1967 Ironically, considering the entity’s name, water poured inside the Showboat Hotel (later Castaways) when flash floods hit Las Vegas, Nevada on Tuesday, August 8. At 2800 E. Fremont Street, east of the city, the gambling room, restaurant, and show and guestrooms were evacuated. Other casinos were forced to do the same, including Caesars Palace,…
1967 The month following closure of its on-site Bullpen casino, the Nevada State Prison sold the brass coins that inmates had used for decades (since 1932) for wagering and as currency. Sets, containing one coin of each denomination — $0.05, $0.10, $0.25, $0.50, $1 and $5 — went for $30 to $50 apiece, depending on their condition. Proceeds went…
1967 After a demonstration of the game, Nevada gambling regulators, for the first time, allowed pai gow — a Chinese version of dominos — to be offered in its casinos. The clubs with pai gow, however, were required to have a bankroll of $10,000 per game on hand should a patron win big. The New…
1967 When the owners of the Ponderosa — Reno, Nevada’s newest major hotel (at 515 S. Virginia Street, now the Wild Orchid) — were about to debut gambling, with a celebratory first throwing of the dice, they ran into a snag. It seems the casino bankroll was locked in the hotel safe … along with the safe key. Two…
1967 & 1970 Apparently, the beloved crooner Frank Sinatra, Sr. had a temper, which he sometimes unleashed when casino operators denied him additional, excessive amounts of credit when gambling. In one instance when Sinatra lost control, he wound up losing two front teeth. That was in 1967, when he provoked a fight with Carl Cohen,…
1967 New York publisher, Lyle Stuart, applied to the Nevada Gaming Commission for a gambling license to purchase 1 percent of the Aladdin Resort & Casino on the Las Vegas Strip for $25,000 ($178,000 today). Regulators, though, denied him one due to his “unsuitable background” because a subsidiary of his company sold books that contained…
1967 Nevada legislators proposed a bill that would disallow any future installation of slot machines in grocery and drug stores. It died, though, in the Senate Taxation Committee.