The 1941 breakout of war between the U.S. and Japan started a series of deleterious events for Nevada’s first tango parlor Reno Club, Inc. and its proprietors. These included a tangle with a newcomer to the region’s gambling industry, William “Bill” F. Harrah. Longstanding Bingo Business A group of Japanese-American men, all U.S. citizens,…
Lady Godiva has a new address. Looking gorgeous in a long blue dress, she and her horse distinctively embellish the front yard of a Carson City home. Godiva appears as though she’s arriving for a visit, but she’s there to stay, at least until she’s uprooted again. A Look Back In 1970, when Nathan “Nate”…
1955-1956 In March 1955, Nevada gaming regulators accused Caliente mayor Donald E. Rowan of cheating while dealing a 21 game — which is illegal — in the Shamrock Club. He’d operated the Clover Street gambling enterprise with his partner and father-in-law Joe Colombo for seven years. Rowan had been the elected head of this southeastern…
1964-1965 “Build it, and they will come” wasn’t a sure thing for gambling houses in Nevada, particularly ones offering an uncommon game. Case in point is the Barboot Coffee House and Casino in Reno. The Visionary C. Mathias “Matt” Skender, moved from Michigan to The Biggest Little City to introduce his favorite gambling game…
1951 A violent episode in a gambling saloon in Hawthorne, Nevada and ensuing events destroyed at least one resident family, the Gonces. A Little Background Vollie “Sam” V. Gonce and Kathleen L. Chapman had tied the knot at age 38 and 21, respectively, in Storey County in 1946. It was a second marriage for…
1910 Nevada was to cease all gambling operations and activity by midnight September 30, 1910* per a new law, already passed.** The final night, a Friday, was unlike any other before. “Nevada is determined to be good, even if the last remnant of the old west, in which the Brooklyn and Westchester school of fiction…
1977-1979 As Mark Estes, 28, played blackjack at a table in Nevada’s Las Vegas Hilton casino one day, he counted the cards. This involved remembering the cards dealt during each game and using a mathematical formula to calculate the odds of success of betting on any given hand. Suddenly, the University of Nevada, Las Vegas…
1941 In the wee Sunday morning hours of May 4, employees closed The Tavern after a busy Saturday night of patrons gambling, dining and dancing to live music. The place was bereft of people except for the night watchman. Suddenly, around 5:15 a.m., he noticed flames inside. He ran to the cabin behind the club…
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…
1965-1969 The Red Carpet in Biloxi was cheating its craps players by using a “juice joint,” a two-ton electromagnet that controlled metal-containing dice on a game table, in 1965. At the time, Mississippi prohibited all forms of clean, never mind dirty, gambling. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) launched an investigation. Agents learned that Harry…