While gambling has been legal in Nevada since March 19, 1931, it took time for the industry to evolve into the state’s economic engine. The following are some of the watershed events that helped to shape the nature of gaming in Nevada:
• 1931 – This year the Pair-O-Dice Club became the first casino to open on U.S. 91, the future Las Vegas Strip. The nightclub was purchased in 1939 by Guy McAfee, a former Los Angeles police captain and vice squad chief, who renamed it the 91 Club. McAfee also began referring to U.S. 91 as the “Las Vegas Strip” after the famous Sunset Strip in Los Angeles. In 1941, the 91 Club was sold to Texas theater-chain owner R.E. Griffith, who a year later replaced it with the New Frontier resort, the second hotel-casino erected on the Strip (the first was the El Ranch Vegas, which opened in 1941).
• Late 1930s - Harolds Club, which opened in 1936 in downtown Reno, introduced female card dealers and became the first Nevada casino to encourage women to patronize casinos. Harold S. Smith, son of Harolds Club founder Raymond I. “Pappy” Smith, recalled in his book, I Want to Quit Winners, that “one day as Daddy stood near the doorway, a woman came in, took two or three hesitant steps toward the first game and stopped short. ‘There are no women here!’ She almost shrieked as she fled. Out of that episode, Daddy got the idea of lady dealers at our tables.”
•1941 - The Nevada State Legislature legalized racing wires. That same year, mobsters Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel and Jack Dragma opened an office of the Trans-America Service in Las Vegas to supply horseracing information to bookies throughout the country. Nevada’s legal racing wires eventually evolved into the state’s legal sports books.
•1944 - Harvey and Llewellyn Gross opened the Wagon Wheel, a rustic cafe and service station on the Nevada-California border at Stateline, on the south shore of Lake Tahoe. Two years later the Grosses added blackjack tables and slot machines, and the Wagon Wheel became the first major casino at South Tahoe.
•1946 – Benjamin Siegel opened the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas, the first modern high-rise resort on the Las Vegas Strip. In his book, Viva Vegas, architectural historian Alan Hess noted that the 105-room, four-story resort “broke Las Vegas out of the public relations mold of a western town of modern splendor and set it on its way to being a mirror of the spectrum of American popular culture.”
•1958 - When it opened, the Stardust Hotel boasted the largest sign on the Las Vegas Strip at 216 feet long. The sign launched the era of bigger and brighter hotel-casino signs.
•1959 - Soon after the Nevada State Legislature created the five-member Nevada Gaming Commission to license and regulate all gaming in the state, the Gaming Commission began compiling its “List of Excluded Persons,” also known as the “Black Book.” The document listed people with undesirable reputations, including those with ties to organized crime, who were not allowed in Nevada’s casinos. Any property ignoring the list would lose its gaming license. In 1963, the commission stripped singer Frank Sinatra of his gaming license at the Cal-Neva Lodge at Lake Tahoe and the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas because he had allowed Chicago crime boss Sam Giancana to stay at the Cal-Neva.
•1966 - Eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes arrived at the Desert Inn, which he purchased after the management of the Las Vegas hotel tried to have him evicted. During the next four years, Hughes bought the Frontier, Silver Slipper, Landmark, Sands, and Castaways in Las Vegas and Harolds Club in Reno as well as Sky Haven Airport in North Las Vegas, Alamo Airways terminal west of Las Vegas McCarran International Airport, Air West airline, a Las Vegas television station, and hundreds of mining claims around the state. Hughes’ presence also led the Nevada State Legislature to pass the Corporate Gaming Act, which allowed corporate ownership of casinos in the state.
•1986 - International Game Technology created Megabucks, an electronically linked network of slot machines that share a large, progressive jackpot. IGT, which is based in Reno, paid out its first Megabucks jackpot, $4.9 million in 1987.
•1989 - The $700 million Mirage, which offered a faux volcano, dolphin aquarium, white tiger habitat, and domed tropical atrium, opened on the Las Vegas Strip. The 3,000-room hotel-casino ushered in the era of giant, fantasy-themed megaresorts.
•2010 to the present – The past decade and a half has seen a consolidation of the state’s biggest hotel-casino companies into even larger corporations.
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