Pit Stop on Nevada Border Now a Hot Spot : Gambling: Stateline, once a drive-through, becomes a destination.

Both sides were pretty evenly matched in this battle at the edge of California, a fight between two dusty rest stops on the road to Las Vegas over 14,000 cars a day and the hearts and wallets of the passengers inside.

Then Gary Primm called in The Desperado.

The tallest, fastest roller coaster in the world became his answer to the most obvious question here on the California-Nevada border: Why in the world would anyone bother to stop in tiny Stateline or nearby Jean when Las Vegas is less than an hour away?

Before last August--when The Desperado began whizzing passengers around 209 feet above Interstate 15--it was hard to tell the difference between Stateline, Primm’s three-casino empire, and Jean, the two-casino stronghold owned by Gold Strike Resorts.

Jean had the ZIP code, a prison, a plastics factory, the spot on most maps and the ink in most guidebooks. Stateline, 10 minutes closer to Los Angeles, was the first place inside Nevada to gamble and the last to buy gas on the way home.

Like other border towns that ring Nevada’s edges, glowing in the desert darkness like a bracelet, these two spots on Interstate 15 had finally begun to cash in on a decade of growth in their state. With $19 rooms and 95-cent breakfasts, an RV park and tractor-trailer parking, they had displaced Las Vegas as the capitals of cheap, as magnets for the down-at-the-heels, not the well-heeled.

None of that, however, turned Stateline or Jean into the kind of places that people went to , instead of through . Then Stateline got The Desperado, a hotel-casino with a buffalo-shaped pool and--this year--an arena called Star of the Desert, where the Captain & Tenille sang to an SRO crowd.

All of a sudden, Stateline is someplace.

“People are shocked when we don’t have rooms,” said an indignant Jenene Marsh, checking in guests at Buffalo Bill’s, home of The Desperado and the newest of Stateline’s three hotel-casinos. “They think that because we’re in Stateline that we’re not busy. Well, we are.”

For drivers on the Baker Grade, heading toward Nevada in the deepening darkness, Interstate 15 is a solid snake of automobile lights slithering through the dry lake bed. Glass from broken beer bottles glitters in the headlights. In the distance is a glow.

That glow is Stateline. Bisected by what is arguably the busiest stretch of asphalt in Nevada, it is a shrine to transportation oddities.

On the south side of I-15, The Desperado climbs and curves, a shrieking mass of flailing arms and clacking steel. A train connects Buffalo Bill’s with the neighboring Primadonna, a sprawling Victorian-themed hotel that looks a lot like the Hotel del Coronado run amok.

The train also spans the freeway from Buffalo Bill’s to Whiskey Pete’s, a curious faux Medieval castle with an 1890s Western bootlegger for a mascot. A space-age monorail shoots back across the freeway to the Primadonna, where a big Ferris wheel ride spins at the entrance.

And then there are the cars. “Don’t Miss the Dutch Schultz Al Capone Gangster Car,” screams the flashing marquee at Whiskey Pete’s. “See the Bonnie & Clyde Death Car.”

Mary Jane Leeseman and husband Don, both 72 and from San Diego, step off the monorail in front of the Death Car, visibly unimpressed. However, and this is a big however, they didn’t come to see the Death Car, the Gangster Car or even the melted lump of airplane that carried actress Carole Lombard to her death in 1942, a grisly memento on proud display at the Pioneer Saloon in nearby Goodsprings.

They came to gamble. Cheaply. They are pretty good at gambling and very good at cheap. The highlight of the Leesemans’ Nevada travels came recently in Laughlin, another border town on the Colorado River. Sitting in a hotel coffee shop, eating a free breakfast, she filled out a discount keno ticket (75 cents instead of $1) and won $3,500.

This was her first trip to Stateline, a group bus excursion arranged by her church. “The price was right,” she shrugged and enumerated: $22 for transportation, a night at the Primadonna and a free breakfast.

Piped up a friend: “You can’t drive that cheap.”

Shoot, said husband Don, “You can’t stay home that cheap.”

Rather than breaking the Stateline-Jean bank--if, of course, there were one--tightfisted travelers such as the Leesemans are the very backbone of this tourism economy. This year, the area’s five casinos are expected to pull in at least $300 million, said Jason Ader, senior gambling industry analyst at Smith Barney.

While that’s barely bar change compared to the $5 billion or more that Las Vegas generates, it’s a healthy half of the revenue of hotel-casinos in Reno and Lake Tahoe.

It is loyal gamblers such as Arvelle Steed, a retired Rockwell mechanic from South-Central Los Angeles, who pay the bills at Buffalo Bill’s. He comes at least once a month, he says, to lose and leave. Video poker is Steed’s game, and at 8 a.m. he’s grinding away at a nickel machine.

“I set there last night at that end machine for three hours,” said Steed, who can drop $400 a visit. “I like to play quarters. I can’t afford dollars. . . . I don’t have to go all the way to Vegas. I can lose as much here.”

Stateline’s only residents are semi-permanent--about 600 single Buffalo Bill’s employees who share trailer space in a mobile home village in the hotel’s back parking lot. Jean has a comparable population base residing at the Southern Nevada Correctional Center.

“Jean is not even no ways of what it used to be,” said Virginia Handy, as she steamed milk for caffe lattes at Buffalo Bill’s. “We moved out there in 1951. I was postmistress for 32 years. My husband worked at Pop’s Oasis on what we used to call the Los Angeles Highway.”

Then the freeway went through. Pop Simon died. Son Peter sold the old Oasis and the land it was on, and the combination motel-gas station-slot machine gallery was razed. In 1987, the Gold Strike opened with 300 rooms, eventually expanding to 800. Two years later, Nevada Landing--a 300-room hotel-casino shaped like a riverboat in the middle of the desert--opened its doors.

Last month, in a nod to the growing lure of these curious little oases on the California frontier, Circus Circus Enterprises announced that it had purchased Gold Strike Resorts Inc., owner of the Gold Strike and the Nevada Landing. The result is one of the biggest companies in the gambling industry today.

In a written statement announcing the transaction, Chief Executive Clyde T. Turner lauded the assets that Gold Strike brings his company, high among them location, the key for such border towns.

People will always go to the closest spot where the banned becomes legal, be it Slovenia, which has casinos up and down the Italian border, or Sun City Casino in Botswana, just a drive from Johannesburg, South Africa, said Bill Eadington, director of the Institute for the Study of Gambling and Commercial Gaming at the University of Nevada, Reno.

“There’s always that psychology in driving to Las Vegas,” he said. “People want to get into action as quick as they can.”

The border towns have become so numerous--Stateline and Jean here, or Wendover and Mesquite for Utah-based gamblers--that Nevada magazine once posited that pilots crossing the remote Southwest “often navigate by the light of these commercial beacons.”

“It’s rumored,” the magazine said, “that Nevada is the only state whose shape is discernible from outer space, thanks to her iridescent outline.”

Glenn Schaeffer, a Gold Strike partner and soon-to-be president of Circus Circus, points to the enormous Southern California market as the reason that the Stateline-Jean area is the brightest border light of all.

“We’re larger than Wendover and Jackpot and Mesquite,” he said. “We’re probably the size of all of them put together. Of the lot, this is the newest market. Its growth rate is the highest. Here, we mine money.”

Gary Primm will cut that fine distinction finer, he who dreamed up the Roller Coaster That Changed Stateline. Together, he figures, Stateline and Jean can be an actual place, offering the budget-conscious enough to do to keep them away from Las Vegas.

But really, says the man who transformed a nearly empty stretch of highway in the 1980s, “our facilities are much bigger and have much more to offer than the other border towns. We’re in the process of doing a golf course. We’re going to be adding meeting rooms. We might even have a golf academy. What we’re after here is a total destination resort.”

Still, legal gambling’s spread is so great that it could someday erode the draw for border towns. In 1988, only two states permitted gambling; today, the number is 23.

“People always say, let’s talk about the next great border town,” Schaeffer said. “But the next great border town doesn’t exist.”

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On the Edge

Hoping to entice gamblers to stop in tiny Stateline, Buffalo Bill’s casino runs the world’s tallest roller coaster, The Desperado. The ride and other new attractions helped swing the momentum to Stateline in its battle for the hearts and wallets of motorists with Jean, the town 10 minutes closer to Las Vegas on Interstate 15.

* Cashing In: Jean is the more established of the California-Nevada border towns, with two casinos and a prison, but Stateline has added a third casino, a train and a music club.