The National Automobile Museum, What Bill Harrah Loved More Than Gambling
Near Reno, Nevada
By the time Bill Harrah died in June nineteen seventy-eight, he owned fourteen hundred and fifty automobiles. They were stored in warehouses across the Truckee River in Sparks, catalogued and maintained with the same obsessive operational standards he applied to his casinos. His philosophy was direct and audacious: acquire one of every significant automobile ever produced. Not a few. One of each. A complete record of the machine that remade the world.
Harrah had begun collecting in the nineteen forties, quietly and without announcing his intention. He bought cars of distinction, vehicles that represented a turning point in engineering, design, or cultural history. A nineteen oh-nine Thomas Flyer, winner of the first around-the-world automobile race. A nineteen thirty-six Stout Scarab, the first vehicle with a fully monocoque body. John Wayne's custom Pontiac. James Dean's custom Mercury. He bought and restored them in exacting detail, to factory specification where possible, to documented period condition where not.
When Harrah died, Holiday Inns had purchased his casino empire, and with it, the car collection. What followed was a public outcry that reached the floor of Congress. Holiday Inns announced plans to sell the cars. Nevada residents, historians, and automotive enthusiasts pushed back. The company agreed to donate one hundred and seventy-five vehicles and the research library to a future nonprofit museum. The remaining twelve hundred or so cars went to auction in nineteen eighty-four, nineteen eighty-five, and eighty-six, generating some of the highest prices ever paid for automobiles at that point.
The National Automobile Museum opened on November fifth, nineteen eighty-nine, in a purpose-built building on Lake Street beside the Truckee River. Today it holds more than two hundred cars across four galleries, tracing the history of the automobile from the eighteen-nineties to the present. What Bill Harrah assembled over thirty years was a private act of historical preservation on a scale no government program would have attempted. The museum is what remained after the market took the rest.
