1953

Harrah’s in Reno, Nevada proposed, to event officials, the casino host an exhibit about gambling at the California State Fair. With a backdrop of silver dollars, the display was to contain gambling equipment and pamphlets on how to play various games, among other items.

The idea went over about as well as the handling of a casino cheat caught in the act.

“What they are advertising is against our state law,” said Dr. J. E. McConnell, a member of the fair board of directors. “I can’t see why we should give them anything — even lip service.”

McConnell said the proposal sounded “as if we’re being taken for a bunch of country yokels.”

(This wasn’t the first gambling-related story involving a regional fair.)

Source: Nevada State Journal, “Californians Scorn Exhibits on Gambling,” July 18, 1953.

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.

—————————-

* 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

The couple’s harrowing experience started at their Las Vegas home.

Two men disguised with faux facial hair and odd outfits nabbed First National Bank of Nevada executive Reno N. Fruzza as he entered his garage at about 9 p.m. on Monday, May 23, 1977. They held him, 56, and his wife Polly, 50, captive there, overnight, at gunpoint.

Reno had worked for the financial institution for 36-plus years. Polly had had a career as a Western comedy star named Polly Possum in the 1950s and ’60s. The two were active in the community, avid fishermen and big art and antiques collectors.

The next morning, the kidnappers injected the Fruzzos with a poison requiring an antidote to stave off death, they told the couple. They instructed Reno to retrieve $1.22 million dollars from his bank’s vault and then follow directions he’d receive in notes left for him in various places. Otherwise, they’d withhold the antidote from Polly, and she’d die.

Elusive Money Swap

Reno obtained the cash and while doing so, told some bank employees what was happening. Per the typewritten note in his 1963 Cadillac’s glove compartment, he then went to the phone booth outside the Knight’s Inn. Meanwhile, his co-workers had notified the police who’d caught up to and started following Reno but allegedly lost him in traffic.

The next note told him to go into room 125 of the Sahara hotel-casino. There, in an ashtray was another instruction, to find and use the 1964 beige Cadillac sedan in the parking lot to follow spray paint marks on the road. Subsequently, various notes and Polaroid photos led Reno through numerous small rural towns, including Goodsprings, Sloan, Jean and Sandy Valley, and finally to the Calvada Inn in Pahrump, about 60 miles from Vegas. He arrived there at about 1 p.m., and was to stay in its Pony Express Bar until further notice.

While he was there, the perpetrators removed the money from the Cadillac’s trunk. They transferred it to a yellow Cessna 172 (which had false identifying numbers on it) and flew from Pahrump to the North Las Vegas Air Terminal, where they got in waiting cars and left. They phoned Reno at about 3 p.m., thanked him for his cooperation and said he was free to go. The freed captive immediately called police, who subsequently found Polly handcuffed to a bed post in Las Vegas’ Showboat hotel-casino.

Neither Polly nor Reno had been hurt, and the supposed poison they’d been injected with had been a hoax, requiring no lifesaving remedy.

Suspects Identified

FBI agents on the case determined the two culprits were Paul Michael Kodelja, a 30-year-old craps dealer at Circus Circus in Las Vegas and previously Harrah’s in Reno, and 50-year-old Craig Otte. Kodelja was a licensed pilot with no criminal background. Otte, however, had a record including burglary, larceny and other petty crimes. Most recently, though, he allegedly had robbed a Los Angeles bank of $40,000 in 1975, charges for which were pending against him in 1977.

For Otte and Kodelja’s criminal scheme, the federal government charged them with conspiracy, stealing bank money, assault with dangerous weapons and kidnapping.

Accountability On Horizon

The younger of the two turned himself in 10 days after the crimes and after his attorney Oscar Goodman negotiated his surrender. Kodelja posted $150,000 in bail and was released from the Clark County Jail. After pleading innocent to the charges, he turned to the Nevada Supreme Court for dismissal of the counts against him on the grounds that the grand jury indictment contained ambiguous language and other technical problems.

Kodelja, however, lost that appeal in November 1977. A trial date was set for January 4, 1978.

As for Otte, he’d disappeared. The stolen $1.22 million had, too.

————————————–

The story concludes in next week’s post, Casino Dealer, Accomplice Execute Elaborate Crime in Las Vegas, Part II.

Sources