leave it to Beaver era. The Stardust was the first to abandon bras and tops, doing so when it unveiled a show featuring the Bluebell Girls for the hotel-casino’s 1958 grand opening on The Strip.…
1931 Belle Livingstone wasn’t the typical Nevada gambling club owner. She’d acted on the stage and screen in the 1890s. She’d mingled with royalty and wealth in Europe and the United States. During Prohibition, she’d operated a speakeasy on New York’s Park Avenue. During that stint, she’d been arrested three times and spent 30 days…
1951 The Irish tenor, Dennis Day, was about to begin a singing engagement at the downtown Riverside hotel-casino in Reno, Nevada in the summer of 1951. Day is known for his appearances on the Jack Benny comedy show and his own television show, A Day in the Life of Dennis Day. To promote his…
1953-1954 When customer Mrs. Curt Whitney entered the Nevada Club at 3 a.m. on a Sunday in May 1953, her shoe allegedly got caught in a hole in the floor, and she fell. More than a year later, she and her husband sued the casino. She sought $35,000 in damages for injuries to her right…
Harolds Club, a casino that debuted in Reno, Nevada in 1935, displayed signs on its property that read: “No one can win all the time. Harolds Club advises you to risk only what you can afford to lose.”
1935 Police discovered John S. Parks, a 67 year old, carrying a loaded Colt 45 automatic on a downtown Reno, Nevada street around midnight on a July Monday. With blood streaming from his nose and smeared on his face and clothes, Parks refused to say what had caused his injuries. After taking him to the…
1931-1965 Nevada’s early gambling industry was “wrapped in a segregated White Curtain” (Reno Gazette-Journal, Feb. 27, 2008). Between 1931, when Nevada legalized gambling, and 1965, African Americans were banned from gambling or even being present in the Silver State’s Caucasian-owned casinos, for fear their presence would scare away white patrons. Typically, any black person who…
1937 The Great American Football Pool (GAFP) of 1937 was to be of massive scale and the first of its kind in the U.S. The organizers aimed to sell 3 million tickets at $1 apiece and award sizable prizes: $100,000 to the first place winner, $50,000 to the second and $25,000 to the third in…
1947 The United States’ Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) co-financed construction of a gambling enterprise via its $975,000 loan for the Mapes hotel-casino in Reno, Nevada in 1947. Under Attack Three years later, Senators William Fulbright (D-Ark.) and Paul Douglas (D-Ill.), members of a committee investigating the RFC’s past lending practices, publicly criticized the group…