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1948 Arthur T. Morgan belligerently stormed into the Big Hat casino on Highway 91 (outside Las Vegas, Nevada) at about 1:30 a.m. on a Friday night in spring. He immediately began heckling, threatening to shoot…
1925 As of 1915, Nevada gambling law only allowed slot machines that discharged tokens, or bingles, exchangeable for on-site merchandise; those that paid out in money or bingles redeemable for currency were forbidden. “The fact…
1936 A thief took the trouble of entering a Los Angeles, California café through a skylight to rob the slot and marble games. But instead of getting the heck out after that was successful, he…
1948-1950 In between dispatch orders, a Las Vegas, Nevada taxi driver fleetingly picked up the announcement of horse racing information on his cab radio one day in mid-October, 1948. He informed Clark County Sheriff Glen…
1967 When the owners of the Ponderosa — Reno, Nevada’s newest major hotel (at 515 S. Virginia Street, now the Wild Orchid) — were about to debut gambling, with a celebratory first throwing of the dice, they ran into…
1960 When one rural Nevada town grew into a gambling hot spot in the mid-1900s, the gamblers in another loudly grumbled. Soon after Idaho outlawed slot machines, its last vestige of legal gambling, the sagebrush-…
Today A casino is a place that houses and facilitates various gambling forms, according to the English, but a casino or kasino is an officers’ mess hall to the Germans, Spanish and others. In Italian,…
1947-1962 A wild burro sauntered into the popular gambling spot, the El Rey Club in Searchlight, Nevada at about 11 o’clock every morning. It approached the proprietor, Willie Martello, who always fed it something he…
1936 Soon after Harolds Club opened in Reno, the main attraction, for only about a week, was mouse roulette, “where customers bet their small change on what color or number a scampering rodent would choose…
1904-1905 Criminal drama occurred between two men late one November morning in the Wieland saloon in Reno, Nevada in 1904. James Mann, a Wyoming man who sometimes worked in Silver State gambling clubs — the…
Today Chinese dice differ from traditional dice in two ways: • The spots for numbers 1 and 4 are painted red. • The number 1 spot is larger and more deeply etched than all others. Anyone…
1961-1966 Early in 1961, Michael Catrone, 60, an apartment complex owner, presented to the Nevada Club in Las Vegas a winning keno ticket for $25,000 ($198,000 today). Yet the casino’s general manager didn’t pay it…