FAMILY AFFAIR by UNR Oral History Prgm

FAMILY AFFAIR
by UNR Oral History Prgm
Order 453804...$24.95
From World War II to the early 1960s, Harolds Club was the largest casino in Nevada and probably the most widely known in the world. This is the story of Harolds and the family that owned it. It is also a revealing chronicle of the gaming industry’s colorful, vigorous, and sometimes outrageous youth. A semi-itinerant family of carnival game concessionaires named Smith founded Harolds Club in Reno in 1935 in a rented “hole-in-the-wall” storefront . No casino owners were ever more idiosyncratic in their approach to the business than the Smiths. Pappy and his sons Harold and Raymond A., were capable of audacious strokes of genius in advancing the fortunes of their club, but they also broke every accepted rule of business and management, doing many things that should have led to the ruin of their enterprise, but somehow did not. They quickly became the most successful operators in Nevada. By the mid-1960s, the club’s relaxed, unconventional approach to business was no longer paying dividends, and its competitors were beginning to get ahead. In addition, there were significant cash flow problems, brought on in part by the habits of some members of the family. With Pappy’s death in 1967, the family and the club lost the one person who could hold it all together. It was time to get out of the business. In 1970, Summa Corporation bought Harolds Club, and the new bosses quickly set about changing the culture of the operation to bring it into line with their corporate values. Employees found the changes so disturbing that in less than a year, most had fled to other casinos. An era was ending in the history of Reno’s gaming industry, and Harolds Club was the first casino to experience conversion to the new ways. 322 pages, November 2003.

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