1960 A cheap, spiral notebook held great power in Nevada’s gambling world for decades. It contained known U.S. mobsters whose underworld statuses and histories were such that the state gambling authorities didn’t want them anywhere near The Silver State’s casinos. This was a problem as these undesirables frequented major gambling operations in the state. Nevada…
1962-1999 You’ve likely heard of Dumbo, Horton and Babar, but what about Bertha? Real, unlike the others, Bertha is an elephant renowned for having performed in shows at the Nugget hotel-casino, in Sparks, Nevada, for 38 years! Former Nugget owner, John Ascuaga, bought Bertha in 1962 for $8,000 (that’s $63,000 in today’s dollars) from a…
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…
1970-1974 During the years Kings Castle in Incline Village, Nevada at Lake Tahoe was open, management routinely used polygraphs on employees, particularly for questions about cheating, theft and employment. Photo from freeimages.com: “No Lies”
1955 It’s hard to believe this ever happened in Nevada. As an emergency measure, the state government approved a temporary moratorium on issuing gambling licenses. It was to last five months, until 30 days after the 1955 legislative session adjourned. The freeze applied only to applications submitted to the tax commission after the legislation went…
1980 Thirty-five years ago, on August 27, an intricate bomb blasted a chasm that spanned six of the 11 floors of Harvey’s Resort Hotel at Lake Tahoe’s South Shore. The explosion hadn’t been intentional but, rather, the result of the best idea experts could conceive of to disarm the instrument. “To this day it remains…
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 for…
1934-1935 Today, 80 years later, the circumstances of actress Thelma Todd’s death remain a mystery, and the case still is one of Hollywood’s infamous unsolveds. A deep cover-up precluded the truth about the incident from surfacing. On December 16, 1935, the famous, 29-year-old blonde was found dead in her garage, her beaten, slumped body behind…