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 River where forty-niners prospected for gold.

Also, Roaring Camp was the name of the fictional California gold mining town in American author Bret Harte’s 19th century short story, “The Luck of Roaring Camp.”

Harolds’ Roaring Camp isn’t around anymore, but California’s Roaring Camp is, as a tourist spot, Roaring Camp Mining Co.

Source: Reno Evening Gazette (Nev.), March 30, 1949.

1937-1970s

For Harrah’s, which debuted in Reno in 1937 as a bingo parlor, extensive advertising was key to its growth into one of Nevada’s largest gambling empires by the 1970s.* However, owner/operator William “Bill” Fisk Harrah‘s approach to publicizing his clubs primarily was to copy what competitor Harolds Club already had done.

“[Harrah’s] promotions were aimed at Harolds,” wrote Leon Mandel, author of William Fisk Harrah: The Life and Times of a Gambling Magnate. wrote. “In perfect accord with the Harrah style, they were — at least many of them — stolen from Harolds itself.”

A Humble Start

For about the first 10 years, during which the club solely offered bingo, and some employees themselves wrote ads for the business, keeping such work in house.

Then when the gambling tycoon expanded his business to a full casino in the mid-1940s, he engaged local firm, Wallie Warren & Associates, to assume advertising responsibilities. However, Harrah wasn’t impressed with the agency’s one advertising man, according to Mandel.

A Campaign With Teeth

Sometime in 1958, the gambler switched to Reno’s Thomas C. Wilson Advertising Co. One of the agency’s ad campaigns for Harrah’s was the “I won a jackpot” postcards. Here are some of the first ones circulated. (Warning: Much of the content is politically incorrect and offensive today.)

Note the images are oriented horizontally, all of the letters in “Harrah’s Club” are the same color, red, and the location cited is “Reno.”

Going Out Of State

In 1955 Harrah opened a second casino at Lake Tahoe in Stateline, and the postcards changed slightly as a result. Specifically, they now named the locations of both properties.

As the two Nevada Harrah’s operations grew, so did their advertising demands. In 1961, Harrah’s director of advertising, Jack E. McCorkle, sought an agency with the manpower to meet the gambling company’s needs.

After four months of searching, McCorkle contracted Hoefer, Dieterich & Brown Inc. in San Francisco, California. This firm’s efforts turned Harrah’s into a household name. 

The postcards evolved further.

Note the images now are vertically oriented, the casino name no longer includes “Club” and each letter in “Harrah’s” is a different color, none of them red.

Big Fat Copycat

It wasn’t Harrah’s but, rather, its biggest competitor, Harolds Club, that blazed the advertising trail for Nevada casinos. Harrah’s simply copied Harolds’ successful formula.

In 1941, the Smiths who owned and operated Harolds Club installed 25 roadside billboards** within 500 miles of their Reno gambling house, which indicated fun was to be had there. All of the signs challenged whoever saw them to make their way to The Biggest Little City, but none mentioned gambling.

Before Thomas C. Wilson Advertising created and placed ads for Harrah’s, it did the same for Harolds between 1946 and 1958. The agency was responsible for Harolds’ covered wagon symbol and its  “Harolds Club or Bust” slogan. It also advertised for Harolds in newspapers and magazines and on radio and TV.

“They did a good job,” Harold Smith, Sr., wrote of the Wilson agency in I Want to Quit Winners.

Harrah’s also put up billboards along the highways throughout the U.S.’ western states and advertised in the same media outlets that Harolds Club did.

Because the casino names, “Harolds” and “Harrah’s,” were similar, each starting with an “H” and containing seven letters, people often mistook one for the other.

“The more advertising Harolds did, the more people noticed Harrah’s,” Mandel noted.

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* Bill Harrah took his company, Harrah’s Entertainment Inc., public in 1971.

** The number of Harolds roadside signs rose over time to about 2,000 and appeared throughout much of the world.

Sources

“Whenever he gets in a fix, he reaches into his bag of tricks.” That statement not only applied to Felix the Cat but also held true for many gambling cheaters during the 19th and 20th centuries in the U.S. One of their go-to aids was called check cop or sure cop (“cop” meaning “steal” here).

Composition And Use

One source described the product as a liquid chemical adhesive, and another said it was beeswax.

Whatever one’s version was made of, “check cop was an indispensable article in any high class poker game, for what was a fellow to do if he lost his match box mirror or broke his Sullivan knee spread, or went blind and could not read the backs of his marked cards? Ah, that has been well looked after, for any real gamble must be a sure thing. If all devices fail, use check cop,” reported the Syracuse Herald (July 24, 1921).

Cheating dealers or players rubbed or smeared some check cop on the palm of a hand, making a “perfect picking-up surface,” the newspaper described. Then, with the treated hand, they inconspicuously pilfered others’ coins, chips and/or checks. They even used check cop to palm then switch cards, coins or dice during a game.

Distraction Is Key

The Syracuse Herald described how check cop was used clandestinely. “If all else fails, all the craft gambler had to do was to point his right hand at the door and cry, ‘Here comes the cops’ or any of those old Sherlock Holmes attention attractors and slyly slip out his left hand over his adversary’s chips while he’s looking the other way, the check cop on his palm will do the rest.”

The article went on: “Of course only a bungling amateur would resort to the suggested method of distracting his adversary’s attention, the simplest way was just to palm the chips one at a time as the gentleman on your left turned to give an order to the waiter, stooped down to light a match or make any other little unconscious move which took his eyes for an instant off the stack of chips before him.”

Foolproof And Fabulous

About 10 big companies, from which gamblers bought cheating implements, sold their own version of check cop and, thus, relied on advertising to distinguish their own product from their competitors’.

One such novelties business touted its check cop as “the best of the kind on the market. It does not interfere with the action of the hand and a check will adhere to it while the hand is held perfectly flat, yet no particle will adhere to the check,” reported The Fort Wayne News and Sentinel (May 3, 1919).

Another firm, Mason & Co., asserted in its catalog, “Palming is one of the most difficult feats of the profession. With our check cop it is done easily and surely with out [sic] practice.”

Other companies claimed the following about their check cop:

• “We positively will not sell this article to more than one person in a town. Order at once to have things your way.”
• “It will pick up coin the same as it will checks, and anyone can use it successfully without practice.”
• “It can be worked on the wisest gambler without fear of detection.”
• “One very small piece will last an entire night while the dope and plasters offered by other firms will soon become dry and lose their power.”
• “As to price, it is almost nothing. One box will last a long time and it is always ready for use, and it is not affected by cold or heat.”
• “For removing top card and holding out cards, it is just the thing. For palming and switching dice, it has no equal.”

Save Your Money

The Encyclopedia of Gambling noted that an alternative was/is available to cheaters, which is cheaper, more convenient and uses a product many people already have in their home.

“Some cheaters see no need to purchase these preparations; they have their own do-it-yourself methods,” the author wrote. “They simply cook up a piece of adhesive tape and scrape the gummy substance onto their palm. It is just as effective a method.”

Beware Of Users

The existence of check cop and similar products led casinos to require that dealers “clear their hands” before touching their person or leaving their game table. They’re required to turn up their palms to the cameras to show they’re empty and clap their hands to dislodge anything that might be stuck to either one.

Science and Invention in Pictures, in its June 1924 issue, advised: “Be suspicious of the person who ‘monkeys’ with the chips. The man who takes ‘kitty’ or ‘cuts’ the game frequently uses a ‘check cop.'”

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Illustration of player using check cop during game: from Science and Invention in Pictures

Photo of palmed chip: from The Inter Ocean

Sources

Interesting age and marital status restrictions are specified in this help wanted ad for casino personnel:

Ran on June 18 in the Nevada State Journal

1947

The Golden Gulch casino re-debuted on June 27 under new management, that of James H. Lloyd. He’d had the gaming rooms and bar remodeled “with decorations featuring the ornate Victorian motif and stressing the ‘golden gulch’ theme” (Nevada State Journal, June 28, 1947).

That night, all women guests were presented with a corsage of native sagebrush encircled with gold and silver ribbons.

The ad read:

“Reno’s newest, brightest spot opens in Friday, June 27 in Nevada’s most colorful old-time hotel . . . the historic Golden! Mining and cattlemen’s headquarters for a half century with restaurant, banquet rooms, casino and bar. Modern comfort . . . 1880 glamour!”

August 5, 1943 Help Wanted ad

1937-1970

Card dealing was a male-dominated profession in Nevada’s casinos until 1937, when Harolds Club, in Reno, put the first woman at a 21 table to deal.

Co-owner Harold Smith previously had been hiring women, mostly family members, for other jobs on the gambling club floor — chip stacking and roulette wheel spinning, for instance — but never dealing.

Smith’s concern had been that women would be too-easy targets for cheaters and, consequently, the casino would get fleeced. (A total of up to 10,000 silver dollars sat on the various tables during a typical night.)

Smith, though, soon realized women could hold their own, and both genders enjoyed gambling with a “pretty, smiling dealer” (Lima News, Aug. 4, 1943).

With World War II and the resulting shortage of men to employ, women filled the gap at Harolds Club. By that time, 90 percent of the employees there were female. Smith launched a school to train women to become professional dealers. They learned how to deal cards, spin wheels, rake in chips, compute payoffs and watch for cheaters’ tricks, among other skills.

Smith advertised in local newspapers’ Help Wanted sections for recruits in ads indicating, “Men Please Do Not Apply” (Nevada State Journal, Aug. 4, 1943). The pay was $25 per week while attending his school, then up to $60 per week when hired. Students ran the gamut, and included housewives, divorcées (women living in Nevada the requisite six weeks to get an expedited divorce), telephone operators, school teachers, sales clerks, stenographers and newspaper reporters.

By 1943, casinos throughout Northern Nevada were hiring graduates of Smith’s school.

Slow To Change

It was the opposite in Las Vegas. Although women worked as dealers in nearby towns such as Henderson and North Las Vegas, none did on the Strip or in downtown Sin City until 1970, nearly three decades later.

That year, the Silver Slipper, a Howard Hughes-owned casino, hired the first — 47-year-old Jean Brady, who had years of experience from dealing at other Silver State gambling houses.

Sources