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 wrote in Reno, Where the Gamblers Go!“

It was race horse keno.

The game essentially was keno or Chinese lottery but with horse names instead of numbers or Chinese characters. The equine monikers — Shot Gun, Red Fox, Mixed Party, Wedding Ring, Rustic Lady and Fussbudget, for example — were entertaining.

To start, the Palace Club conducted the game every 30 minutes versus the then typical twice daily keno schedule. The announcing of the events was exciting, like actual horse races at a track. According to Sawyer, they went something like this:

“All right folks, they’re at the post! And they’re off on race number 57; the first one out is Jockey Number 16 on Main Street right down the main drag. A hell of a race and a hell of a bunch of horses! Next is Jockey Number 60 on Kay Dugan, that old Irish gal again. Next is Number 50 on Bally Boy, that bloody English horse. And next out is Number 8, on Ask Kate. I did — and nothing happened!”

How It Got To Reno

Palace Club pit boss, Frances Lyden, had seen race horse keno played in Montana and proposed to his boss, casino owner John Petricciani, that they debut it in Reno. He agreed.  

Lyden telephoned Warren Nelson, 23, whom he’d seen run the game in Great Falls, and asked if he’d be willing to start up and operate race horse keno at the Palace Club with a few experienced men of his choosing.

In late April, Nelson, arrived, with a crew — Jim Brady, Clyde Bittner and Dick Trinastich — and immediately got to work preparing and then launched the game.

At first, the Place Club generated about $200 to $300 (about $3,700 to $5,600 today) per day from race horse keno, selling each ticket for $0.10 ($1.80).

And They’re Off …

In its newspaper advertisements, the Palace Club described race horse keno as “the game that has taken Reno by storm.” The claim was true.

“It didn’t take long, not more than a week or so, for the new game to catch on,” Sawyer wrote.

Over time, at the Palace Club, Nelson began holding the “races” more often, first changing it to every half hour, then every 20 minutes and finally, every 10.

Eventually, $0.35 tickets replaced the $0.10 ones as the most common, $0.35 ($6.50) ones became most popular. Some players bought $0.50 or $1 tickets ($9.40 or $18.80).

“Soon we were writing $1,500 to $2,000 [$28,000 to $37,000] a day, and by the end of summer we were writing $5,000 [$93,000] a day,” Nelson said in Always Bet on the Butcher.

Competition Springs Up

Also starting in 1936, and over the ensuing years, other gambling places got in on the action, offering race horse keno themselves. Those gambling houses were the Wine House, Block N and Harolds Club in Reno; the Index Club in Winnemucca; Jill and Eddie’s in Fallon; and the Nevada Club in Stateline, to name a few.

When the Bank Club, the Palace Club’s nemesis, followed suit, the latter raised its game win maximum to $5,000 from $2,000. Later, Reno’s Frontier Club debuted its game with a $25,000 limit ($400,000), and that drew even more players.

In Southern Nevada, the first club received a gambling license for race horse keno in late 1939. There, the Las Vegas Club and the Boulder Club adopted the game early on.

Retiring The Game

Race horse keno in Nevada began fading out in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

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Reno Joe in the Mapes lobby

1950-1956

A novel, animated gambling device began to appear in Nevada casinos in 1950. It debuted in the lobby of Reno’s Mapes hotel-casino in the fall and “got a big play from visiting Shriners,” reported the Nevada State Journal (Nov. 12, 1950).

They were one-armed bandits, or life-sized outlaws whose torso was a slot machine and whose arm and gun-toting hand constituted the lever.

Donning a white plastic cowboy hat, a red bandanna over their lower face, jeans and boots, the men’s eyes lit up in red when a player got a payout. In some models, they shouted “jackpot” when the bars aligned horizontally. The Mapes’ version garnered the name “Reno Joe.” 

The showcasing of Reno Joe resulted in numerous calls from Silver State casinos to the manufacturer for large orders of the Bandit. However, because Character Manufacturing Co. (CMC), on South Virginia Street in Reno, hand carved and custom made each one with individual characteristics, it only produced them in limited numbers. The brand of slot machines it used in them also differed occasionally but typically was a Mills or a Pace.

A Popular Novelty

In 1951, the Nevada Club in Reno installed in its bar area four Bandits, ones wearing hatbands bearing the casino name. They held Jennings Standard Chief slot machines, at the request of Lincoln Fitzgerald, the club’s co-owner and gaming manager.

The same year, LIFE magazine published in its May 18 issue a photo of the five Bandits in Stockmen’s Hotel and casino in Elko, in Northeastern Nevada. Those boasted gray and white polka-dot bandannas and red slot machines.

To entice people to play the slots, the Las Vegas Club in Southern Nevada, in 1952, commissioned 15 Bandits for its casino. They were beefier and better resembled men than Reno Joe, and had two arms and patterned shirtsleeves. Some lacked the bandanna.

These slots became the club’s icon, getting face time on advertising matchbooks and decal-postcards. The message on the latter was to see for oneself “the 15 generous gentlemen of the Old West at the Las Vegas Club.”

Other casinos, too, including Vegas’ Mint, purchased and incorporated the Bandit into its gambling offerings.

Artists And Products

Character Manufacturing Co. (CMC) began in 1948. During that time, various individuals carved its products.  One of the first was Sundance Cravat, a well-known Reno cowboy skilled in various handcrafts, including wood carving.

CMC hired cowboy artist Frank Polk when he claimed he could do a better job than had been done. During 1951 and 1952, Polk crafted more than 90 pieces for the company.

Other slot machine figures CMC made were the Gold Miner and the Cocktail Waitress, which was plastic. The latter was noteworthy for various wigs and apparel each of them wore. Reno’s Golden casino added 21 Cocktail Waitresses in 1956. They nearly met their demise during the fire ten years later that razed the building but were saved.

(CMC’s slot-less products included oversized, hand-carved Native Americans and talking horses.)

Sources

Lorenzi Lake Park c. 1931

1931

Soon after Governor Frederic “Fred” B. Balzar approved wide-open gambling for Nevada, three men applied for an initial gambling license  from the City of Las Vegas to operate a craps game at Lorenzi Lake Park in the Pavilion building.

Lorenzi, with a pool, dance area, two lakes, rowboats and concessions and an affordable entry fee, was a local hot spot for fun. Numerous events, including concerts, prize fights, horse races, dance contests and beauty pageants, took place there.

The city commissioners denied Roy Grimes, R.H. Davenport and D.J. MacCauley a gambling permit, which they believed was unjust and discriminatory. The new state gambling law began on March 19, and they’d filed their application on April 17, in proper form and meeting all the necessary requirements.

Agency’s Approach Questioned

In fact, the commissioners’ refusal to grant the three men a license was in accord with the agency’s recently adopted resolution, on March 30, that it only would afford gambling licenses in the future to entities that already had one from the previous quarter. The moratorium was to go into effect on April 5 and remain in place until the agency could develop a policy for issuing new licenses and outline a city area in which gambling houses could operate.

However, prior to moratorium decision, the commissioners had granted gambling licenses to six clubs — Boulder, Las Vegas, Exchange, Northern, Red Rooster and Meadows.

“The city commissioners arbitrarily fixed the number to be granted at six, and rejected all other applications other than the six favored ones” reported the Nevada State Journal (May 28, 1931).

Further, after the decision, the commissioners make an exception to the moratorium, which was they could grant  gambling licenses to people of the “Ethiopian race” for games at establishments “that catered to persons of the same race.”

Off To The Courts

In early May, Grimes, Davenport and McCauley filed for a writ of mandamus against the Las Vegas mayor and city commissioners, the first court action to be filed in Nevada regarding the 1931 state gambling law. They wanted the court to compel the agency to give them a gambling license. (Another mandamus action in the wake of the new gambling law was taken later in the month, in Northern Nevada.) The trio’s attorney, Charles Lee Horsey, argued that “the law prohibits discriminations and that all who conform to the same standards must be given the same privileges.”

On May 27, the case was presented to the Nevada Supreme Court, whose jurists had to determine whether or not city or county authorities have the right to limit the number of gambling licenses to be issued in a community.

Gambling Stigma Revealed

The ruling, which came two months later, in July, was the opinion of two of the three judges, Edward A. Ducker and Benjamin W. Coleman. It determined that “the city of Las Vegas exercised sound discretion in denying the application” because it was for a type of business that was “of a character regarded as tending to be injurious” (Nevada State Journal, July 9, 1931).  And when it came to this kind of enterprise, governing bodies could control which ones did and didn’t receive gambling licenses.

Contrarily, Judge John A. Sanders, the sole dissenter, opined that the commissioners indeed had acted arbitrarily and discriminatorily and that the writ should be granted.

Sources

Photo from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas University Libraries’ Digital Collection

The article, “Las Vegas Gamblers Arming in Control Battle,” ran on the front page of a Los Angeles newspaper in the third week of December, to the chagrin of Nevada gambling regulators, casino owners, officers of the law and other industry representatives.

The story reported that in the new iteration of Sin City:

• Casino owners (gamblers) were readying to fight for control of gambling there
• Many gamblers were carrying weapons and had armed bodyguards
• Men (presumably hired by the gamblers) were cruising competing casinos’ parking lots, trying to persuade guests to play at their clubs instead
• Ladies planted in cocktail lounges were directing visitors to specific casinos
• Although unreported, several physical beatings took place in gamblers’ inner circles
• One casino owner left the state because his life had been threatened*
• Fixers, dispatched by East Coast Mafia heads, were en route to negotiate a truce

Landscape At The Time

In the ’40s, downtown Las Vegas transformed when a handful of its gambling properties changed owners and names. The 1949, or post-war, Fremont Street was home to the:

Las Vegas Club (1930)
Boulder Club (1931)
Frontier Club (1935)
El Cortez Hotel (1941)
Western Club (1941)
Pioneer Club (1942)
Santa Anita Turf Bar (1943)
Monte Carlo (1945)
Golden Nugget (1946)
Club Savoy (1946)
El Dorado Club (1947)

Downtown Las Vegas in early 1950s

Also in that decade, the city saw the start of what would become the Las Vegas Strip, with the debut of this quartet of hotel-casinos:

El Rancho Vegas (1941)
Last Frontier (1942)
Flamingo (1946)
Thunderbird (1948)

Still fresh in the minds of those in the gambling world was the execution two years earlier, in 1947, of Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, violent mobster (Genovese crime family associate) and Meyer Lansky pal. Siegel had overseen (badly) the building of the Flamingo in Vegas, and had run the business until his murder.

In mid-December 1949, the Flamingo double-crossed Club Savoy, which was across the street, with a play that involved a cheating gambling stunt. The incident was extensively reported in the papers when Savoy’s owner refused to pay the Flamingo its winnings. It was negative publicity that gambling regulators and state officials disliked.

Also around the time, several casinos agreed to stop some of their blatant efforts to poach customers from other gambling properties. They’d used people on megaphones and “circus-type banners” to inform passersby that their slot machines had better payouts than their competitors’.

The L.A. newspaper article didn’t specify which gambling factions supposedly were fighting one another. Perhaps it was a Strip vs. downtown beef.

Similar, Widespread Reaction

The overarching response to the newspaper report from the big names in and associated with the Vegas gambling industry was denial: A turf war? What turf war? Calling the article’s contents hogwash, they deduced it merely was an attempt to hurt Nevada’s booming sector at a time it would feel it the most, the New Year’s Day weekend.

Here are some of the individuals who publicly weighed in and their comments. (All quotes are from the Nevada State Journal, Dec. 29, 1949.)

Gus Greenbaum, mobster, Meyer Lansky lieutenant and Flamingo hotel-casino president:

“The stories to that effect are fabricated entirely,” he said, specifically referring to an impending war for control. “No guns are being carried on any hotel or club property except by authorized personnel.”

Spokesman for the Nevada Tax Commission, the then gambling regulation agency:

Any impending warfare over gambling control “is news to us.”

Spokesman for the downtown casinos, who asked to remain anonymous:

“Relations between the gambling clubs and the casinos are more harmonious than ever. We think the story was carried mainly to counteract favorable publicity given our gaming recently by another Los Angeles newspaper. This whole business has been dreamed up by some eager newspaper correspondent.”

William J. Moore, Jr., Hotel Last Frontier executive vice president and tax commission member:

He wasn’t aware of any threats on the gambling scene, he said. In fact, the various gamblers have gotten along well in recent months and hold weekly meetings to hash out any issues. The story was “a deliberate attempt to keep California dollars from coming into the state, appearing as it did on the eve of the biggest weekend in the history of gambling in Las Vegas.” He added Vegas gamblers aren’t using “steerers,” or “persons corresponding roughly to ‘B’ girls in cocktail lounges who direct visitors to a certain casino,” which the state prohibits.

Archie Wells, City of Las Vegas acting police chief:

He didn’t know about any alleged beatings of certain gambling figures, he said. “We checked thoroughly and found no violence of any kind — reported or otherwise.” His department found no evidence the reports perhaps stemmed from possible attempts at revenge by Club Savoy.

Glen Jones, Clark County sheriff:

“We’ve received the utmost cooperation from all gambling operators.” He didn’t know of any gambler who was carrying a gun openly other than the special officers with deputy sheriff status in the clubs.

Informal Peace Summit

After the story appeared, the city’s casino and gambling club owners quickly convened to address its allegations.

They must’ve come to a mutually satisfactory resolution, if in fact a battle for gambling control had been underway or imminent, as no lives were taken . . . at least that we know of.

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* One gambler, Beldon “Jake” Katleman, co-owner of the El Rancho Vegas, had traveled to the Middle East recently but was back in town at the time the newspaper article was published, the Nevada State Journal noted.

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