Harolds Club Still on a Roll as It Marks 50th Year in Reno

To a fast-buck carnival man like Raymond I. (Pappy) Smith, it was like the ring of a silver dollar when Nevada legalized gambling back in the 1930s.

He didn’t know much about casino games, but he figured he couldn’t go wrong by sending his sons to Reno to set up shop with a couple of nickel slot machines and a penny roulette game.

It was 50 years ago this month that Harold Smith Sr. and Raymond I. Smith opened Harolds Club, Nevada’s oldest casino.

Survived Depression

Even in the midst of the Great Depression, the pioneer venture in a small room fronting North Virginia Street showed promise.

When Pappy came to Nevada from California to supervise the business, he put his carnie instincts to work.

Pappy promoted “The Biggest Little City in the World” far and wide. “Harolds Club or Bust” signs featuring the outline of a Conestoga wagon soon appeared in remote corners of the world.

When customers complained about the bouncy ride on U.S. 40 over the Sierra Nevada from California, Pappy took action. He set up roadside signs urging authorities to widen the highway to four lanes.

When World War II broke out and thousands of servicemen were stationed in Reno, Pappy treated them royally. Word-of-mouth advertising brought in even more customers.

When the war effort cut into his manpower, Pappy turned to womanpower. He was the first casino owner to hire female card dealers, a trend that has become commonplace today.

Business became so good that he built a seven-story tower billed as the “World’s Largest Casino.” The place had a Western theme, and employees dressed in Western garb to complete the effect.

Party Every Night

The showroom featured name entertainers and every night was a party.

Harold Smith Sr. liked to make a flashy entrance. He might arrive at work on a horse one day and roar up to the main entrance on a motorcycle the next.

He liked to pop up at odd hours and would sometimes pick up a deck of cards, deal and then pay the winners double.

A teetotaler whose bars reportedly poured more business than any in the world, Pappy was a familiar figure with his green eyeshade and armbands. Instead of free drinks, he would offer candy bars to the players.

Often he would play his violin over the loudspeaker system, and sometimes he would charge off with a butterfly net and chase Harold Smith Jr., his dapper man-about-town son, through the casino.

Harolds Club regularly paid bonuses for certain hands, such as 6-7-8 of the same suit or same-suit blackjacks.

The biggest slot machine pay-out was a jackpot on which the reels showed pictures of the Smiths. The casino’s off-the-wall promotions included “mouse roulette,’ in which the winner would be decided by a mouse crawling out of a hole and resting on a certain number.

Sold to Hughes

But as time passed and Pappy grew older, he decided to sell out. Harolds Club was sold in 1970 for $13 million to Howard Hughes’ Summa Corp.

Summa enlarged the place to keep pace with a casino construction boom that included such giants as the MGM Grand-Reno and Harrah’s Reno-Lake Tahoe complex.

Pappy died a few years ago and Harold Smith Sr. moved on to other ventures. Harold Smith Jr. poured at least $1 million into an unsuccessful Yugoslav casino operation.

Summa threw a big party to celebrate the 50th anniversary last month. The guest list included mayors, legislators, long-time Reno residents and three employees who have been at Harold’s since the beginning.

Gov. Richard Bryan presented a proclamation praising the casino as a pioneer enterprise that drew the line between Nevada’s mining-agriculture economy of the old days and the modern billion-dollar gaming era.

Pappy got a big hand when he was introduced. But, when the party moved downstairs to a cake-cutting ceremony, he found himself sitting alone.

He later rejoined the group, but Harold Smith Sr. didn’t show up. Neither did his son, who works as an employee at the rival Cal-Neva Club down the block.