Harolds Club and Bill Harrah, The Casino That Invented Modern Gambling

Two blocks north of the Virginia Street arch, there is an outdoor plaza where Harolds Club once stood. The building came down in a controlled implosion on December sixteenth, nineteen ninety-nine, demolished by the company that had bought it. That company was Harrah's, and the rivalry between those two names, separated by one letter and an apostrophe, defined Reno's casino era.

Harolds Club opened on February twenty-third, nineteen thirty-five, Harold Smith Senior's twenty-fifth birthday. He had come from California with his father, Raymond 'Pappy' Smith, who had been running carnival games in the Bay Area until California's crackdown pushed him to look east. Nevada had legalized gambling four years earlier, and the Smiths arrived to claim a piece of it. Their club was small at first, a single room with a handful of tables. What set it apart was marketing.

Pappy Smith's instinct was that gambling needed to be made welcoming to ordinary Americans, not just to high rollers and gamblers. He lowered the minimum bets so anyone could play. He put a woman dealer at a table, a genuine novelty for the era, and advertised it nationally. He invented the slogan 'Harolds Club or Bust' and eventually had it painted on more than twenty-three hundred billboards across the United States and in selected locations around the world. One brief early promotion involved a live field mouse running across a roulette wheel, a stunt that got Harolds its first national newspaper coverage.

By the nineteen forties, Harolds Club was the largest casino in Nevada and probably the most famous in the world. Through the nineteen fifties and into the sixties, it held that position. But Pappy and Harold failed to expand, to buy the properties in Reno and Lake Tahoe that their crosstown competitor William Harrah was quietly accumulating.

Bill Harrah came to Reno in nineteen thirty-seven with a bingo parlor and an obsessive commitment to operational quality. He believed that casinos could be run like respectable businesses, clean, professionally staffed, with strict rules and genuine customer service. He was right, and his competitors were not. By the nineteen sixties, Harrah's had surpassed Harolds in both size and reputation. Harolds Club finally closed its doors in nineteen ninety-five, and Harrah's later bought the building and erased it from the skyline. The apostrophe had won.