Draftsman Gets a Wild Hair … Or Two … Or Three
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…
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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…
1952 “One of the members of the Journal news staff stopped in at a [Reno, Nevada] casino one night last week, put a nickel in a slot machine and hit the jackpot. The…
1934-1938 While doing time at Alcatraz, Alphonse “Scarface” Capone, infamous Chicago organized crime boss heavily involved in gambling, played the banjo and mandola (a large mandolin) in the prison band, The Rock Islanders, a rotating…
1951 Canada-born Jack Sullivan, né John D. Scarlett, had co-owned and run the Bank Club for two decades and prior to that, the Willows (it burned down in 1932) — both Reno, Nevada casino hotspots.…
1943 A site protection officer disciplined nine workers for shooting dice in a restroom and instructed them to report to the labor relations officer. This happened during the night shift at the Ford Motor Company…
1830s In this decade, moral fervor over gambling and organized crime led many United States cities to outlaw nine-pin bowling, which had been popular since colonial times. By the mid-40s, nine pin had vanished from…
1957 In 1957, Club Primadonna chartered passengers to and from San Francisco to the Reno, Nevada casino on “champagne tours.” On the September 28 return flight, delayed from 3 a.m. to 6 a.m. due to…
1915 The ’49 Camp, one of the attractions at the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition, offered a gambling experience in which chips could be bought for money but cashed only for free-admission coupons for the other…
1955 In a longstanding tradition, Missouri State Penitentiary inmates were allowed, on New Year’s Day, to gamble with their prison savings while playing dice and card games with each other. The warden, however, rescinded the privilege after…
1860s to 1960s “The loose buckle in the Bible Belt” and “Las Vegas before Las Vegas had water” — these were Hot Springs, as described in the press (Hot Springs, 2013). This Central Arkansas city…
1933-1954 His unfavorable personal opinion about gambling notwithstanding, Patrick “Pat” A. McCarran (D-Nev.) — U.S. Senator between 1933 and 1954 — acted repeatedly on the industry’s behalf. Had he not, it’s likely gaming wouldn’t have…
1920s-1930s Presumably to gain money, power and notoriety, two men controlled gambling in Reno, Nevada during the 1920s and 1930s through violence, payoffs, intimidation, threats and other gangster techniques. The industry mostly was illegal, with…
1931 When a Southern Pacific train stopped in Reno on a Friday in May at about 9:15 p.m., four passengers disembarked to squeeze in, before continuing on, a glance at gambling, which Nevada recently had…
1948 When Pasadena, California vice squad officers got a tip that chef/restaurant owner Paul B. Weston, 56, was sidelining as an illegal bookie, they raided his home and found gambling paraphernalia — where else? —…
1976 “Next time try London. The odds are better,” boasted a sign in the McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas in 1976. The posting of this ad and possibly others resulted from an agreement between…
1919 Outside many of Reno’s gambling saloons were benches, on which club-goers, typically men, whether or not they’d been gambling, were welcome to sleep the night. (At that time, some forms of gambling were legal…