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1931 Catalyzed by unexpected circumstances, Colorado-born Clara Antoinette Rowan (née Beggs) became the first woman to own a legal casino in the United States. Her husband, Thomas “Tom” George Rowan and his partner Leo Kind…
Late 1840s-1858 A list of Western United States’ gamblers would be incomplete without William “Lucky Bill” B. Thorington.* A thimblerig master, he plied his craft in the Western mining camps and towns from Sacramento to…
Today Bally Manufacturing Corp., at one time decades ago, was heavily involved in the gambling industry. It owned six hotel-casinos in the U.S. It was a major producer of state lottery games and developer of…
1963-1970s With assorted help from Mobsters starting in 1963, a small Chicago, Illinois-based pinball game maker, which had begun as Lion Manufacturing Co. in the 1920s, grew into the world’s largest slot machine developer, Bally…
This week, Nevada gambling regulators removed New York mobster, Charles “Charlie Moose” Joseph Panarella, from their List of Excluded Persons. Formerly the Black Book, this compilation contains the names, photos and criminal records of personas…
1971 Actress Jane Fonda and renowned activists led about 900 people down the Las Vegas Strip on March 6, 1971, a Saturday, in protest of welfare cutbacks. “Today we launched a spring offensive and…
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…
1937 At a time when wide-open gambling was legal in Nevada (as of 1931), the penalty for operating a game of chance without a license was 60 days in the county jail or a $120…
1869, 1877, 1905 The 1869 statute partially legalizing gambling in Nevada prohibited any such operations in first floor rooms. An 1877 revision allowed gambling in back rooms of a ground level in certain small counties.…
1961 In Nevada, where casino operators can employ shills to play in their clubs, it was established that a licensee may not act as a shill, gambling in their own establishment. Their spouse can’t either…
1928 A woman named Gladys Anderson sued the McGill Club in McGill, Nevada for $5,000. It was the amount she claimed her husband had lost there playing poker. The district court, however, dismissed her case…
1956-1959 A thief absconded with $2,000 (about $17,500 today) from the Club Primadonna casino in Reno, Nevada on the first Friday of May 1956. The missing 10,000 dimes, 2,000 quarters and 1,000 half-dollars, the reserve…