1949 The Smiths, who owned and operated Harolds Club in Reno, Nevada appropriately named their casino Roaring Camp. Generally, a roaring camp was “a gold-prospecting camp characterized by wild behavior, unrestrained drinking and gambling,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary. Specifically, Roaring Camp was an actual mining settlement in California’s Amador County, on the Mokelumne…
1936-1950s The Palace Club introduced a new casino game to Nevada’s “Biggest Little City” on May 1, 1936. Renoites quickly discovered it, and its popularity soared, leading to a solid run over about a decade. The emergence of this enticing gambling offering was “a major event in the development of Reno’s gaming,” Raymond Sawyer wrote…
1929-1941 In the early decades of legal gambling in Nevada, Reno’s McKay/Graham combine expropriated legitimate business owners’ casinos in Washoe County. The local Mob, headed by William “Bill” Graham and James “Jim” McKay, strove to dominate and control gambling in Reno without competition. Thus, anyone who wanted to open a gambling club had to seek…
1920s-1930s It’s undisputed that Mobsters ruled early gambling in Reno, Nevada’s 1920s and 1930s. Two club owners who offered games of chance in the city courageously wrote, in their memoirs roughly two decades later, about the powers that were. Here are the authors and their depictions created with words: Harold Smith, Sr., I Want to…
1950-1979 The Harolds Club casino, in Reno, Nevada, held an annual winter holiday party for employees at its Harolds Trapshooting Club in the neighboring town of Sparks, on the Pyramid Highway. The fêtes, which featured dancing, live music, food and alcohol, lasted 24 hours, so every worker could attend. Photo from Wikimedia Commons: by AnelGTR
1949-1979 Harolds wasn’t the only Northern Nevada club with gambling that the Smiths owned for decades. In 1950, the renowned gambling family purchased Jabberwock Gun Club, located on the Pyramid Lake Highway in what today is Spanish Springs,* and renamed it Harolds Trapshooting Club. “For more than two decades, [it] was where the elite met…
1952 “Someone very dear to you is being held and will be killed if you don’t give me the money.” This was the content of the note, a bluff, Frederick Charles Will, handed to the manager of the American Trust Company branch in San Francisco on July 28. Walter Blomberg, whose wife was at home…
1960s-Today The Big Bertha introduced in the 1960s wasn’t a circus lady or a German howitzer; it was a made-in-Nevada slot machine that became iconic. Named for its size, the three-reel device stood 5 to 6 feet tall and weighed about 700 pounds. Along with its ample dimensions, the potential $1,000 (about $7,800 today) jackpot…
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…
1946-1947 On the third Tuesday of April 1946, after work at the Southern Pacific Shop in Sparks, Nevada, Sam Lemel took the bus to Reno and went to Harolds Club where he played craps. He began by betting two half-dollars, which he lost. He left the casino and returned a bit later, only to lose…