riverside casino movie times laughlin nv

Woodbury, a longtime county commissioner in Clark County, Nev., said. He kept expanding his operation, adding 48 rooms in 1972, 52 rooms three years later, a 14-story tower in 1983 and another tower with 307 rooms in 1986. The confluence of three states was a boon, with a ceaseless flow of motorists traveling between them. One day a postal inspector told him that he couldn’t keep getting mail if the town had no name. He and his family lived in four of the motel’s eight rooms. He advertised all-you-can-eat chicken dinners for 98 cents, 12 slot machines and two gambling tables. Laughlin reopened the motel as the Riverside Resort. Something told him that the spot’s isolation would be an advantage: Once gamblers reached him, he had them in his grasp. He sold the 101 Club for $165,000 and put down $35,000, in cash, for that motel and six acres on the Colorado River, ultimately paying $235,000 in all. A bankrupt bar and motel on an unpaved road on the Colorado River seemed like the ticket. He found it on the extreme southern tip of Nevada, a place of mountains, desert and river where the state meets Arizona and California.

He learned to fly - it became his passion - and began scouting the state for an alternative to Las Vegas. He got a gambling license, posted “families welcome” and “steak and eggs” on the signboard and started what he said was the only blackjack game in the area.īut Mr. By 1954 he had saved enough to buy a restaurant in North Las Vegas, the 101 Club.

He worked as a bartender and at night went to a school for card and dice dealers. With his young wife, he moved to Las Vegas in 1953, when Nevada was one of the few places in the United States where slot machines were legal. “I said, ‘I’m making three times what you are, so I’m out the door.’” “He said to get out of the gambling business or get out of high school,” Mr. The principal of the one-room schoolhouse he attended for high school was not amused. As a teenager, he stockpiled cash from trapping mink and muskrat and used it to buy mail-order slot machines, installing them himself in local pubs.ĭemand was high, and before long he was making $500 a week (nearly $7,000 in today’s money). Taking chances seemed to come naturally to Donald. Donald Joseph Laughlin was born on May 4, 1931, on a dairy farm run by his parents, Raymond and Olive (Benalleck) Laughlin, outside Owatonna, Minn., about 65 miles south of Minneapolis.

Riverside casino movie times laughlin nv