O^LWAYS
Warren Nelson
Oc> ET
and Casino Gaming,
01V THE
1930s— 1980s
BUTCHER
Always Bet on the Butcher: Warren Nelson and Casino Gaming
Interviewee: Warren Nelson Interviewed: 1992, 1994 Published: 1994 Interviewer: Ken Adams UNOHP Catalog #164
Description
At the beginning of the Great Depression of the 1930s, eighteen-year-old Warren Nelson lost his job with the Park Hotel in Great Falls, Montana. Work of any sort was scarce, but Nelson did not long remain unemployed — he used a family connection to join a quasi-legal gambling business operating in the back rooms of a local cigar store.
As Warren Nelson set about learning the craft of gambling, the state of Nevada was creating a legal and political environment in which he and many of his colleagues would flourish. In March 1931, with passage of AB 98, Nevada became the only state in the nation that sanctioned the operation of gambling casinos. This presented a great opportunity to professional gamblers working elsewhere, largely outside the law. A number of pioneers in the business — people such as Bill Harrah, Pappy Smith, and Benny Binion — were attracted to Nevada by the prospect of being able to operate without having to bribe officials and without being subject to closure every time the political climate changed. Throughout the decades of the thirties and forties, they and others like them drifted in to Reno and Las Vegas, forming the nucleus of an industry that would eventually dominate the state’s economy.
In Montana Warren Nelson learned how to set up and operate a Chinese lottery game called keno, and in 1936 a fellow Montana gambler who had relocated to Reno asked him to come and put a keno game in John Petricciani’s Palace Club. Keno certainly wasn’t new to Nevada in 1936, but, as he was to do many times in many different areas over the next fifty years, Nelson refined the concept, and introduced a game that was more exciting and more successful than any that had previously been seen locally. By doing so he effectively launched what would become a remarkable career.
The evolution from “joints,” owned and operated by gamblers, to today’s “gaming entertainment centers” run by trained professional managers was lengthy — but by the 1960s the casino owner no longer kept his bankroll in his back pocket; he no longer dealt or supervised the games, or counted the money, or painted the walls; and he no longer personally hired all employees, greeted high rollers, and chased down thieves who had been caught in the act. Stricter regulation by the state, the need for ever-larger amounts of capital, and the sheer size of the operations were forces for change. Reflecting its movement toward the respectable mainstream of American business, casino gamblers began calling their business “the gaming industry.”
Warren Nelson is undeniably an operator who was influential in the evolution of casino gaming. While he was rarely the primary source, he was often an early and important participant in innovations and changes that brought great success to the industry. Nelson was always on the lookout for better ways to operate, to attract customers, and to satisfy them — quick to recognize a good idea, he was never reluctant to try one, modify it, refine and improve it.
(Continued on next page.)
Description (continued)
Through most of his career Nelson has believed in a simple principle: Give the players the best bet (lowest odds for the house) that you can while still making a profit, and they will play longer, leave satisfied, and come back bringing their friends — it makes better business sense for a casino to average small wins on millions of bets than to average large wins on only a few hundred. That philosophy fueled the dramatic growth of the Club Cal-Neva. It is also at the heart of the phenomenal success of casino gaming in the state. The story of Warren Nelsons personal journey, from his start as a “gambler” to his current position as a respected casino operator, can be read as a metaphor for the rise of Nevada’s gaming industry.
C^LWAYS bet ON THE BUTCHER
Warren Nelson, 1930s
“ I was really a player, and Id gamble on just about anything.
C^LWAYS BET ON THE BUTCHER
Warren Nelson and Casino Gaming, I930s-I980s
University of Nevada Oral History Program
From oral history interviews with Warren Nelson, conducted by Ken Adams, a narrative composed by R. T. King, assisted by Gail K. Nelson
Publication of Always Bet on the Butcher was made possible in part by a generous gift from William C. and Barbara C. Thornton. Contributions from Raymond C. Avansino, William S. Boyd,
Lud Corrao, Pauline Farris, International Game Technology Foundation, Si Redd, and William Shay helped defray the expense of printing.
University of Nevada Oral History Program Reno, Nevada 89557
Copyright 1994 by the University of Nevada Oral History Program All rights reserved. Published 1994 Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Nelson, Warren, 1913-
Always bet on the butcher : Warren Nelson and casino gaming, 1930s-1980s : from oral history interviews with Warren Nelson / conducted by Ken Adams ; a narrative composed by R. T. King, assisted by Gail K. Nelson p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 1-56475-368-9
1. Nelson, Warren, 1913- 2. Gamblers— Nevada— Biography.
3. Gambling-Nevada-History-20th century. 4. Casinos-Nevada- History— 20th century. I. Adams, Ken, 1942- II. King, R. T.
(Robert Thomas), 1944- . III. Nelson, Gail K., 1951-
IV. University of Nevada, Reno. Oral History Program. V. Title. HV6721.N45N43 1994
795'.092-dc20 [B]
94-21183
CIP
Publication Staff:
Production Manager Helen M. Blue Senior Production Assistant Linda J. Sommer Production Assistants Verne W. Foster, Amy R. Thomson
No one can beat the house consistently at any game unless he's cheating. There's an old saying: "The lamb might kill the butcher, but always bet on die butcher."
O
CONTENTS
Preface / xiii Introduction / xvii
PART ONE: IN MONTANA
1 . "Always Be Good to Your Father" / 3
2. On the Eden Ranch / 7
3. Times Were Tough / 13
4. "You're Big Enough if You Think You're Big Enough" / 21
5. I Was Making So Much Money! / 27
6. Dealing Keno at the Mint / 33
7. Players and Mobsters / 41
Cool Francis Lyden. Helena Mike. Mob keno?
PART TWO: LEARNING THE CRAFT,
BUILDING A CAREER
8. First Time At The Palace / 49
The boss and his daughter. First keno in Reno. I quit . . . twice. Back to the Palace. Always full, even on graveyard.
9. Characters, -Hustlers, and Scam Artists / 59
Gold-Tooth Camel. Dope and sex. Heroin cool. Titanic scams. A strange group. "Something you can do for me . . . Mouse roulette. Unethical. On the square. Spit on the wheel.
10. Semper Fi / 67
"I want your job!" Lefty recommended no action. A pitiful sight. She was very attractive. Harrah had a job for me.
x / Contents
11. Joint Duty / 73
Dressed for action. A real huckledy-buck joint. "God, he looks awful!" Everyone was stealing.
12. With Harrah's Club After the War / 79
Clerk of the works. A skimpy bankroll. Ex-Marines from Montana. Putting in a peek. The great keno war. Wire service. Women dealers. I get amortized.
13. Partner in the Waldorf / 93
Buyer, beware. Luck, good and bad. "Pm getting out of here."
14. At the Mapes / 99
The best joint in town. Haven for gangsters?
15. Postwar Players, Crooked and Square / 103 Lightning hand. "We can beat this guy." Happy to be a peon. A personal thing. A system player. Caruso dies. Kill them with kindness. Sergeant Bilko. Big tip, big woman.
16. The Palace, Again / 115
No license. Tight machines. A hit on graveyard. A good, clean joint.
PART THREE: THE RISE OF THE CAL-NEVA
17. A Partnership / 121
Someone has to be responsible. Adjunct operations. Friends and adversaries.
18. People Who Made it Work / 129 "Those sons of bitches are crazy."
19. Riding the Slot Machine Wave / 135
The eight-spot slot. Ballys and more Ballys. Loose carousels. Si Redd, computers, and Megabucks.
20. The Sports Book / 143
Getting started. Switching to computers. Tournaments. "If those bastards want to gamble . . ." Wiseguys.
Contents / xi
21. Grinding it Out / 149
Treat the customer right. Keeping it loose. Managing from tire floor. They aren't addicted.
22. Ballyhoo / 157
23. Cheating, Stealing, Scamming / 161
Stealing from the house. Customers who cheat. Cheating the customers. Regulating it.
PART FOUR: BEYOND CASINO WALLS
24. The Teamsters Want In / 175
25. Representing the Industry / 179
Battling the government. Member of the board. "Let's get this over with."
26. Founding a College / 185
27. Family, Friends, and Interests / 191
Greg. Gail. Understanding and forgiveness. Other enterprises. Dogs and horses.
28. Looking Back / 201 Glossary / 203 Index / 209 Photo Credits / 219
Preface
WORK IN THE FIELD of oral history is marked by variety: individual projects rarely resemble one another in anything but form. This keeps things interesting. Although a procedural path has been blazed, it merely points the way — while each project plumbs human memory to gain a better understanding of the past, there is no standard chronicler profile, no rigid approach to interviewing, no boring routine. Our production of Always Bet on the Butcher strayed uncommonly far from the path, and it was an uncommonly rewarding experience for all who were involved.
In 1977 the University of Nevada Oral History Program (UNOHP) recorded Warren Nelson's oral history a first time. (Back then, none of the program's oral histories were taken beyond the edited transcript stage, and that is the only form in which the first version exists.) It is not our custom to repeat such exercises, but when in 1992 a colleague sug¬ gested that we interview Nelson again, the idea seemed a good one. Fifteen years had passed and Mr. Nelson was still very active in the gaming industry. Not only was there much to be learned about recent developments, but also we would have the opportunity to go over old ground more carefully and in greater depth. I felt that with Ken Adams as our inter¬ viewer, the results were sure to be worth the effort.
To the interviewing, Mr. Adams brought experience in oral history combined with expertise in casino gaming management. He was the interviewer for the Mead Dixon oral history, from which came our 1992 book, Playing The Cards That Are Dealt. Adams has been in the gaming business since 1969, and he currently heads a consulting firm and publishes the Nevada Gaming Almanac. We
xiv / Preface
were confident that he would ask the right questions and manage the interviews effectively.
Between June and October, 1992, Adams and Nelson tape- recorded thirty-one hours of interviews, from which UNOHP staff eventually produced a verbatim transcript over twelve hundred pages long. Following my review of dais material, an additional six hours of interviews were recorded in February, 1994, and the transcript grew to fourteen hundred pages. It was not easy to read and understand. Oral discourse can be practically impenetrable when represented in print: empty of gesture, inflection, tone, and o titer nuances that go unrecorded on tape (or for which there are no symbols on the keyboard), transcripts are full of fractured syntax, false starts, repetition, and general disorder. Scholars willing to accept the challenge of reading oral history transcripts often find them to be filled with information, but the form will never reach a wide audience.
From die transcript, I planned to compose a readable narrative in Warren Nelson's voice. But first, as is our practice, we sent the tran¬ script to Mr. Nelson and asked him to review and correct it. Months went by without it being returned. We learned that Mr. Nelson's daughter, Gail K. Nelson, had the transcript and wished to take an active role in preparing it for publication as a narrative. To permit this would be a radical (and, I believed, unwise) departure from our tested and proven system, and I asked that the corrected transcript be returned to die UNOHP immediately. Ms. Nelson and her father then brought to bear their considerable powers of persuasion. Eventually, reluctandy, I yielded. I am glad that I did.
Gail Nelson was of great assistance to me. Without altering content, she edited the huge transcript down to manageable pro¬ portions. She also subsumed the interviewer's questions into the text, brought related passages (many of them widely scattered) togedier into discrete groupings, summarized some material, and isolated a considerable number of fragments that she could not assemble into any orderly arrangement. The quality of her work was excellent. Ms. Nelson saved me a great deal of time, and made a major contribution to the project. I am personally indebted to her. Although she told me many times that she wanted no recognition, it is proper that her name appears on the title page.
From Gail Nelson's work, I composed the first-person account in Warren Nelson's voice that is published as Always Bet on the Butcher.
Preface / xv
Although my goal was a readable narrative, I tried not to force die material I was working with to take that form artificially, and die book's organization reflects this. Throughout, oral history's natural episodic structure is visible in the occasional lack of smoodi transiuon from subject to subject. Such leaps are indicated in the text by a break between paragraphs, and sections that are stand-alone stories are given their own subtitles. The reader will also encounter at least two departures from conventional composition: when Mr. Nelson laughs in amusement or to express irony, I represent this with [laughter]; and ellipses are used not to indicate that material has been deleted, but that a statement has been interrupted or is incom¬ plete ... or there is a pause for dramatic effect.
Within the framework of Warren Nelson's life and career, the subject explored in Always Bet on the Butcher is the development of casino gambling in Nevada over a half-century period beginning in the 1930s; but the book is also rich in gaming industry folklore and traditions. Nelson has stories to illustrate every point he makes, and working with him (and with the text of his oral history) was a pleasure. Although he has risen to become one of the giants of the casino gaming industry, he remains true to his past, true to his origins — he is just one of the guys, and he would be a good companion on a fishing trip or a night on the town.
Mr. Nelson has read my finished manuscript in page-proof form, and affirms that it accurately interprets the content of the interviews from which it was drawn. Still, I hope that there will be some readers who are interested in examining the unaltered record: copies of die tape recordings of the interviews are in the archives of the Oral History Program of the University of Nevada, Reno, where they can be heard by appointment. As with all such efforts, while we can vouch diat Always Bet on the Butcher is an authentic expression of Warren Nelson's remembered past, the UNOHP does not claim that the work is free of error. It should be approached with the same caution that the prudent reader exercises when consulting gov¬ ernment records, newspaper accounts, diaries, and other sources of historical information.
The UNOHP is deeply indebted to William and Barbara Thornton for dieir unswerving support of oral history as a method for inves¬ tigating the past, and their continued generosity to the Oral History Program. This book would not have been possible without their help.
xvi / Preface
Special recognition is also due Joyce Ousley, the Club Cal-Neva's executive secretary. Ms. Ousley was involved in practically every phase of the project. With cheerful efficiency she capably handled countless requests for information, referred us to others who could be of assistance, and in general helped expedite the interviewing and the production of this book.
In preliminary research, reviewing and correcting the transcript, finding appropriate photographs, and designing the book and its dust jacket, we were aided by many people. At the University of Nevada Press, Tom Radko, Nick "Maxwell" Cady, Sandy Crooms, and Cam Sutherland gave valuable advice; and Heather Goulding's recom¬ mendations, assistance, and judgment strongly influenced the design of our book. Lucy Walker and Rick Crippen of the University of Nevada's Department of Creative Services also were very helpful. Renowned Reno photographer Don Dondero provided several excellent photos from his portfolio; and Gail K. and Sarah Nelson, Silvio Petricciani, the Nevada Historical Society's Nita Phillips, the Promus Corporation's Melissa O'Brien, Jef Bauer of Harrah's Club, Harry Upson of Upson Photography, and the Cascade County Historical Society (Montana) found and made available most of the other photos which illustrate the pages of this book.
Many people assisted us in verifying the spelling of names and researching the context of subjects explored in the interviews. (Even with their help, it is likely that we have misspelled a few names, and for this we apologize. It is almost impossible to track down the correct spellings of all.) As usual, the staff of the university's Getchell Library was very helpful, particularly Barbara Butler, Linda Perry, Sharon Prengaman, Susan Searcy, Kathy Totton, and the staff of the reference desk. Off campus, we were assisted by: the Cal-Neva's Maria Adams, Willy Stromer, Al "Nubs" Peroddy, and Mark Garber; Esther DeVries-Nielsen; Susan Jarvis; Diane Midzor of Harrah's Club; and staff of IGT, Western Village, and the city of Reno's Community Development Office. Thanks to all.
ROBERT THOMAS KING University of Nevada, Reno June, 1994
Introduction
AT THE BEGINNING of the Great Depression of the 1930s, eighteen-year-old Warren Nelson lost his job with the Park Hotel in Great Falls, Montana. Work of any sort was scarce, but Nelson did not long remain unemployed — he used a family connection to join a quasi-legal gambling business operating in the back rooms of a local cigar store.
As Warren Nelson set about learning the craft of gambling, the state of Nevada was creating a legal and political environment in which he and many of his colleagues would flourish. In March 1931, with passage of AB 98, Nevada became the only state in the nation that sanctioned the operation of gambling casinos. This presented a great opportunity to professional gamblers working elsewhere, largely outside the law. A number of pioneers in the business — people such as Bill Harrah, Pappy Smith, and Benny Binion — were attracted to Nevada by the prospect of being able to operate without having to bribe offi¬ cials and without being subject to closure every time the political climate changed. Throughout the decades of the thirties and forties, they and others like them drifted in to Reno and Las Vegas, forming the nucleus of an industry that would eventually dominate the state's economy.
In addition to the now-famous names, many other men and women were drawn to Nevada to deal cards, maintain and repair slot machines, write keno tickets, or otherwise work in support of casino gambling. In Montana Warren Nelson learned how to set up and operate a Chinese lottery game called keno, and in 1936 a fellow Montana gambler who had relocated to Reno asked him to come and put a keno game in John Petricciani's Palace Club. Keno certainly wasn't new to Nevada in 1936, but, as he was to do many
xviii / Introduction
times in many different areas over the next fifty years, Nelson refined the concept, and introduced a game that was more exciting and more successful than any that had previously been seen locally. By doing so he effectively launched what would become a remarkable career.
The Second World War brought astonishing changes to Nevada and her nascent gambling industry. During the war important military installations in the vicinity of Reno and Las Vegas carried huge payrolls. They provided a customer base of many thousands of young men from all over the country — men with money in their pockets and an urge to gamble. The state's casinos grew, prospered, and multiplied. Following the war, as the national economy boomed, more families could afford vacation trips, and Americans in great numbers took to the road in their automobiles. The challenge to casino operators was to learn how to build and operate places that would attract these tourists. What amenities did they want? What services did they expect? What kinds of games would they gamble oa? And with so many more customers, how could the integrity of the games be protected?
In the 1930s a typical casino might have had five or six table games, from twenty to a hundred slot machines, a cafe, and possibly a few hotel rooms. Investments and bankrolls of twenty to fifty thousand dollars were enough to get an owner/operator started. The typical casino in 1994 has hundreds of table games, thousands of slot machines, five to ten restaurants, shopping, recreational areas (such as golf and bowling), major amusement attractions, and thousands of hotel rooms. The cost of building these megaproperties is measured in hundreds of millions of dollars, and the operating bankrolls in the millions.
What led to growth of this magnitude? There is no simple answer. Developments in transportation, changes in social mores, and the pragmatism of politicians who recognized a powerful special interest when they saw one were certainly factors. But most important was the evolving fairness of the games. In the beginning, many joints were only marginally honest — operators did everything possible to win, and players were thought of as suckers. This was reflected in the custom of calling operators "gamblers," while their customers were "players," and sometimes even "marks": the product was more hype and salesmanship than it was content and substance. Today, the
Introduction / xix
integrity of the games is protected by strict regulation and excellent supervision. "Suckers" are now "Very Important Persons." valued customers, and the games are structured to give customers more value for every dollar wagered. The key elements are looser slot machines,1 bigger prizes, sports betting, and innovative table games. Customers have also come to expect great service and bargains on food, rooms, and entertainment.
The evolution from "joints," owned and operated by gamblers, to today's "gaming entertainment centers" run by trained professional managers was lengthy — but by the 1960s the casino owner no longer kept his bankroll in his back pocket; he no longer dealt or supervised the games, or counted the money, or painted the walls; and he no longer personally hired all employees, greeted high rollers, and chased down thieves who had been caught in the act. Stricter regulation by the state, the need for ever-larger amounts of capital, and the sheer size of the operations were forces for change. Reflecting its movement toward the respectable mainstream of American business, casino gamblers began calling their business "the gaming industry."
Warren Nelson is undeniably an operator who was influential in the evolution of casino gaming. While he was rarely the primary source, he was often an early and important participant in inno¬ vations and changes that brought great success to the industry. Nelson was always on the lookout for better ways to operate, to attract customers, and to satisfy them — quick to recognize a good idea, he was never reluctant to try one, modify it, refine and improve it.
Through most of his career Nelson has believed in a simple principle: Give the players the best bet (lowest odds for the house) that you can while still making a profit, and they will play longer, leave satisfied, and come back bringing their friends — it makes better business sense for a casino to average small wins on millions of bets than to average large wins on only a few hundred. That philosophy fueled the dramatic growth of the Club Cal-Neva. It is also at the heart of the phenomenal success of casino gaming in the state. The story of Warren Nelson's personal journey, from his start as a
1 See the appended Glossary of Gambling and Gaming Terms for a definition of this and all other inside jargon appearing in this book.
xx / Introduction
"gambler" to his current position as a respected casino operator, be read as a metaphor for the nse of Nevada's gaming industry.
KEN ADAMS Reno, Nevada June, 1994
Part
One IN MONTANA
1
"Always Be Good to Your Father"
I'M A GAMBLER. Deep inside I believe that every bet I make will be a winner, and every chance I take is worth die risk. There were times, particularly in my youth, when luck was all I had, but luck always carried me through.
Rasmussen Nelsen, who was my grand¬ father, came to the United States from Den¬ mark by sailing ship. He landed in San Fran¬ cisco, and when the Civil War broke out he joined die Union army. That was when our family name became "Nelson" — the officer who signed him up spelled it that way on die enlistment papers.
During the war Grandfather worked out of the Black Hills of South Dakota, hauling freight to Cheyenne in big wagons pulled by four to six horses. He was attacked by Indians several times, and once was shot through the jaw with an arrow. This left a scar that he covered with a long beard for the rest of his life. He also took a rifle ball through one knee, and that crippled him a litde.
After the Civil War, Grandfather Nelson went back to Denmark, married, and returned to the United States with his new wife. My grandparents were granted a homestead close to die little town of Summit, near John Day in the Blue Mountains of Oregon. There they built a log-and-clapboard house, setded down and had three children: Lawrence (my father), Emma, and Guy — all tough people who lived rough and tough lives. Guy, the youngest, was eventually killed in a bar fight when he was in his forties.
Oregon was great, wild country then. When Emma was about four years old she got lost in the woods while on a family picnic, and for days everybody was out looking for her. They found her in a huckleberry patch, eating berries. On the other side of the bush was a
4 / ALWAYS BET ON THE BUTCHER
black bear who was also eating huckleberries, [laughterl It always made a great story that she was dining with a bear when they found her. When Emma grew up she worked in logging camps near her home as a cook. She was a big woman — six feet tall, and about one hundred and seventy-five pounds — and from what I heard, she could hold her own with die lumberjacks. Nobody gave her much trouble, [laughter]
My father, Lawrence, was the oldest of die children, and he couldn't get along with his fadier, who was big, tough, and mean. When Dad was thirteen my grandfather beat die hell out him one day, so he just left and didn't return unul much later in his life. He went to working in the threshing crews, travelling through fami country cutdng and threshing wheat during harvest time. The threshing machines were driven by steam engines, and they were pretty primitive, and there were many accidents — men could be burned by die steam, or caught and maimed in the equipment. My father's later interest in the labor union movement may have grown from what he witnessed during this time.
Threshing crews were always accompanied by a special cook wagon, and that was where my father learned to cook. After leaving the crews he went to work at the Saint Francis Hotel in San Francisco as a sous chef under the famous Chef Victor, after whom the restaurant at the top of the Saint Francis was named. At eighteen, he was very young to hold that kind of position. In the earthquake of 1906 the Saint Francis Hotel burned down, and Dad went back up to the Northwest, finally setding in Great Falls, Montana. A few years later, at the age of twenty-three, he became the chef of the Park Hotel on Central Drive, the biggest hotel in Great Falls.
My mother, 'Bertha Meisenbach, was from a big family that had immigrated from Luxembourg. They all spoke German, and diey setded in a German community in the farmlands outside St. Louis, where my mother was bom in 1888. When Mother's father died, her mother continued to run their small farm all by herself.
At the age of seventeen or eighteen, my mother moved to Great Falls, following many aunts, uncles, and cousins who had previously made die move. It was a very close-knit group. She started working as a waitress in a litde off-beat place outside of town called die Minneapolis Restaurant, where the German people hung out.
Emma, Guy, and Lawrence Nelson, ca. 1890s ‘ . . all tough people who lived rough and tough lives. ”
Bertha Meisenbach Nelson, ca. 1915 “She was a great mother, who always stuck up for me and took me a lot of places. ”
"Always Be Good to Your Father" / 5
Although my parents never discussed their romance with me. I assume they must have met at this time, since my dad was a cook and my mother a waitress. They married sometime around 1910, and I was bom January 19, 1913.
My mother was a very pretty woman — big, tall, stately-looking; almost exactly like my daughter . . . maybe a little different in temperament, but an awful lot alike. She was a great mother, who always stuck up for me and took me a lot of places. She took me to visit family in St. Louis while my dad was away in the Marine Corps during the First World War. That fall I remember farmers getting together at my grandmother's place. They set up long tables under the trees, and a fire was going under a big pot of boiling water. Then hogs were brought in and slaughtered. Maybe ten or fifteen guys would stand at the tables as if at an assembly line, each one with a particular job. They would take the blood out, move the pigs down the line, and cut the hams off. They made headcheese and blood sausage, and smoked the ham and bacon in their own smokehouses. Every bit of the hog was used.
The great flu epidemic hit St. Louis while we were there. Thousands of people were dying all over the United States, but tire epidemic was particularly bad in the Midwest; and although I didn't catch the flu, my mother and all her relatives did. It was in the wintertime, and the cold was devastating. The sick adults would let me crawl into bed and cuddle up with them because it was so cold. Everyone was so sick they couldn't even get up to load the coal furnace, and there was nobody but me there to help them.
I remember looking out the window and seeing a wagon being driven down the street with three men on it. One man drove, and the other two went along from house to house taking out the dead people and loading them onto the wagon. The bodies were all frozen stiff, and they stacked them in like cordwood. When they got to the end of the street, the wagon was full.
Serious illness was just a part of life back then due to the lack of modern medicine, particularly for people who lived out in the country and simply didn't have access to treatment. Before I was bom my dad had contracted scarlet fever and been sent to a "pest house," a dreadful place outside of town where people with contagious diseases such as diphtheria, scarlet fever, or smallpox were quar¬ antined. He damn near died there.
6 / ALWAYS BET ON THE BUTCHER
After visiting in St. Louis, my mother and I returned to Great Falls. Shortly after our arrival home Mother became ill with some kind of infection that they called "blood poisoning." She was down in bed, very sick, and she knew she was dying. She would call me into her room every day, and I would sit on her bed, and she would hold my hand and tell me everything about life that she wanted me to know and remember. "Now, I don't want you to cry, Warren," she said one day. "I'm going away. I want you to think about me, but I don't want you to cry. Remember always to be good to your father."
That same day contests for children were being held in Paris Gibson city park, across from our house. A bunch of little piglets were turned loose, and whoever first caught and held a piglet won. Well, I caught the first pig, but some older kids rolled me over and took it away from me. Naturally, I was devastated. I ran back to my mother lying in bed and told her what had happened. "When your Dad gets back, he'll buy you a pig," she said. Within a few days, my mother died.
Dad returned from the Marine Corps shortly after my mother died. I was riding my tricycle, and I saw this great big guy wearing a Marine Corps uniform coming down the street. He reached out and snatched me off that tricycle, threw me up in the air and hugged me. It just scared the hell out of me, because I didn't know who he was. Then I can remember going to my mother's funeral, and not crying as she had asked.
2
On the
Eden
Ranch
MY DAD WENT BACK to work as a chef, cooking for long hours and making little money. He was unable to take care of me properly, so my mother's cousin, Lena Meisenbach Bell, and her husband George took me to live with their family, which had cattle ranches in Eden and Hysham. George Bell came to pick me up, and Hysham became my home until the family returned to its Eden property about a year later.
Lena and her husband had two boys and four girls, one of whom, Alta, was my age. The Bells were great, loving people. A month or two after my mother's death, another of her cousins died, leaving two children, Ned and Ivo. Aunt Lena took them in too, adopting all three of us and creating a family of eleven altogether. At the Hysham ranch all of us children slept in a little lean-to built next to the log cabin, which had two rooms and a dirt floor. After about a year there the family moved to the Eden homestead which had been purchased from Lena's parents.
The main house at Eden was built of logs, to which siding had later been added. There were three large rooms downstairs, and four bedrooms upstairs. In the kitchen there was a coal stove, and a fancy potbellied stove heated the living room, but there was no heat in our bedrooms upstairs except for the chimney pipes that went through two of the rooms. On cold winter nights we would heat bricks in the kitchen stove and bring them upstairs to our beds; then in the morning we would hurry downstairs to put on long underwear and get dressed. Sometimes blizzards were so bad that a rope was strung from the house to the bam so that we could go out to feed tire animals without getting lost.
There was a single bathroom, which had a tin bathtub with a heater, but no toilet. We
8 / ALWAYS BET ON THE BUTCHER
took baths on Saturday nights with rainwater from the cistern, but all the other water that we used in the house was hauled uphill from a spring about a half mile away. The dirty bathwater would be drained out into an area where wormwood grew, a bitter plant used to brew wonnwood tea, which was a kind of cure-all.
Another small house, referred to as the "other house," was on the property. It was originally for Lena's parents, but they were unable to live in it due to illness. The "other house" was built of stone, and downstairs there was one large room plus a cooler room, where they kept the eggs, milk, and cream. Upstairs there were two bedrooms which were sometimes occupied by hired hands.
I lived at the Eden ranch until 1921. There were no boys in the family near my age, so my cousin Alta became my closest playmate. Alta was always called "Chubby" by her family, but since I wanted her to be a boy, I started calling her "Chuckie." [laughter]
"What if' was one of the fantasy games that we used to play together as we walked along the creek on our way to school.
"Hey, Chuckie, what if there was a pony walking down this creek?"
"And what if he had a saddle?"
"What if he had a saddle with some saddle bags?"
"What if those saddle bags had a lot of money in them?"
"Well, then, how would we spend that money?" And the game would continue.
All kinds of animals, domestic and wild, lived around tire ranch, and we'd catch the wild ones, like gophers and magpies, and try to tame them. In those days people weren't as kind to dogs and cats as they are now — they had to catch their own food, or they were given boiled wheat to eat.
One year here was an overabundance of gophers, and a neighbor, John Pilgrim, offered a penny a tail for all the gophers we could drown in heir holes. Instead of drowning hem, Alta and I made a house for hem out of grapefmit crates and kept some as pets. When he adults found out, hey made us get rid of them. Alta and I have remained very close throughout he years, and she has become a true sister to me.
Lena and George Bell, who took Warren in following the death of his mother. “The Bells were great, loving people. ”
A grown up Alta Bell, who had been Warren’s playmate on the Eden Ranch. “Alta and I would sometimes sneak a bucket full of sugar, and sit under the table and eat it straight. ”
On the Eden Ranch / 9
We lived primitively, but we had a healthy diet, and my aunt was a very good cook. She made our bread out of ground whole wheat flour, and it was just as black and good as it could be. We never bought groceries (they were too expensive), but Aunt Lena did a lot of canning. We had plenty of butter and cream, and there was always a kettle of boiled wheat on the stove; it would cook all day until it got mushy and glutinous, and we'd heat that wheat up and eat it with thick cream. Another staple of our diet was sauerkraut, which was kept in great supply in a big barrel. So many Germans had settled in the Eden area that it was known as "Sauerkraut Valley." [laughter! Although there wasn't much fresh fruit, things like dried prunes, apricots, and raw peanuts were always out on the table. We ate no meat except when the threshing crews came through to cut our wheat. Then we'd get a side of pork or chickens to feed the threshers if they were lucky.
My aunt and uncle didn't believe in eating candy, as they were followers of Bemarr Macfadden, a natural foods advocate who published a popular health magazine of the times, Physical Culture. We did have an ice-cream maker, however, and when a big hailstonn struck we would scoop up handfuls of the icy hail to put in the ice cream maker. It was a really big deal to get to turn its crank, and the older girls wouldn't let me touch it.
Alta and I would sometimes sneak a bucket full of sugar, and sit back in a dark comer under the table and eat it straight. We were crazy for that sugar! My aunt would make cupcakes and good, sweet stuff like that when we had guests; but being out in the country, we didn't have guests too often. As a consequence, we were just sugar- hungry all the time. One time Helen, my older cousin, made five lemon pies with whipped cream on top instead of meringue; I ate four of them all at once and got sick, [laughter]
We had twenty-five to thirty milk cows on the ranch, and we sold their cream, delivering it to the creamery in a two-wheeled cart drawn by a saddle horse. An adult would drive the cart to town to pick up mail and deliver the cream, and on creamery day the neighborhood kids (six or seven of us) would meet and ride to Eden in the cart with a ten-gallon cream can tied up on a seat. If any of us had a nickel or a penny, we'd buy jawbreakers or lemon drops, penny candies.
10 / ALWAYS BET ON THE BUTCHER
Living on the ranch was my first experience with discipline and chores. One of my earliest chores was to ride out and bring in the cows. Sometimes I'd spot a covey of prairie chickens and race my pony back to the ranch to get my uncle. We'd take a team of two horses to pull the hayrack, and we'd circle around those prairie chickens, which were so damned dumb you could just sit up on the hayrack and shoot their heads off. My aunt could cook them up so good, I just loved them. Hunting is one of the great joys in my life, and that's when I first started.
When I was ten they tried to teach me to milk cows, but milking looked like the worst job in the world to me. I'd milk a little bit, then I'd reach under and pinch that cow's tit real hard, and she'd kick me and the stool and the bucket over. Finally it was decided that I wasn't cut out to be a milker, so I was never pushed to do it.
As for other chores, I could pitch hay and run the stacker; and I could ride the hayrack and drive the rake, which for speed was pulled by saddle horses, because they were light. You had to whip the horses to make them go fast, and then you would trip a device to make the rows of hay straight. But the worst job was herding sheep. God, they were awful! It was hard to keep a hundred sheep together, and if you lost one, you got into big trouble.
In springtime the sheep shearers would come through. They'd clip the sheep and tie their wool into bundles. Then a big wool sack about twenty feet deep and four feet in diameter was hung from the bam rafters, and the wool was tossed up and dropped into the sack. One person had to get in the sack and tramp the wool down as it was dropped in. You had to pack that wool down real tight in the corners of the sack; and it was hot in there and smelly from the manure and grease that clung to the wool, but you couldn't get out until the bag was stuffed.
Although these chores weren't any fun, they helped me a lot with discipline. You had to do things whether you wanted to or not, and I helped with everything.
I went to Meisenbach School, a little country school named after my mother's family. It was one room, about fifteen by twenty feet, and there were only six students — four girls and two boys. When I started I was tire youngest, in the second grade with Alta, who was six months older than me.
On the Eden Ranch / 11
We went to school from about eight in the morning until three in tile afternoon, five days a week. If there was no snow, we walked, but during those long, cold, snowy winters, my uncle would often hitch up a team of horses and pull us to school in a sled. He'd put a bunch of straw in the sled and cover us up with buffalo robes, and go out of his way to pick up the other kids.
There was a wood stove in the school, and the teacher, Miss Dewsock, would get to school on her horse a little earlier than the students to start the stove. Miss Dewsock was young, just out of school, and very dedicated. Children from three families were attending the school, so she stayed with each family for three months of the school year for a total of nine months. Teachers got room and board plus a very small monthly salary.
I never really studied, but I learned a lot from listening, because the teacher would go from one grade to the next in the classroom and you had to listen. You were privy to all of it, so you could be in the second grade and damn near get an eighth grade education if you just sat there and listened. We learned one subject at a time — writing, reading, geography, and then you had question-and-answer periods.
I could always read well, but there wasn't very much to read at the ranch, and there wasn't much time to read because we were always working during the day. At night you could use a Coleman lantern, but it was damned hard to read by. There were so many people in those days who never had the chance to learn what they should have learned, because there just wasn't an opportunity. What you learned was practical stuff like how not to milk a cow, how to pitch hay, and how to shoot a gun.
The only other boy in the Meisenbach School was in the fifth grade, and he was what was known as a bond boy. (Bond children were orphans that ranchers would take in to do work, but they wouldn't adopt bond children.) The other kids in the school were older girls, and the bond boy and I used to tease them. One day we found a nest of baby mice in the school bam where we kept the horses, and we put the babies in our pockets. After we got in from recess, we put one of those pink, wiggly things on the floor, and the girls just screamed and screamed, [laughter] So the bond boy and I had to stay fifteen minutes after school every day for a whole month.
12 / ALWAYS BET ON THE BUTCHER
We were always teasing die girls. During the summer after die haying was done I had a lot of free time, and I would spend all day playing in the creek near die house. I'd walk up and down that creek all day long, just fooling around. There were a lot of frogs in the creek, and one day some girls I knew, cousins that I admired, decided it would be a good idea for us to catch some and to cook frog legs for dinner. I caught about sixty or seventy frogs, all pretty good sized, and we cut dieir legs off and skinned diem. My aunt wouldn't let us in the house widi diem, but we were able to get a big frying pan and some grease from her.
We built a fire for cooking in the fireplace in the back yard, and since I had caught so many frogs, I assumed I would be helping to cook the legs. But the girls said, "No, no, no! Get away. You can't cook!" They just pushed me away, [laughter] So I took the frog bodies and went off by myself and took out all the eyes; and when the girls weren't looking, I direw eyes in the frying pan with die legs.
About halfway through the meal one of the girls said, "What's this?"
"Oh, that's one of the eyes," I said. I got to eat all die frog legs, [laughter]
Life on the ranch was great, and most people who were raised in the Eden area consider it to be their home no matter where they ended up settling. Every year I still journey back to Montana in my motor home to hunt, fish, and just enjoy the scenery. Alta wrote a poem about our Eden home when she was a little girl:
Night has fallen,
The stars are gleaming,
I feel so lonely, and I'm dreaming,
Dreaming of my Eden home,
And the prairie I used to roam.
3
Times
Were
Tough
ONE DAY WHEN I was about nine years old, my father came out to the ranch and told me, "I'm going to get married and you're going to have a new mother. I want you to be good to her, and she'll be good to you."
My stepmother, Margaret, was only nine¬ teen when my father married her, and she acted her age . . . drove a car wild and fast like a kid. She was a beautiful woman, about five foot six and very slim, and she took good care of herself. Margaret had had a tough time before she met my dad. She was bom in Oklahoma, and her father died when she was very young, leaving her mother with four girls and a boy to raise. They all picked cotton to make ends meet. When Margaret was fourteen she married a guy who was part Indian, and gave birth to my stepsister Frances; but she soon divorced him and moved to Spokane. Unable to make a living there, she moved to Great Falls, where she met and married my dad.
Margaret was hard working, and although I had learned the basics of chores and disci¬ pline at die ranch, I really learned a lot about domestic work from her. I helped wash and clean everything around the house, and I would help her with the laundry, which was done in a big copper ketde on a stove in the basement. I'd lift the clothes out of the hot water with a wood stick and put them through a hand wringer, which was easy for me because I was strong.
With my stepmother's help I became a good cook, and when I was about twelve years old I cooked an entire Thanksgiving dinner for a family whose mother had died. Margaret sent me over to cook for them, and I made turkey, mashed potatoes, candied sweet potatoes, brussels sprouts, gravy and dressing. It was just as good a dinner as you
14 / ALWAYS BET ON THE BUTCHER
could cook, and I did it. I probably still could, but my wife is too good a cook for me to try it now. [laughter]
My stepmother was a great woman, and she had a hell of a lot to do with shaping my character. She was very strict, and was opin¬ ionated about a lot of things; but she was good to me and good for me, and whatever she told me to do, I did it. I can never thank her enough for what she taught me and for how strongly she disciplined me. However, she treated Frances, her real daughter, just die opposite. She was very partial to her, and, being younger and being a girl, Frances just got away with everything and got no discipline at all. Frances and I never did get along.
When I was about nine or ten, things were real tough for us. My dad was working only part-time, and he had a whiskey still in die basement, making moonshine to supplement income. Margaret would deliver it. It was a way of staying on their feet. Times were tough, and we didn't have a hell of a lot, although we did have a car and always wore good clothes.
In Great Falls I entered Lincoln School, starting in the fourth grade. Lincoln was so different from that small country school in Eden! Instead of six kids of different ages in the same room, there were thirty or forty kids all the same age, half girls and half boys. I had no idea how to relate to these kids — I had never even seen a baseball, much less played the game; I had never played football or marbles; and I had never seen a game of hopscotch.
At first I tried teasing the boys at Lincoln like I had teased the girls at my old school, but every time I did that, some kid punched me in the nose or gave me a black eye. I thought I was so smart! I had a squirt gun with a rubber bulb on it, which I filled with ink and took out to die playground. A big farm kid named Garvin Matts was wearing a nice white shirt, so I squirted so much ink on his back that he could feel it soaking dirough. He just beat die hell out of me for that, breaking my nose and splitting my ear. He pounded me!
When I was about thirteen all the neighborhood kids formed football teams, and we held games in Gibson Park. My team was known as die "Deer Pen Demons." Once I got in a fight with a kid on another team, and knocked him down several rimes, but I wound up with four broken fingers, two on each hand. The doctor bound them to big, unwieldy, wood splints. Both my hands were useless — I was unable to button my pants or my shirt, and going to the bathroom
Margaret, Frances, Warren and Lawrence Nelson ‘My stepmother has a lot to do with shaping my character. She was very strict.
Stewart Bell
“Whenever he would tease me, I fought back with whatever I could find.
Times Were Tough / 15
and eating were real adventures. But when I got back to school tire next Monday morning, I found out that I'd broken the other kid's jaw, so the whole ordeal did not seem to be in vain, [laughter]
Learning how to get along with kids was a difficult, painful process for me, and it wasn't until liigh school that I really began to feel comfortable with my peers. However, the few friends that I did make as a youngster became life-long friends.
A family named Murphy lived across the alley from us — nine boys and three girls. I more or less became a part of that family, and I spent a lot of time with them, particularly the three oldest children, Florence, Joe, and Owen, who was my age. I was especially fond of Owen, and remained so until his death in 1992.
The parents, dirt poor Irish, were good friends with my parents. Old man Murphy was a bricklayer and a drunkard, and when he'd blow his paycheck my dad would send over a sack of potatoes, milk, and fresh elk meat.
From the age of fourteen I used to go elk hunting with my dad, who may have been the best elk hunter in the state of Montana. He was strong and sure, a very good shot who could walk all day, and he spent a lot of time tracking elk and studying their habits. Although he always had a job, elk meat for our table really supplemented his paycheck, and this was important during those tough times. 1 learned to love elk meat, which was good, because we hardly knew what beef was. [laughter]
Of course, back then there were no freezers. The ice man just came and delivered a block of ice, or you could leave your meat at the ice house that was run by my one of my dad's friends. He would butcher the meat, wrap it with your name on it, and store it in a big freezer in the abandoned ammonia plant. We would go to the ice house twice a week to get meat. They would also freeze vegetables or anything else you wanted.
On weekends in town, our mother would give Frances and me fifty cents to go to the movies. It cost ten cents apiece to get in, and you could get a milkshake for fifteen cents. We squandered every cent. They had a serial called "Pearl White and Plunder" at the Alcazar theater. Every Saturday they'd stop the film at a real wild, crucial point, and continue it die next week, when we'd just fight to get back in there to see die movie and drink milkshakes.
16 / ALWAYS BET ON THE BUTCHER
Even though I was living in Great Falls. I continued to spend summers out on the Eden ranch. When I was ten, my oldest cousin Stewart drove in to town to pick me up and take me to the ranch for the summer. I had just bought a new puppy for fifteen cents, and was real excited about taking him out there with me. On the way, Stewart stopped tlie car and said, "Warren, do you see that rabbit out there?"
"Yeah, I see that rabbit."
"Well, do you think that dog of yours would chase that rabbit?"
"Sure, he would." When the dog took off after the rabbit, Stewart drove away, and I never saw my dog again.
Stewart and I became pretty close, but he was mean to liis sister, mean to his father and mother, and he was mean to me. I wouldn't stand for it. Whenever he would tease me, I fought back with whatever I could find — a rock, a stick or a club.
Stewart lorded it over the other children, and he'd even lash them with a blacksnake whip that he carried. Once he discovered some orphaned baby birds that I was raising, and when he saw them opening their mouths to be fed, he dropped little rocks down their throats, which killed them. He was just inherently mean, and as time went on, he got meaner.
Stewart was about eleven years older than me. He did a lot to help run the ranch, but he became more and more peculiar. He was an absolute, dyed-in-the-wool vegetarian, who seldom even ate bread. In the summertime he'd go out in the garden and pick a head of leaf lettuce, twist the roots off, shake it, pick the caterpillars off, and just sit there and eat that lettuce — nothing on it: no salt, no pepper, no nothing, [laughter] Then he'd reach over, pull up four or five carrots, wipe them off on his overalls, and eat them. Once in a while he'd have a drink of milk. He never married, and he lived that way until he died at eighty-five.
During the summer Stewart and I slept in a bunkhouse away from the house. He had bad asthma, and after pitching hay or being around die horses he would cough all night.
There were a lot of rattlesnakes around in those days. When Aunt Lena went out to pick wild chokecherries, currants, gooseberries, and the purplish serviceberries that grew as big as your thumb, she always carried a club to kill the snakes. And my cousin Caroline —
Times Were Tough / 17
a hot-tempered, strong girl who liked to work with the men — used to kill rattlesnakes with a hayfork.
It was stylish for all the young men to wear rattlesnake-skin hatbands. By the time I was twelve I was a smart-aleck kid. and pretty quick, and I liked to catch rattlesnakes with my bare hands and kill them. To do this, I'd wait until the snake uncoiled, grab it by the tail, and whip it real hard so its head would snap off. If that didn't work, I'd find a fence post or rock and whack its head against it until it was dead.
When I was fifteen, Stewart and I rode thirty miles to pick up some cattle and herd them back along the Missouri River to the ranch. That was a long, tough ride. We had about forty head of cattle, and some calves were bom along the way. When the calves got tired, we stopped until they were able to travel, and while we were resting I saw a big rattlesnake going down a hole. I grabbed its tail to pull it out, when all of a sudden Stewart hit me alongside the head and knocked me down.
"What's the matter?" I asked. "Why did you hit me?"
"Don't you ever do that again. That snake will kill you," he replied. I hadn't realized how big it was . . . maybe ten or twelve rattles. I probably would have gotten bit and maybe killed if I'd taken on that big a snake. It taught me a lesson; I don't grab big ones by the tail anymore, [laughter]
Stewart taught me everything about the ranch, and about horses, cattle, and sheep. That summer he and I took three mares to be bred to a good Morgan stud on a ranch about twenty miles away on Deep Creek, off the Smith River near a great fishing stream. We trailed them on a real difficult path through a deep canyon down to the ranch. When we got there, we learned that the rancher had cut the stud, so there was no way to breed the mares! [laughter] He said, "Well, stay overnight and have dinner anyway."
"No," we replied, "We're going back." We turned right around, with those three mares behind us, and rode all the way back to our ranch. We had had nothing to eat for thirty-six hours. That's just the way it was.
Stewart wasn't big on eating, anyway. One day I was helping him run the hay rake at another of the family's homestead areas, and he forgot to bring anything for us to eat. After we had been working all
18 / ALWAYS BET ON THE BUTCHER
day 1 found an abandoned stone house on the property, looked in the basement where food was usually put to keep it cool, and found six eggs and some lard. I built a fire and cooked an omelet without mixing the eggs. Later I discovered those eggs had been about two years old . . . but we were so hungry that they sure tasted good.
Every once in a while we'd visit Miles City, an old Montana cowboy town of the West. On Saturday nights cowboys from outlying ranches would come to town to get drunk in the bars, and ride their horses up and down main street, full blast, shooting pistols in the air. They weren't trying to kill anyone, but occasionally they'd shoot at each o tiler; usually they were too drunk to hit anything. Nobody bothered them — they were free to drink and raise hell the length of town.
Charlie Russell was the epitome of a rough and tough cowboy.1 He and my dad were friends from 1910 or 1911 until Charlie's death, and I can remember him sitting out in front of die Mint Cigar Store, where I later worked. There were high curbs in those days for the wagons to back up to and load or unload, and the curbs were a comfortable place for people to sit. Famous guys of that era — Will Rogers, Will James, Charlie, and others — would sit on the curb in the summertime, drink beer, and just talk, because it was too damn hot inside. Those colorful old-dmers are very vivid in my memory, and my interest in gambling (they all gambled) probably dates from that period.
On Sundays, Charlie and my dad would go down in the basement and drink wann whiskey before it was flavored with anything, just as it was coming out of Dad's still. Charlie'd bring over a couple of willow hoops with beaver hides on them, and he'd flesh the skins while he and my dad talked and sipped whiskey.
I was told that in the early years Charlie was something of a drunk who would pay his bar bills at the Mint with pictures he had painted. Those paintings would probably be worth millions of dollars today,
1 Charles Marion Russell (1864-1926) was a painter and sculptor of Western scenes and subjects. Born in St. Louis, Russell left for Montana at the age of sixteen to become a cowboy. He eventually launched a career as an artist, established a studio in Great Falls, and became a popular painter of cowboy and Indian life.
Times Were Tough / 19
but a friend of mine later bought the place and sold the paintings for practically nothing. Eventually, the gal that Charlie married straight¬ ened him out and promoted his work.
Charlie's paintings and sculptures became more and more renowned, and he made money and began to travel all over the world. The first fresh pineapple I ever remember seeing or eating was brought to me by Charlie Russell from Hawaii — he came back on a boat, bringing a whole case of pineapples with him. When he was in Europe, he would write to my dad, saying, "Hi, Swede! You can't believe these people over here in London," and he would draw pictures of the Buckingham Palace guards in their funny-looking helmets. It didn't seem like a big deal at the time, but those letters, which are lost, would now probably be worth thousands of dollars.
When I was in the seventh or eighth grade, Charlie Russell died, and we were let out of school for the funeral. Everybody stood on the street and watched that big hearse drawn by four black horses. In cowboy style, Charlie's saddle horse, with the stirrups tied up, trailed the hearse.
4
"You're
Big
Enough if You Think You're Big
Enough"
1 STARTED Great Falls High School in 1926. but I only went a year and a half before I got kicked out. Punching the principal in the nose will get you kicked out of school, [laughter!
Just before school was out for the summer my first year we had Roundup Day. Everybody dressed up like cowboys and Indians, which I thought was pretty neat. I borrowed a six- shooter from Sid Willis, who had been sheriff of Valley County in the eastern part of Montana, and later worked with my dad in the Mint Cigar Store. That pistol, a big .44, had a rosewood handle and came with a holster, and I strapped it on for Roundup Day.
I had gotten ahold of some blanks, and I loaded the pistol with them, and .... I put the gun behind me, and my finger just hap¬ pened to pull the trigger, and WHOOM! That big gun kicked like hell! The principal, Irving Smith, was standing behind me in a white leather Indian outfit with a big headdress, and he got a black powder bum about a foot wide just below his belt. He was very angry, but he didn't do anything to me . . . yet.
The next year I was sitting in study hall, just reading a book while the other kids raised hell. The head of study hall called for the principal because the kids were out of control, and although I wasn't doing anything, Mr. Smith tapped me on the shoulder along with two or three others. When we got to his office I asked, "What's this all about?"
"For raising hell in study hall," he answered.
"I wasn't raising hell. I was reading a book and I didn't do anything."
"Bend over," he said, reaching for his big paddle. I absolutely refused, so he called the manual training teacher and the janitor, who put an ami lock on me and bent me over. I
22 / ALWAYS BET ON THE BUTCHER
told the principal, "Don't you dare hit me," but he gave me kind of a token swat. When they let me go, I punched him in the nose. At that point, he expelled me from school. I didn't care: he was a real officious little guy, and I felt he was just wrong and that I was absolutely right.
My father was angry with me, both because of my expulsion and because I was living a pretty wild life, drinking dandelion or chokecherry wine whenever I could buy it or steal it. He took me up to my room and really chewed me out, yelling, "I ought to knock you down."
"You'd better not try!" I yelled back.
He just walked out.
Dad had quit school when he was in the third grade; nevertheless, he educated himself, and he could read and write well, and he respected the value of an education. He was a real strong union man, and he held key positions in several unions, including the presidency of the Cooks and Waiters union. One Labor Day he spoke to a crowd of more than fifteen hundred. He would gesture and posture, and really make believers out of people . . . and it was clear that they needed unions — Dad was making only about six dollars a day as the chef of a large hotel, and he was working twelve hours a day, seven days a week.
My father was a great leader, no question about it; and to be a great leader, you have to be a bit bull-headed. It was either his way or no way. He was so strong in what he said and what he thought, and I was so strong in what I thought and what I said, that there were some tremendous conflicts between us as I grew up. There was also a lot of love, but it was not a demonstrative love. He would never put his arm around me, preferring just to shake my hand; and although he did things that expressed his love for me, he would never come out and directly praise me to my face. Instead he would tell everyone else how wonderful he thought I was: "Hey, did you hear what Warren's doing now?" Then he would go on to recount all of my achievements.
To this day, no one knows if I'm a Democrat or a Republican; but there was no doubt about my father — he was a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat who could really influence ordinary people. Everyone looked up to him because he could deliver the votes. If my dad
'You're Big Enough if You Drink You're Big Enough" / 23
needed something, he had no compunction about asking for it, which is a trait that I've chosen to emulate in my life. My dad also had a lot of older friends that he admired and from whom he learned a lot.
Dad was a big, strong man, over six feet tall, weighing 225 pounds, and everyone called him the "Big Swede." (They tried to pin the name "Little Swede" on me; thank God it never stuck.) But throughout his life he was afflicted with migraine headaches that were very debilitating. He'd be sick for three to four days, in terrible pain, throwing up and unable to eat. As he entered his sixties the migraines brought about a gradual deterioration, and he just became weaker and weaker until he died in 1972.
My expulsion from high school had made my dad so mad that he didn't speak to me for two years. My stepmother, who had been fighting with Dad about me, finally talked me into going to school in Helena at Mount St. Charles, now known as Carroll College. At the time it was a combined high school and college, with about forty people in high school and more than twice that many enrolled in its college curriculum. I was already working, and making good money, and my dad said I would have to pay my own tuition and fees. That was all right with me.
Mount St. Charles was probably a turning point for me. There I met Sid Smith, who became one of the most important people in my life. Sid was the prefect in my dormitory. He took an interest in me, and he was a very strong, tough disciplinarian. If you did something wrong, he would grab hold of you and rub his rough beard across your face, almost taking skin off. [laughter] Sid was the president of the student body, captain of the football team, and a strong Catholic. He was a real man, and he wanted you to be a man like he was.
My dormitory housed about forty-five of us, and, as prefect, Sid slept in a semi-private tent-like space with curtains all around it. College boys who lived in the donn got to go out on Saturday nights, but they had to be back by midnight. Sid would bring back a milkshake and hamburger for me, and we'd go into his tent and eat and talk.
When I was a junior, Sid became the basketball coach. I was on the team, but I was a tall, skinny, clumsy kid. To prepare me to play the game Sid made me dribble a ball for two months without shooting a basket or playing with the rest of the team. That's all I did
24 / ALWAYS BET ON THE BUTCHER
for two montlis — dribble; but it really straightened me out. More than anything else, getting down low and dribbling the ball taught me good balance. By the time 1 was a senior I was playing first string center. There were only eight kids on our team, but we did pretty well, coming in third at the regional tournament.
The next year, when I started playing football, Bill Jones was tire new coach and Sid was his assistant. Jones said to me, "I heard you're a pretty good basketball player. How would you like to play football for me?"
I only weighed 145 pounds, so I said, "Coach, I don't think I'm big enough."
He looked at me and said, "Son, you're big enough if you think you're big enough. Do you think you're big enough?"
"Yes, sir, I think I'm big enough." So I went out for football. Sid wanted me to be an end because I was six feet tall, so that became my position.
Bill Jones had gone to Notre Dame, where he was a member of the famous team known as the "seven mules and four horsemen." He had a big effect on my life by giving me confidence that I had never had before. As my football coach he always gave me a chance, put me out front and let me try, even though I wasn't a good player. (Jones eventually became die chief judge appointed by President Kennedy for the District of Columbia. He was John Sirica's boss when Sirica was die judge for die Watergate hearing. I had kept in touch with him, and he allowed my wife and me to sit in at one of the hearings.)
We were a very good football team — undefeated, unded, and unscored upon. Our scores were low, but winning scores never¬ theless; good enough to win the state championship, which was a big deal at die time. A newspaper picture of me captioned "Local Boy, Warren Nelson, End for Mount St. Charles" was posted in a Great Falls store window, and I went downtown to see it. While I was looking at it, someone put a hand on my shoulder. It was my dad. "That's a good picture, kid." After our argument over my expulsion from high school, it had been two years since he and I had spoken to one another; and although we stayed closer after that, we continued to butt heads occasionally: we were both pretty stubborn.
'You're Big Enough if You Think You're Big Enough" / 25
Other titan my coaches, the other influential people in my life during this time were the Catholic priests, Norbert Hoff, E. G. Riley, and Father McCormack. They were very dedicated to helping young people, and they kept talking to me about religion and going to church.
Sid was a very strong Catholic. He convinced me to join the church, which I did in my senior year in high school. He stood up for me as godfather when I was confirmed, and I remember tltinking that it might even be a great thing to become a priest.
Sid was one of the strongest and greatest men I have ever known. He took me under his wing as coach, friend, and mentor. Later he became the railroad commissioner of Montana, and next the labor commissioner, always remaining politically active. We were close friends until his death in 1992.
I decided that I would go on to college after graduation from the Mount St. Charles High School, and my dad, who was politically very strong, encouraged me to consider West Point. Senator Walsh told my dad he would give me the appointment if I could pass the qualifying exams. In the interim I registered for the first term in the Mount St. Charles college program, and I told the registrar that I needed a lot of math to prepare for West Point. I was given trigonometry and advanced algebra, but I had no background in these subjects and was in way over my head. In the second or third day of trigonometry, the priest said, "Turn to the chapter concerning cosines."
"What's a cosine?" I asked.
"Didn't you take algebra?"
I told him I hadn't, so he gave me a book and told me to study it. I looked at it that night in my room and realized I had no idea what was going on. I ’took that book and threw it over my shoulder into a comer. It might even be there today, because I never picked it up again, [laughter] As a result, from that September until December, I faked everything in school — got away with it too. [laughter] I probably had a C average coming out of high school, and no grades at all in college, because I didn't go to class. I stayed in the gym instead, playing basketball or handball, and just loved it! Under¬ standably, I decided not to try to go to West Point.
26 / ALWAYS BET ON THE BUTCHER
Discipline was probably the most important tiling I got out of school at Mount St. Charles. When somebody told you to do something, you had to do it; if you were caught doing something wrong, you were punished — sometimes it's necessary to just conform and follow the rules. But academically I didn't really learn much, because I faked it all the way through. I was interested in too many other tilings to pay attention to school.
5
I Was Making So Much Money!
IN MY SOPHOMORE YEAR in high school I had gotten a job as the only bellboy at the Park Hotel, where my father was the head chef. The Park, with about two hundred rooms, was tire biggest and classiest hotel in Great Falls. It was located near the railroad station where everyone came into town, and one of my responsibilities was to meet arriving passengers. When I called out "Park, Park, Park Hotel!" my voice would break; but the bellboy from our competitor, the Rainbow Hotel, was a fat, jolly black man whose deep¬ voiced "Rainbow, Rainbow" was mesmerizing; it would begin to sound like "train bell, train bell."
At the railroad station I would load our guests' baggage into my cart and pull it back to the hotel, and I would get to know them as they walked along with me. A lot of them were salesmen. They would display their wares — suits or whatever — in big rooms in the hotel, and there could be as many as three or four sales rooms going at the same time.
Business was booming, and so was boot¬ legging, because Prohibition was still in effect. People would call me up to their room and say, "Hey, kid, get me a bottle of moonshine!" So that's what I did. You could buy bootleg whiskey for two dollars a pint and sell it for five. Real Canadian whiskey was more expen¬ sive, so bootleggers would put phony seals on some bottles, passing them for Canadian. You could buy that whiskey for five and sell it for fifteen. I was making so much money!
On the graveyard shift I would start at midnight, and by two in the morning my pockets would be full of tip money. My mother sewed canvas pockets into my pants clear down to my knees so I'd have enough room for all tire money. I made two hundred
28 / ALWAYS BET ON THE BUTCHER
dollars a week and more, a tremendous amount then, and that enabled me to pay my own way through Mount St. Charles and buy my own clothes. I would give some money to my mother and other people who needed help, and spend the rest on nice clothes and parties. But I didn't buy a car and never wanted one — it was more fun to sit in the back seat with a girl than it was to drive.
The graveyard shift was tough, particularly in die summer. When I got off at eight o'clock in the morning, I'd try to sleep for a few hours; then I'd get up early and go see a friend of mine, Jack Mullen, who lived with his mother in an apartment house. It was cool up in that apartment, and Jack would go out and get me a quart of Coke, double strength with lime in it, which was almost like taking a "benny." [laughter] On the graveyard shift, I practically lived on Coca- Cola.
C. R. Loutherback, my stepmother's younger brother, came up to Great Falls to visit us when he was about twenty-two. He was a good looking litde guy, about five-foot-six, and it was said that the reason he left Oklahoma was because he looked like Pretty Boy Floyd, whom the authorities were trying to catch for robbing so many banks. Every time C. R. turned around, he was getting picked up. [laughter]
I never learned much from C. R. except how to drink whiskey. When I was a kid, drinking was the smart thing to do. We'd go out in a group, hitting all the boodeg joints, and as time went by I grew wilder and wilder. It's lucky I didn't die from some of my ex¬ periences.
One night I went with C. R. to a litde bootlegging joint where we bought two pints of whiskey. C. R. turned his bottle up and drained it, and dien tossed the empty over his shoulder. "That's the way we drink whiskey in Oklahoma," he said.
"We usually drink ours in Montana the same way," I replied, and drank mine down.
We were going to a dance with a guy who had a car, and we all got in and headed out into the country. All of a sudden, I just went comatose. I didn't pass out, but I couldn't talk, couldn't say a word. I had been seeing a good-looking girl named Zola, who was to meet me at the dance, but I couldn't even get out of the car when we got there. C. R. went on in, and Zola approached him:
"Where's Warren?"
7 bad gotten a job as the only bellboy at the Park Hotel, where my father was the head chef.”
I Was Making So Much Money! / 29
"Well, he's out in the car."
So she came out to get me. I just sat there, paralyzed, [laughter] It scared the hell out of me! And it was the end of my relationship with Zola.
We didn't know it, but the guy who had driven us to the dance had stolen Iris uncle's car to do it. On the way back, at about seventy miles an hour, the car went off the road and we landed in a mud lake. We were stuck bad in mud several inches over the running boards, and still I sat there, unable to talk. The others called a wrecker who agreed to pull us out for fifteen dollars. C. R. knew I was carrying a lot of tip money, so they went through my pockets and took enough to pay the wrecker.
I got to bed at maybe five o'clock in the morning, and didn't get up until it was time to begin my next graveyard shift as a bellboy, still horribly hung over. When I rode the elevator to take a guest up to his room, my stomach felt like it was falling to the bottom of the shaft. I ran down the stairs to the basement restroom to throw up. Someone found me there on my hands and knees, and I was so sick and dehydrated that they took me to the hospital and pumped my stomach out. It might have been the best thing that ever happened to me, because I've never touched a drop of bourbon since. Vodka is my drink now . . . but I never drank anything excessively once I started a family.
When the Depression hit, the bottom fell out of my job as a bellboy. Most of the rooms in the hotel were empty, and the place was as still as a morgue. I wasn't making a quarter a day in tips, so I quit.
About that time my dad and Cal Lewis went into partnership to set up an illegal keno game in the back of the old Mint Cigar Store. Dad bribed several officials to look the other way — two hundred dollars a month for the sheriff, two hundred dollars a month to the county judge, and six hundred for the "licensing" fee.
I asked my dad if I could go to work there, but he didn't want me to. "You're not even twenty-one yet," he said, "and I don't want you in the gambling business, anyway."
Since my dad wouldn't say yes, I went to Cal Lewis. He said, "Your dad told me you might come in, and he doesn't want me to
30 / ALWAYS BET ON THE BUTCHER
give you a job. But . . . what the hell? I'm running the joint. You can come work for me, and I'll take care of your dad."
Cal Lewis was a real character, a frontier gambler. He knew all about the wheel, faro bank, twenty-one, and keno. Cal was close to seventy, a very handsome, imposing man — tall, with a ruddy com¬ plexion and a pink, bald head, ringed with a fringe of pure white curly hair. To cover up the bald spot, he always wore a white cowboy hat. His complete outfit included a white gabardine shirt with a diamond stick pin, cowboy boots and cowboy pants, and on liis little finger a five carat diamond ring, very big and ostentatious. Dressed in this all-white cowboy outfit, he really looked like one of the good guys, [laughter]
Cal was a great politician, and I learned a lot about handling people from him. He would greet everyone who came in, saying, "Hi, partner! How ya doin'? Come on in and we'll have a drink." But he never bought a drink for himself. All day long he'd sit there and drink short beers bought for him by customers, and just put that drink money in the cash register. He made a lot of money that way, and never spent any of it. And he hated a nickel because it wasn't a dime, [laughter]
Even though Cal would take advantage of you, no one ever seemed to get mad at him, he handled people so well. One day my dad came into the Mint and found me trying to learn keno from a young guy named Jimmy Shea. Dad told me to get out, but I said, "I'm going to work here." He went to find Cal Lewis, and Lewis told him, "Leave the kid alone. He can't do any good if he doesn't have a job." So Dad just walked away, and I continued to work there.
Keno, which was originally a Chinese game, was well known throughout the “West. Everywhere you'd go, Chinese could be found running illegal keno games. Some of them had tried to start games in Butte, but their competition, white professional gamblers, would get their games closed up. Then a fellow went in partners with a Chinaman, and when he learned everything he could from him, he kicked him out. The Chinese were looked down upon so much that you could do anything to them and no one would say a word.
I learned how to handle a keno brush and how to write tickets from Jimmy Shea, but when he tried to show me the formulas for the game, I just couldn't understand. So I went to one of my math
I Was Making So Much Money! / 31
teachers, Father Rooney, the assistant to lire president at Mount St. Charles. He had a reputation for being a top mathematician, and when I showed him what I needed, he said, "No problem. That can be figured easily."
"Will you do it for me, Father?"
He replied, "I'll give you the basic formulas, but you'll have to figure everything else out yourself."
I took his formulas over to Butte to talk to the keno men there. Then, with the added input from these guys, I went back to Great Falls, took a roll of butcher paper, laid it on the floor, and began my calculations stretched out on my stomach on the floor, writing with a pencil while scooting backwards. I checked my work over and over to make sure I hadn't made any mistakes.
During that same period a Chinese fellow who used an abacus taught me a lot about keno. I never figured out the abacus, but I learned all the "ways" on a ticket and all of the payouts. And I probably learned more math in those three months than I learned all the way through school, [laughter] Without realizing it, I was also learning a game that would turn out to be the foundation of my career in casino gaming.
6
Dealing Keno at the Mint
THE MINT CIGAR STORE was a pretty high- class place. Its decor was opulent, and included tiled floors, leaded glass windows, solid mahogany billiard tables, velvet curtains, statuary, and frescoes. Western paintings by Charlie Russell were hung on the walls. Cigars were sold up front, where there was also a big lunch counter with stools.
People came from miles around to have lunch — pork or beef sandwiches on big buns with special gravy, thick milkshakes, malted milks, and Coca-Cola. Our customers were doctors, lawyers, firemen, and farmers. Indians were not allowed to come in, and the bums hung out at smaller hotels and boarding places that didn't even serve food.
Three or four poker and pan games, along with the keno, operated in back rooms of the Mint. Since women weren't allowed back there, a circular window for a keno ticket station was cut into the foyer of the ladies' restroom, which was adjacent to the keno room. (Women were permitted to play keno, but not other games.)
We also had a side hall that could hold sixty or seventy people, and girls would put on shows there at night. These were all neat, nice girls — not hustling, but going from town to town just to perform. But some hustling girls would hang around the Mint, too. Cal Lewis always had a woman on his arm — young or old, made no difference to him — and he was real friendly with the working girls, intro¬ ducing them to me, embarrassing the hell out me. [laughter] He would say, "Ladies, I'd like you to meet Warren Nelson. He's quite a man . . . packs a hell of an affidavit, and always deposits more than he withdraws. You can't imagine what he can do for you!" I'd just sit there, hanging my head and blushing.
34 / ALWAYS BET ON THE BUTCHER
A lot of dance bands and entertainers also came through town. Great Falls had the Opera House, a place where Chautauquas were held. Plays and boxing matches were also staged there. People would come from all over the West to see these events, and there were always a lot of performers like singers and dancers around town.
I went to work on the keno game in the back room of the Mint. In the beginning we drew numbers the same way the Chinese did. First we printed numbers 1 through 80 about an inch high on separate slips of oiled paper. Then we cut light rubber tubing into eighty, two-inch cylinders. Before a "race," each slip was rolled and put into a cylinder. All eighty cylinders were dropped into a big dishpan, and while the pan was shaken around, somebody called, "Coming out! Coming out! Make a bet!" Taking the cylinders from the big pan, the dealer then dropped them one at a time into four smaller pans until they were distributed evenly, twenty cylinders in each of four pans.
(The four pan concept was borrowed from the Chinese, the pans representing North, South, East, and West. Similarly, each of the eighty numbers originally represented an element from nature, such as heaven, earth, sun, fire. However, these meanings died with the Americanization of keno, and the numbers became nothing but numbers.)
The numbers of the pans, 1 through 4, were on slips in four bigger cylinders, and one of the players was asked to pick a cylinder. The number in the one he chose was announced, and the twenty numbers contained in that pan were called out as winners. If a mistake had been made and the pan was short a cylinder, one was drawn from the pan that was over; if the announced pan was long, a cylinder would be discarded before the numbers were called.
The sheriff finally told us that our method was illegal. Instead of cylinders and pans we would have to use punchboards (which were legal in Montana) or the game would be closed down. So I had a carpenter build a large, shallow, open-faced case partitioned into eighty square compartments. Then I took big capsules that were used for horse medicine, and put the numbers in eighty of them. These were shaken in a pan and placed randomly in the eighty com¬ partments. Behind each was a small hole through which you pushed
Dealing Keno at the Mint / 35
a rod to tumble the capsules with the twenty winning numbers into a tray below.
At first we called tire game at the same rate as the Chinese — one day game and one night game. But it was just too dull and boring to sit there and wait, so I said, "Let's call one game now and one in an hour," wliich I'm sure was tire first time that the game was called with such speed. Then I said, "What the hell! Let's do it every half hour."
We'd call, "Coming out on the hour, on the half. Who's next?" We'd only get thirty or forty tickets in a half hour, so we decided to call the game every fifteen minutes: "Coming out quarter of, quarter after, on the hour, and on the half." It really got busy then, and sometimes on Saturday we went over the prescribed time.
With two shifts, staying open from ten o'clock in the morning until two o'clock tire next morning, we were doing a hell of a business, writing about a thousand dollars a day with the average ticket being twenty-five cents. I was making eight dollars a day, and I had eight men working for me making six dollars a day. Back then that was big money. Several of the people that I had hired to work for me — Jimmy Brady, Clyde Bittner, Johnny Morris, and Dick Trinastich — became very proficient, and they later were the cadre that I brought with me to open the first keno game in Reno at the Palace Club.
Writing about a thousand dollars a day, we were making over three hundred dollars a day, since the keno game percentage was set at 33 percent. We were paying about fifty dollars a day in wages and six hundred a month for license fees, besides paying out a little bribe money ... a pretty sweet little operation! But all that time, I never saw a tip; I really never learned what tokes were until I dealt in El Cerrito, near San Francisco, during the war.
The Mint would occasionally get closed up for a while due to complaints the sheriff received from people who were either opposed to gambling or were unhappy losers. When the heat died down, we would open up again. It was very sporadic. We would run for a month or two, then get closed down for anywhere from a month to four months . . . until our people put on enough pressure, usually in the form of bribes, to get the sheriff to allow us to open again.
During down times I'd sometimes go fishing out at a place in the country called The Gumdrop Inn that used to be owned by the Isaak
36 / ALWAYS BET ON THE BUTCHER
Walton League, a conservation club. Six or seven of us from work would go out to this log cabin that was supposed to be closed. Right next to die cabin ran a big creek filled with fish, and there were a lot of grouse to shoot. We'd get about twenty dollars' worth of groceries and live off the land. If we got lazy, we could just drive like hell down the road, run over a few turkeys, throw them in the back of the car and have turkey dinner that night, [laughterl
Another time when the keno game was closed down, I got a job as a steam fitter's helper. It was a terrible job, twelve hours a day, making me just dead tired at the end of every day. My boss was a little Swede, about five feet tall, who was contracted by the school district to change over their furnaces from coal to gas. It was in the hot summertime, and I'd have to go into the fireboxes of the furnaces to clean them out so they could be fitted with gas fixtures. What a filthy, crummy, dirty job!
However, the worst job in the steam fitting business was having to thread pipe by hand. Ordinarily, we'd use an electric mule that would turn the pipe for threading, but one day the electric mule broke and we had to use a mechanical threader that you turned by hand. The pipe would get so hot from the friction that you couldn't touch it! Finally my misery ended when the boss told me he didn't have any more work and would have to lay me off. That was the end of my stint as a steam fitter. I decided then that I wasn't going to become a plumber, [laughter]
Between the reopenings of the keno game and my different jobs I always seemed to have plenty of time to party; and although I was still living at home with my folks, I rented an apartment just to have a place to hold parties. We'd get a gallon of 180 proof grain alcohol and mix it in the bath tub with three gallons of distilled water and juniper berries for flavoring, making four gallons of gin. Once we were sitting around playing hearts, and I poured a glass of straight alcohol, set it on the table and said, "The next guy who gets the bitch (the queen of spades) drains that glass."
Sure enough, within a few minutes I got the bitch. One of my friends pointed to the glass and said, "Now drink it!"
"I can't drink that," I protested, "it'll kill me!"
"Well, are you a man of your word?"
Dealing Keno at the Mint / 37
So I drank the whole thing, but my head stayed clear. "Hey, that's not bad. In fact, it's pretty good!" I filled the glass again and kept on drinking. The third glass never reached my lips — I just keeled over backwards and passed out. [laughter]
Prohibition ended in 1933, and every little joint that had been bootlegging started selling 3.2 beer. All of a sudden, every place became a cigar store with all kinds of illegal games going on in the back rooms — high-low dice games, twenty-one, punch-card keno, pan and poker games. Gambling stayed undercover in Great Falls, but Butte was wide open. Butte was a copper mining town, and all of the miners wanted to play. They made about five dollars a day, working on commission, with the big shots making up to eight dollars a day, depending upon how much they brought out. You had to know someone to get a mining job, and you had to pay them to get it. There was a lot of corruption in those days, and it was common practice to bribe the mining foreman in order to get a job.
As prohibition ended, Cal Lewis and a man named Amos Wagstaff became partners in the Star Cigar Store, running illegal games in the back. In the meantime Cal retained his piece of the Mint, where he added games of twenty-one. I learned that game at the Mint, and transferred back and forth between there and the Star, dealing two- dollar-limit twenty-one.
(Migrant Mexican beet pickers would come through and gamble at the Star. Many of the Mexicans, who were good gamblers and would play all day, smoked marijuana. They'd roll up that stuff in cigarette papers and smoke and laugh all day long. I tried it once, but it didn't do much for me.)
Eventually, Cal and Amos had a falling out. They worked different shifts and always made sure that they missed each other coming and going. The drawer on my twenty-one game usually held anywhere from $150 to $200; and when leaving, Cal and Amos, each operating independently of the other, would come over, open my drawer and take out two twenties — one for themselves and one for me. At first I thought they were just being nice to me. Then I realized that each was trying to shut me up; neither one knew what the other was doing. They had been partners for so long that they thought alike and stole alike, [laughter]
38 / ALWAYS BET ON THE BUTCHER
Cal had told me, "Now, I know you're not going to steal my money, kid, but watch tire bartenders: those sons of bitches are tire same as bank robbers. Remember, always watch my money and keep an eye on the bartenders." But sometimes you have to watch your partner too. I have seen partners try to get the best of one another ... it just doesn't happen in the same ways it used to, because controls are tighter, and today partners don't have that kind of access to the counting rooms and the money.
Following another closure of the keno game I got a job working in the county assessor's office as an assistant for about four months until I was promoted to deputy county assessor. It was very boring work, just copying figures down on paper, but it paid well. The assessor, Cap Burton, who was planning on retiring, asked me, "Why don't you run for my job as county assessor? You're a member of the Young Democrats. You could do it." I was unsure, partly because I was so young, and partly because the job was so boring. Sitting there with a pencil, copying down "the northeast comer of the south¬ west . . ." was just not my cup of tea. My dad encouraged me to run, and he also said he could get me a job as a fireman if I would prefer that. But the thought of sitting around a fire station all day waiting for a fire sounded even worse. I put in my application to be a candidate for the county assessor's office.
One of the judges who had received pay-off money from our illegal keno games called me in to see him. He took me into his chambers and started talking about the candidate opposing me. "Warren," he said, "I'll help you run for office, but we've got to knock this guy out of the box." I told him I wouldn't do anything dirty, because the guy was a friend of mine. But the judge was insistent, and I walked but of his office thinking how dirty the business of politics was.
Shortly after that I got a call from a gambler I knew named Francis Lyden. He was working in Reno, and he asked me to come there to open a keno game for him. I went to my dad and said, "I've decided I'm not going to run for the assessor's office. I want to go to Reno and work for Francis Lyden."
"Are you sure that's what you want to do, son?"
"Yes. That's what I want to do."
Dealing Keno at the Mint / 39
"Well, better an honest gambler than a crooked politician. I really don't want you to go, but if that's what you want .... Don't fool around with the wrong kind of women, and don't blow all your money gambling. Just use good judgment."
|
7 |
^ , r, . FRANCIS LYDEN got his Cool Francis , , , , start in the gambling busi- y ness in Butte, working with his brother Joe for their |
|
Players and |
stepfather, Pete Notten, who owned a little joint called the Crown Bar. Francis and Joe were at the Crown when I was working at tire Mint Cigar Store, and we became acquainted |
|
Mobsters |
when 1 went up there to observe the keno game they were running. Both of the brothers were very bright and meticulous; there was no slam-bang with them. Everything had to be absolutely perfect — a certain way to push the roulette checks, a certain way to hold the keno brush, and a certain way to hold the deck. Everything had to be exactly right. Francis was the personification of "cool." He had pale blue eyes, spoke in a real low voice, and was a true gambler. He and Jimmy Shea were the first men I knew who were really conscious of clothing and image, and he came to Great Falls often just to party and show off. In those days, everyone wore hats, and Francis and Jimmy wore theirs in a certain fashion and knotted their ties just so, always looking in the mirrors behind the bars to straighten out their ties and tip their hats. I caught myself doing the same thing, but it seemed a bit affected, so I quit doing it. In those days clothiers traveled from town to town to exhibit and sell their goods. One day when I was dealing keno in Great Falls, a guy came up to me and said, "I'm Charles Hamilton, Francis Lyden's shirtmaker. He suggested I call on you." It meant a great deal to me to know that Francis Lyden would recommend me to a shirtmaker. I bought a couple of white shirts for ten dollars apiece, and three gabardine shirts with three-button sleeves for fifteen dollars apiece. |
42 / ALWAYS BET ON THE BUTCHER
There was always an air of mystery and excitement surrounding Francis, but he wasn't quite as sophisticated with the girls as he was in liis appearance. We were doing a lot of partying in Great Falls, and he asked me to set up a party and invite the girls, which was really a big deal for me. I arranged everything, and we all arrived at liis hotel room to have some champagne. (It was not an orgy or anything like that, just an ordinary party.)
Francis wore a six-carat diamond ring, and one of the girls spotted it and said, "Oh, that's the prettiest diamond I ever saw! Can I try it on?" He handed her the ring. The party continued until about five in the morning, and when the girls were ready to go home, Francis came to me and said, "Warren, I didn't get my ring back."
"Well, just go on over and ask for it."
"I don't know how."
So I went over, took the girl by the arm, brought her to Francis, reached down and pulled the ring off her finger, and handed it to him. He knew a lot about gambling, but not much about girls or the ordinary things in life.
Francis was a high rolling gambler who liked to bet horses and would bet almost anything. One day some people showed up just to take him off, because they'd heard he'd recently won twenty-five thousand dollars playing poker — suddenly, these people just came in and set up a book . . . which wasn't unusual in those days, with all tire joints opening and closing at irregular intervals, and games moving around. First these take-off artists set him up, playing straight with him for a few days. Then they told him they had a fixed race that a particular horse was a cinch to win. Francis put up his twenty-five thousand; the horse lost the race; and the people disappeared with Francis's money.
Francis knew he'd been had, but he got a friend of his named Pinky Dugan and said, "Come on, Pinky; lets go to the movies." They went to see a cowboy movie and sat through two showings. Francis never said a word, never showed any sign of being perturbed. That's cool.
Curly Darrow, from Butte, was another guy who got taken off on a phony scam. (Curly was married to a woman named Edna, who ran a house with about half a dozen girls.) Even though he knew the
Players and Mobsters / 43
games, he didn't have much education and he was a real sucker; anyone could take him off. A guy from Spokane came through and showed Curly a machine with a slot into which he'd slip a new dollar bill. When he turned the crank on the side, tire dollar bill would disappear into tire box, and out the other end would come a twenty, [laughter] Curly paid thousands for that box, and got taken off just like Francis Lyden on the phony horse race.
Helena Mike I was really a player, and I'd gamble on just about anything. I wasn't a high-stakes gambler, but I was bold, liked to bet real fast, and never got to the point of being a bad loser. I guess I was just destined to learn the gambling business the easy way.
In 1930-31, I played a lot of poker when our keno game was closed. A guy named "Helena Mike," an old-timer, used to come into the Mint to deal cards. He could do anything with a deck, and my dad would tell me to stay away from him or I would lose all my money; but I was young and lucky, and thought no one could beat me, so I played with Helena Mike and just kept on making money.
My dad decided he was going to make me stop playing poker by setting up a game with Helena Mike to take me off. I knew they were slipping in cards on me, but I wound up with three kings, beating everyone. My dad said, "OK, do whatever you want. You can take care of yourself."
After that game, Mike asked me if I wanted to go up to Shelby with him. "We can make some money up there," he said. "I like the way you operate, and together we can beat those guys up there."
So we went up to Shelby, Montana, which was near the Canadian border. Some of the guys we were going to play were bank robbers from Canada. With guns and fast cars, they'd rob a few banks up there and speed down into Montana with nothing on the border to stop them.
There was a little beer hall in Shelby with a poker game in the back room. Three or four people along with Helena Mike would already be playing, and I'd come in and take the empty seat. Mike would have marked up the cards, and whenever the pot got big he'd set me up a hand, raising his eyebrows to let me know that I should bet up. We were very careful, not too aggressive, and only did it a
44 / ALWAYS BET ON THE BUTCHER
couple of times, enough to make about two hundred dollars between us.
I always wondered what would have happened if those bank robbers had found out that we were taking them off, and I have never done anything like that since. Although I personally wasn't cheating, I was a recipient of money; so I guess I was guilty to a certain degree.
Mob keno? My first brush with the mob occurred when I was working at the Mint. A guy named Guttenburg was on the run, on the lam for something he'd done in Chicago, and he was hiding out in Great Falls. He seemed real interested in our keno game, which was going strong at the time, and he started questioning me, "What do you think about Chicago?"
"Well, I've never been there."
"A guy named Billy Johnson has a couple of joints there," Guttenburg told me. "This keno is a great thing, and Billy would love to have it in Chicago. You could make a lot of money. Why don't you talk to him?"
Billy Johnson was associated with Al Capone, and in downtown Chicago they had eight or ten places which had maybe a thousand horse players a day, and ran bingo games in the afternoon. After seven or eight at night, all kinds of gambling would be going full blast. I talked to Billy Johnson on the phone and told him about the keno game that I was running in Montana. Billy said, "Gee, it sounds real good. I think I'd like to have it. Could you run it for me?"
"Sure, I could run it for you."
'Well, come to Chicago. I'll put the game in for you, take care of all the expenses, and I'll give you 15 percent of whatever the game wins."
That sounded pretty good to me, so I told him I'd think about it and get back to him. I discussed the matter with a few people. A friend of mine who had worked for Billy Johnson told me, "Warren, don't go back there. If you're a success and it goes real good, instead of ending up with 15 percent you'll end up in a pair of cement shoes at the bottom of Lake Michigan. Billy Johnson doesn't give anything away." That chilled me out pretty good, and I never talked to Billy Johnson again. Later on when I worked at the Mapes a lot of mob
Players and Mobsters / 45
guys were real good players, and we wouldn't have drought of keeping them out of the games.
Part
Two
LEARNING THE CRAFT, BUILDING A CAREER
|
00 |
IN THE EARLY SUMMER of 1936 I went to Reno to open the keno game for Francis Lyden. When I got there I found that I was actually working for John Petricciani, the |
|
First |
owner of the Palace Club. For the next five years, except for a brief stint at the Crown Bar |
|
Time |
in Butte, I worked at the Palace, learning the games, working my way up, and eventually |
|
At The |
becoming the youngest pit boss in Reno. |
|
Palace |
_ , , The Palace had rooms over The boss and .. , . . its casino, and a mce look- his daughter girl was mnning [he front desk of the hotel when I checked in. She was very attractive, and I was interested in her; and we talked for a while and I asked her out. I later learned that she was Petricciani's daughter, Clorinda, and that she was married! This shook me up, because I wanted to date her, but I had become so indoctrinated with Catholicism during my school days .... Clorinda soon got a divorce and showed me the papers, and we began seeing a lot of each other. On the spur of the moment, twenty-one days after we met, we got married. I had to overcome a lot of apprehension to do this, since marrying a divorced woman was against Catholic doctrine. My devotion to Catholicism waned a little bit after that. As things developed, Clorinda and I couldn't get along as husband and wife, and the union ended unhappily several years later. But while it lasted our marriage helped my career. Old John Petricciani gave me some opportunities that I wouldn't have had if I hadn't been married to his daughter. John Petricciani, Slot-Machine Johnny, was bom in 1888 in Tuscany, a northern region of Italy. As a young man he emigrated to northern California, where he found work as a |
50 / ALWAYS BET ON THE BUTCHER
waiter and busboy. Later he moved to Nevada. There he and Bert Baroni (whose mother owned a ranch on tire Carson River) formed a partnership and started a slot route, which they eventually extended into the Bank Club, owned by William Graham and James McKay.
Petricciani bought the Palace Club building at the comer of Center Street and Commercial Row as an investment. When he decided to put in gaming, he became a competitor to the Bank Club, which then dropped out of his slot route and bought their own machines, bringing in Louis Iacometti to operate them. As the major joints in town, the Bank Club and the Palace were bitter enemies, at logger- heads all the time. Keno would put the Palace one up on the Bank Club.
First keno I was twenty-three years old, and my keno game in Reno was the first in town. To help me set it up I
brought my Montana boys with me: Johnny Morris, Clyde Bittner, Jimmy Brady, and Dick Trinastich, a fat, good-hearted guy who was always teased a lot. All of them were top-notch, experienced dealers, who took pride in what they were doing and were able to keep up with the action. You just aren't able to get that caliber of people any more.
The first thing our team did was get keno tickets printed. I knew exactly what I wanted, and I gave the order to Harry Frost at Reno Print. We became great friends. (Harry continued to print our tickets for many years until we required a bigger company to do the work.)
Next we went to Chinatown in San Francisco to pick up equip¬ ment for the game. I bought a couple of punches, four or five hundred brushes, and a quantity of red ink. (After a bettor chose the numbers he wanted to play, his keno ticket was marked with a calligraphic brush dipped in a special ink. The secret formula consisted of Mother Stewart's blueing and a kind of Chinese red ink. Mixed together, they created a transparent black — transparent enough for the numbers printed on the ticket to show through the marks.)
While we were assembling equipment to get our keno started, we were informed by state authorities that we couldn't open a "Chinese lottery." Vinnie Merialdo worked for Petricciani, and his brother Pete was politically connected. When Pete got us in to see Governor Kirman, we explained that we would be running a "racehorse keno"
First Time At The Palace / 51
game, not a Chinese lottery. In reality, the only difference between the two was that in racehorse keno the numbers had corresponding horses' names, and as the balls were drawn these names were called out instead of tire numbers. We just altered our terminology a little in order to open up. [laughter]
When we started the game, we introduced an innovation: the numbered balls were drawn out of a wooden, goosenecked con¬ tainer, shaped like a gourd and about a foot tall. We played the eighty balls straight from the goose rather than first distributing them evenly into four pans as we had earlier done in Montana. Old-time gamblers told me that by doing this I was losing my percentage — they were sure that by failing to reduce the draw to twenty numbers (by limiting it to only one of four pans), we were giving the customer a better chance of winning. Common sense told me they were wrong. No matter how the numbers are drawn, regardless of where they are placed, the same odds are operating.
The gooseneck was constructed so that it could be spun around to agitate the balls, make sure the draw was random. You drew the balls through a spring-loaded door. They were the size of big peas, each with a number painted on it; and after calling the numbers you'd set the balls in a rack. This system didn't last long. The little balls were difficult for the customers to see, and it would have been easy for someone to make a switch at the draw.
In Los Angeles bingo games I had seen numbered ping-pong balls being drawn out of cage-like containers, and for both security and showmanship reasons we decided to switch from the peas and gourd to ping-pong balls in a spinning cage. I had a guy from L.A. make me a cage, and it really souped up the game. People loved it, but at first we had a problem with the ping-pong balls because they would get dirty after two or three drawings. We eventually found a way to shellac the balls, so the numbers, painted on by an artist, wouldn't wear off. Later a crap dealer we had fired started making the balls for us.
I got to Reno on May 29, and we opened the keno game on June twentieth. The first few days, we were writing ten-cent tickets, taking in two or three hundred a day, working off a small bankroll. By the time wages were paid, the win was only about fifty or sixty dollars a day. It didn't look good.
52 / ALWAYS BET ON THE BUTCHER
On the third or fourth day, an old Chinaman who ran errands for the Green Lantern prostitutes came in to play. (He took care of all the girls' needs, and brought fresh towels to them whenever they wanted them. They called him the "towel man.") He played a fifty-cent eight spot and won eight hundred dollars. When I looked at that ticket, I almost fainted. "God almighty," I drought, "how am I going to tell Jolin Petricciani. a man 1 barely know, that we just got hit for eight hundred dollars?"
I went in and told John that we'd just gotten hit for a big ticket. "OK, my boy," he said, "how much was it?" I told him, and he calmly took a stack of money from die safe and counted out eight hundred in hundred-dollar bills.
All of a sudden, I had an idea. "Can you give me that eight hundred in ten-dollar bills?"
"Why do you want tens?"
"Because it looks like more money."
I got the eight hundred in ten-dollar bills, crumpled them up to make them look even bulkier, went out to the keno counter in front of all the customers, and began to count out the Chinaman's money for him, one bill at a time: "Ten, twenty, thirty, forty . . ." into eight piles of bills. I believe that incident, as much as anything else, really pumped our game up.
Making a show of dre pay-off is still part of the fabric of our business. We make a show of paying out money, whether it's in keno or the slots, and we use all kinds of marketing devices — p.a. announcements, photos of winners and their winnings, newspaper articles, et cetera. But back then, all we had were our voices and our ingenuity.
Our keno business began to boom. Instead of writing ten-cent tickets as we had in the beginning, a thirty-five cent nine spot became the prevailing ticket, although you would get some fifty-cent and some dollar tickets. Soon we were writing fifteen hundred to two thousand dollars a day, and by the end of the summer we were writing five thousand a day.
Just as we had done in Butte, we began to speed the game up until we were dealing several games an hour. There was a Chinese place down on Lake Street that had been taking in two or three hundred a day running a traditional, twice-a-day game, and we pretty
John Petricciani owned the Palace Club.
‘He always encouraged me to learn, and never questioned my judgment.
The Palace Club, Labor Day, 1937.
The Bank Club is immediately next door, and the Golden Hotel looms in the background.
“As the major joints in town, the Bank Club and the Palace were bitter enemies, at loggerheads all the time.
Inside the Palace Club in the late 1930s.
Silvio Petricciani (1.) and John Blanchard (c.) are working the roulette table.
First Time At The Palace / 53
much took all their business away from them. They ended up closing in about six months.
Soon more dealers were needed to accommodate business, so I started sending up to Butte for people like Red Kiley, Pete Savage, Peck Holly, and Harry Hall, who had been one of the bartenders in the Mint Cigar Store that Cal Lewis didn't trust! [laughter] (Harry worked for me for a long time, and I certainly trusted him. I must have fired him at least fifteen times for being drunk, but I always put him back to work, [laughter] Harry later came with me when we opened the Cal-Neva, and he ended up working for me for thirty years.)
We continued the keno game for about a year without any competition. Harolds Club' put in keno, but they weren't very proficient, getting hit with a lot of phony tickets because they didn't understand how to check them. Then some other boys came down from Butte and opened a keno game in the Bank Club. Our limit for a payout had been two thousand a game, but when the Bank Club opened their keno, we raised our limit to five thousand. That was tops in Reno until Pick Hobson opened the Frontier and set its limit at twenty-five thousand. Everyone thought that such a big payout was the end of the world — that it would encourage crooks to cheat and rob our business. However, big payouts just ended up enticing more people to play.
Keno really built up the Palace Club, and we got better at running the game, drawing bigger crowds of people. The men I brought in from Montana knew the math, and we were proud of how fast we could write tickets and check them. It was really a going thing.
After running the keno game for a while, I had a falling out with Francis Lyden, who felt that my marriage to Petricciani's daughter was a threat to his' status. I was going to leave, but Vinnie Merialdo prevailed upon me to go to work in the pit. He put me on the chuck- a-luck game, and I started learning even more from him about dealing twenty-one. Merialdo was an excellent teacher, and I was promoted quickly up to pit boss.
1 Raymond I. "Pappy" Smith opened a casino in Reno in 1935- Although named after Iris son, Harold, who managed the place, the club has never used the possessive apostrophe in the spelling of its name. Hence, "Harolds" instead of "Harold's." This convention is followed among Nevada casinos in general.
54 / ALWAYS BET ON THE BUTCHER
In 1938 Petricciani sent me up to Lake Tahoe to open a keno game in the old Nevada Club. They hadn't tried keno up there before, and it didn't prove to be very successful. But at least I learned something about the way tilings operated at the lake. Almost every place up there at that time was a flat joint, a place that cheated die customer. One joint, the Country’ Club Casino, had great food, but business at the lake in general was very sporadic, nothing like it is today.
I quit . . . I owed a lot to John Petricciani, because he always twice encouraged me to learn and never questioned my
judgment. But in 1939 I got mad at him when he fired a friend of mine because the guy had a crippled hand and couldn't deal twenty-one anymore. (We didn't know about the condition then, but he had probably contracted carpal tunnel syndrome from dealing cards.) I was also arguing with my wife at the time, and I wanted to get away, so with twenty dollars in my pocket I caught the next train to Great Falls.
I went over to Butte to see my old friend, Jimmy Shea, who had helped to break me into keno, and told him I needed a job. He took me to a joint called the Arcade to see Curly Darrow — an imperious old bastard, and the same guy who'd paid twenty thousand for the phony money box that supposedly changed dollar bills into twenties. Jimmy warned me that it was difficult to talk to him.
I went to the bar and set down my only remaining money, a ten- dollar bill, and bought a drink. Curly came over, shuffling some silver dollars back and forth in his hand. (I later learned that he would pick that silver off the games five or six times a day, pretending to just play with it. The money would always end up in his pocket.) "What do you want?" he said.
"Curly, I'm looking for a job. I deal keno and twenty-one, and I just came up from Reno."
"Reno, huh?" He turned around and walked away, [laughter] 1 had just spent a buck and a half of my last ten-dollar bill on nothing, and I was not very happy.
Later, when I was back working at the Palace, Curly came in to ask for a job and acted as if he didn't remember me. "You old son of a bitch," I thought. The tables had turned. I told him very emphat¬ ically that he couldn't work for me, so he went over to the Bank Club
First Time At The Palace / 55
to ask Jack Sullivan for a job. In those days everyone knew every¬ thing that went on, and Sullivan wasn't going to put him to work if I'd turned him down. He came back and demanded to know why I had knocked him. "I didn't knock you," I said, "I just told you you couldn't work for me . . . and you can't." He left town, and I never saw him again.
When Curly Darrow wouldn't put me to work in Butte, I went over to see Joe Lyden at the Crown Bar. He took me on as a relief man for the wheel, craps, twenty-one, and keno. I only had one problem — I didn't know how to deal the wheel. But I was out my last ten dollars, and I had to put my backbone somewhere.
At the Palace Club Wick Williams had taught me how to push checks and spin the ball. I could spin the hell out of die ball, because you can leam that standing on the outside of the game; but I'd never actually stood behind the game and dealt it. Nonetheless, that night I went to work on the roulette game widi a Lebanese kid named Pete Seaman.
"Hi, how are you? I asked. "What are you?"
"I'm the check racker," he answered.
"Well, I'm sure going to need one. I guess I'd better cop to it: I don't know how to deal this game. I've never dealt it."
Pete told me, "Well, I was the dealer until they brought in some hotshot from Reno. You got my job. But I'll help you because I'm not a very good dealer either."
"OK," I said, "we'll help each other." [laughter]
He was trying to leam, and I was trying to leam, so we spent a lot of time dealing to each other, and did we leam fast! Luckily, the night manager didn't know any more than we did; but if Joe Lyden had been working the night shift, he would have caught on in a minute that we didn't know what we were doing. We practiced pushing stacks of checks back and forth, finding the best arrangements to push the payouts of anywhere up to fifteen stacks across the table. We figured out the payouts together, and we innovated. For example, if a payout was thirty-five to one, and we got seventeen checks straight-up on a number, what is seventeen times thirty-five? We'd break the problem into two simpler ones:
"Well, Pete, ten times thirty-five is three fifty."
56 / ALWAYS BET ON THE BUTCHER
"And seven times thirty-five is two hundred and forty-five, for a total of five hundred and ninety-five." Not only did we become good wheel dealers, but we also became good friends.
Since I was still married to Petricciani's daughter, I made a lot of long-distance phone calls to Reno, and ran up a bill of about two hundred dollars. When Pete found out I was trying to hock the diamond ring I'd received on my twenty-first birthday to pay for the calls, he gave me the tw'o hundred from a wad of five-dollar bills he'd been saving. (Our wages were five dollars a day, and he put aside a five every other day.) That started a great friendship that still remains steadfast.
Pete and I would get off work at about two in die morning. In Butte there was absolutely nothing to do that time of night, so we'd jog up the hill to the School of Mines, and walk back. Then in the morning we'd get up at about eleven and go down to the YMCA to shoot baskets and play handball. Pete had been a fighter, and he was teaching a couple of kids how to box, so I'd box around with them just for fun. We had a great time and got into great shape, which came in handy for some of the things that happened in the wild place we were dealing — the Crown Bar.
Joe Lyden had a certain peculiarity: if he invited you to have a cup of coffee with him, it meant you were going to be fired. A cup of coffee was the kiss of death, [laughter] One day Joe asked me to have coffee with him. He didn't fire me, but he told me business was slow and he'd have to cut me down to three days a week. I couldn't survive on three days a week, so I quit with no other prospects.
Fortunately, old man Petricciani called from Reno saying he'd just fired Francis Lyden and a couple of other guys, and he needed me to go to work. The same day I was fired, I got a job as a pit boss in Reno, so I headed back.
Back to Warren Atcheson, a slim, hawk-faced old-timer who
the Palace wore a celluloid collar with a little string tie, was the absolute arbiter of everything in the gambling business. A kind of walking Hoyle's, he knew all the rules and all the percentages and the proper way to deal. If a dispute came up on any point, everyone would just say, "Go ask Warren."
First Tune At The Palace / 57
When I returned to Reno I was hungry to learn my craft, and I made that my primary goal. Although I had quite a bit of experience with keno, poker, twenty-one, and roulette, I had never dealt faro bank or craps. I decided to learn everything that I could from Mr. Atcheson. It wasn't easy for young guys to gain the acceptance of the old-timers, but I was just as polite and respectful towards him as I could be, always saying, "Yes, sir, Mr. Atcheson; no, sir, Mr. Atcheson." Finally, he said to me one day, "Your name is Warren; why don't you just call me Warren, too?" He had accepted me. I treated all the old-timers with respect, and in return they shared their knowledge of the business with me.
Vrnnie Merialdo had taught me chuck-a-luck and twenty-one, and I went on to learn about hazard, craps, and faro bank from Billy Panelli. Billy was a little bit older than me. He had been a fighter at one time, but now he was working as a pit boss, a faro bank expert. He was very bright, but he had a bad habit of gambling all the time.
Billy was an absolute perfectionist; it was impossible not to learn from him. If there was a big roulette game, he'd have me deal to get experience while he racked the checks. He'd hone my skills and techniques, correcting my movements, and he did the same thing for me with the crap game. Billy would sit and look at the roulette game, and try to figure out the best way to clean the layout according to how the drips were placed. The right way was always the smoothest way, taking the least amount of effort and the least amount of time.
Billy Panelli is tire one who really got me interested in the faro bank game, and I tried to learn everything from the old men who were dealing it. Faro bank was the toughest game in the business to learn because it took the most concentration.
Always full, ' The Palace Club was open twenty-four hours a even on day, and tire faro bank game was always full, even
graveyard on graveyard. There was a lot more business on graveyard back then than there is now. In the old days Reno was a graveyard town.
The Palace was quite a business for its time. In about seven thousand square feet we had one hundred and fifty slot machines, a keno game with eight stations, six twenty-one games, one crap and one roulette game, and two faro bank games. All tire slot machines were very tight, but the nickel machines got a lot of play. There were
58 / ALWAYS BET ON THE BUTCHER
no money-counting devices of any kind, and we had to count all those nickels by hand, [laughter] The quarter, half, and dollar machines got very little play.
It seemed that we always had plenty of money to operate in the summertime, but around November every year old man Petricciani would have to go to the bank and borrow fifty thousand to get us through the winter. The nut was probably damn near that amount. By the first month of the summer he'd have the loan paid off, and he'd start putting some money away for himself.
We had a restaurant that just broke even, with a lunch counter and maybe ten booths. It was a very cozy set-up, and everyone knew all the waitresses. But there were no cocktail waitresses at that time, and no women dealers; and there was only one woman player, an old gal named Sagebrush Annie. Other than that, the only women you'd see would be the working girls from the line, three blocks down the street, who would come in to play after they got off work around two o'clock in the morning.
We were located right across from the train station, a good spot at that time, and passengers who came through would come over and play. We also had a lot of local professional people, doctors and lawyers, who were regulars; they made good money and they played good money! [laughter] John Petricciani was a distant, quiet sort of person, but he was always well dressed, and he made a great host, standing at the bar to greet people as they entered.
9
Characters, Hustlers, and Scam Artists
THERE WERE SOME interesting characters in Reno in the late 1930s, and many of them had colorful nicknames. A tall, slim hustler, nick¬ named Diamond Spike for the diamond stick¬ pin that he always wore, wrote some doggerel called "The Gathering," about all the whores, pimps, and hustlers who had come to Reno — people with nicknames like Jimmy the Goat, Goathead John, Ragged-Ass Johnny, The Oregon Kid, The Dago Kid, and Big-Nosed Joe.
Big-Nosed Joe, a faro bank dealer, was a real roughneck, and all kinds of stories went around about his opium use and goofy beha¬ vior. We had an expression:
"And Big-Nosed Joe from down below,
if he ain't there, the game don't go!"
Here's a story that illustrates the extremes we went to in nicknaming characters who hung around town in those
Gold-Tooth
Camel
days: Some guy came off the street into a boarding house and asked the landlady, "Do you have a fellow staying here named Gold- Tooth Camel?"
The landlady said, "No, he's not here. I don't know him."
"Well, I heard he was staying here."
"He ain't here!"
"Are you sure?"
"Look — I've got Cheese-Assed Sam, Pop¬ corn Jimmy, and Alabam; but I don't have no Gold-Tooth Camel!" [laughter]
There was a lot of dope in Reno in those days, and on Saturday nights quite a few guys would go some place to
Dope and sex
"lie on the hip and smoke the pipe." [opium] There was no cocaine, but many people used
9
Characters, Hustlers, and Scam Artists
60 / ALWAYS BET ON THE BUTCHER
heroin. Heroin users have a problem moving their bowels, and an addict who succeeded might come in with his face up in a smile and say, "Boy, I dropped a birdie today!" [laughter]
Several large whorehouses were in operation. Just east of downtown, there were a number of cribs in the "bull pen," with a station in the middle where a big guy sat to keep order if anyone got out of line. They were always busier at night, but they were open twenty-four hours a day.
Further east, on die river near Sparks, was die Green Lantern, a high-class bawdy house that offered drinking, dining, and dancing, as well as prostitutes. The girls who worked at the Green Lantern were pretty quiet . . . just trying to make a living. They lived on the premises, and diey were only allowed to come into town from midnight to ten o'clock — if they needed to do any shopping, they had to be finished by ten in the morning.
A lot of people came to Reno to get divorced, and many of the young guys in town were looking for a divorcee to mess around with.1 The places that catered to divorcees were the Riverside and die Country Club, a place out of town a ways that hosted some of the big name orchestras: Ted Fiorito and Guy Lombardo and others.
Once I was out at the Country Club with a guy I used to work with named Harry Montague — Harry the Horse, [laughter] Harry was very funny in a snotty, sarcastic kind of way. He saw a young kid, a basketball player from the University of Nevada, dancing with some pretty young girl, and he asked in a snide manner, "Hey kid, have you shot any baskets lately?" [laughter] That started a fight that became a real donnybrook. Harry could have started a fight in a church.
Heroin cool Although Francis Lyden didn't have a nickname, he certainly was a character . . . and he was also a heroin addict. Once at the Palace Club, Francis
1 In 1931 Nevada reduced its legal residence requirement for a divorce to six weeks, by far the lowest in the nation. This led numbers of well-to-do women who were leaving their husbands to take up residence in Reno for six weeks at a time. A divorce industry, including special "divorce ranches," sprang up to accommodate the business.
Characters, Hustlers, and Scam Artists / 61
called me over to a game he was in and said, "Hey, kid, make a bet for me." He gave me six thousand dollars and told me to bet it across the board on a particular horse. I got the money down, with the odds being about nine to one.
I was really jumpy and nervous about the bet, but Francis just calmly went on playing poker. He never asked me how the horse ran. (It had come in third.) Hours later, after the game broke up, Francis came into the back room to get something to eat, but even then he didn't glance at the board to see how he'd done — it wasn't until he was finally ready to leave that he looked up. That's cool.
Although I worked hard to appear just as cool and calm as Francis, on the inside I never really felt that way. But Francis probably never felt as cool as he appeared, either. He was on heroin . . . perhaps to calm his nerves. As time passed he became more and more involved with the drug, but he continued to work every day as a faro bank dealer — a beautiful dealer. Finally he went down to San Francisco to open a faro bank game, and he died there in 1941 of a heroin overdose. Francis Lyden had a lot to do with my thinking about gambling . . . ultimately more negative than positive.
Titanic scams The top gamblers in the world would play in some of the highest rolling poker games in the world with Francis Lyden in the back room of the Palace Club. People came from all over, mostly to play lowball. The stakes were very high, and it wasn't unusual for someone to win or lose thirty or forty thousand dollars at a time. After I had moved up to pit boss, I would go in every hour and take the money off the game. (It cost five dollars an hour to play, so with six players we got thirty dollars an hour.) As I'd go in to collect the money, I would be very quiet and hot say a word. The players ran the game and could do whatever they wanted, but they were too smart to let anyone cheat; so it was a good, square game with a lot of money changing hands.
Some of the greatest gamblers of all time were playing then: the Dago Kid, the Oregon Apple, old man Felix Turrillas, Doc Howard, and Titanic Thompson, who always got the best of everyone. Titanic bet someone a hundred dollars that he could throw a pumpkin over the Overland Hotel, which was a two-story building. He got a pumpkin the size of a baseball, and just pitched it right over.
62 / ALWAYS BET ON THE BUTCHER
[laughter] Titanic was a good athlete, and he bet another guy that he could hit a golf ball five hundred yards. The guy accepted the bet, but Titanic insisted on picking the place. He took the guy out to Washoe Lake, which was frozen over, with no snow on the ice. With his back to the wind, Titanic drove the ball out over the ice, and it just kept on going. It might still be going, [laughter]
All of these gamblers would hustle suckers. Even though they played most amongst themselves, if an apple just happened to drop in, they'd take him. They were unbelievably smart gamblers, and I think that if they were around now they'd eat today's players alive.
When the guys got tired of playing poker, they'd go for a mile walk down the railroad tracks past the depot. They were walking down the tracks one day when one of them pointed up and said, "Just look! What the hell? Somebody put a card up there!" An ace of hearts was tacked about twenty feet up a telephone pole.
They had finished their walk and resumed the game at the Palace when Titanic said, "That had to be some crazy son-of-a-bitch to nail that ace of spades up there."
One of the guys said, "No, no, Titanic. That wasn't the ace of spades; it was the ace of hearts."
"I'll bet you a hundred dollars that it was the ace of spades," said Titanic, and the bet was on. (One hundred dollars was the standard bet in those days.) So they all walked back down the tracks . . . and there on the pole was the ace of spades, [laughter] Titanic had set the whole thing up, and paid someone to climb the pole and switch the cards.
Eventually, someone did get the best of Titanic. He was killed by Nigger Nate in a poker game in New York City.
A strange There was a lot of cheating going on, and all of the
group games were vulnerable, particularly the faro bank
game. The president of Paramount Pictures was a neat little Jewish guy who wore a patch over his eye and played faro bank twice a year for two weeks a pop. He always brought along his brother, who would watch the play from five paces behind the game; and since it was pretty high-rolling play, he attracted a crowd, which he really didn't like.
Characters, Hustlers, and Scam Artists / 63
In order to accommodate him, Billy Panelli and I set up a game in a hotel room above the Palace Club, and the two of us dealt to him up die re. He was easy to deal to because when he got tired, he'd just stop and talk about all the gambling he'd done in Inis life: "You know, faro is the greatest gambling game in the world. I just love to play it. I lost a million dollars playing this game on the square, but I got cheated out of another million on top of it."
The dealers always figured out a way to cheat the faro bank. One way was to make a tiny hole in die box through which you could see if the card coming out was a big one or a litde one; and the box could be fixed to deal the second card if the first one looked undesirable. When a box was rigged that way, it was called a deuce box.
The old-timers in die faro bank games thought they were the elite in the gambling business, and they would hardly speak to a wheel dealer or a twenty-one dealer. And the faro bank players were also a strange group of guys who stuck to themselves unless they were out gambling. A wild-eyed faro bank player named Eddie White was the most temperamental player I ever saw. When he'd start to lose, he'd just throw down his money and walk out.
Boo Harrigan, a mean litde guy who was married to a real nice girl named Flossie, was always in action on the faro bank game, playing one or two thousand at a dme. He never had a job. Lived off his wife's tips, working her all the dme. One dme he stood there putdng on his gloves, one finger at a dme, and said, "God, this has sure been a tough winter. Things are real bad, and Flossie's only worked two shifts this week." [laughter]
"Something When I first got to town, Graham and McKay
you can do controlled Reno. They had the Bank Club, ran
for me " the whore houses .... A lot of wild, real bad
guys — bank robbers and murderers, like the Barker brothers — would come to town under their protecdon. When Graham and McKay went to prison for some of their notorious dealings,2 Jack Sullivan operated the Bank Club for
2 In 1939, William Graham and James McKay were convicted of mail fraud in connecdon with a horse racing swindle, fined $11,000 each, and sentenced to do time in a federal penitentiary. Nevada's Senator Patrick McCarran secured a presidential pardon for them in 1950, and they returned to Reno.
64 / ALWAYS BET ON THE BUTCHER
them in their absence. Sullivan's real name was Jack Scarlett — he was Jewish, and when he came to Reno he changed his name. With all of die cheating going on there were a lot of fights, and Jack was the heavy, the iron hand that broke them up. He was an ex-bouncer, ex-prizefighter ... a big, imposing old man who had the reputation of being very tough, and he always carried a cane.
Since the Bank Club and die Palace Club were the two domi¬ nating clubs, Sullivan and John Petricciani, who owned the Palace, agreed to keep wages at the same low scale in bodi clubs during the winter of 1939. Suddenly, Sullivan just left town to go on vacation, failing to keep his side of the bargain. It created a big hassle. The next time I saw Sullivan in the Palace, I walked up to him and asked politely, "Good afternoon, Mr. Sullivan, what can I do for you?"
He whacked his cane on the floor, looked down his nose and said, "What could you possibly do for me?"
"Well, sir, there's something you can do for me: you can go fuck yourself!" [laughter] He turned and walked away, but I think that encounter formed the basis for a mutual respect.
Mouse When Pappy Smith opened Harolds Club, it became the
roulette third major joint in Reno. Pappy's son Harold was the
gambler, and he had his wife and a few other women working for him. At first Harolds was the laughing stock of the town, because they had roulette wheels run by mice,3 with no twenty-one or keno. Pappy had a big counter there — maybe twenty players could play at once. This was a big tiling for a while, and it was the only real carnival gimmick in town.
Harold would come into the Palace every night and gamble. Sometimes he won, but mostly he lost . . . and always he demanded credit, [laughter] Nobody would give it to him, and when credit was refused he'd return to Harolds Club and come back with the nickels, dimes and quarters from the club's slot drop. If he lost that, he'd get
3 Pappy Smith installed a form of roulette using a flat table with numbered holes cut into it instead of the traditional wheel, and a live mouse instead of a ball. The mouse would be released from a cage atop the table, and would scurry about before diving into one of the numbered holes. Winners were paid at the same odds as roulette. Initially, the game created quite a sensation, but interest soon subsided.
Characters , Hustlers, and Scam Artists / 65
money from old man Smith to open the next day. All the time I knew Harold, he never called me by my name, and the only time he ever spoke to me was to give me an order.
Unethical Harolds Club had a big player named Fleischman, a real wealthy man from the East who owned a ranch where old Manogue High School was. The Bank Club had given him a marker for fifty thousand, which was a big lick back then, but Fleischman was mad at them. He felt for some reason that their play was not on the square, so he was determined not to pay them back. He began coming to tire Palace Club, buying into the faro bank game five thousand at a time, and never asking for credit.
One time Fleischman came to play on my day off. He got lucky and was up about fifteen thousand when old man Sullivan came in and tapped him on tire shoulder with his cane. Sullivan whispered in his ear and Fleischman got up, went to the cashier's cage, changed ten thousand in chips and handed Sullivan the money.
In my mind that is one of tire most unethical things you can do in a gambling house — hustle a player who owes you money while he's gambling in another joint. When I found out, I got really hot! I told my people that the next time Fleischman came in, they were to call me if he was getting out with some money.
Four or five days later, he began to play and started to get lucky again. I was called, and just stood in the background. Sure enough, here came Sullivan. He walked up to the bar and hooked his cane over the lip of the counter and sat down. He didn't order a drink . . . just sat there eyeballing the faro bank action.
I walked over to him and said, "Jack, what would happen if I came into your club and hustled a player who owed me money? Two big bouncers would grab my ass and throw me out the door."
He grabbed his cane, whacked it on the floor, looked me in tire eye and said, "Kid, you're right." Then he walked out.
On the The three bigger places, the Bank Club, the Palace Club,
square and Harolds Club, operated on the square; however,
most of the smaller places were cheating their cus¬ tomers. People in the business referred to them as clip joints, but what they did was rarely discussed openly. There was a code of silence amongst gamblers. And usually customers were cheated by the house only when they were winning.
66 / ALWAYS BET ON THE BUTCHER
Eventually, cheating the customers subsided. I believe I had something to do with it, because I discouraged or stopped it whenever I could. Today, cheating by the house has totally vanished, and in fact there's damn few people left who even know how to cheat anyone, [laughter]
Spit on the Back before the war Butte enjoyed the same kind of wheel atmosphere that pervaded Reno. In 1939,
during the short time that I worked at the Crown Bar, a guy got smoked three or four times in a pan game, went back to his room, got his .45, came back and shot the cards right off the table! [laughter]
An old Greek who owned a little restaurant up the street would come in to play the wheel. When the wheel was spinning slowly, he was good at anticipating what number the ball was going to land on. He would bring in another Greek with him, and they'd talk to each other in Greek and gesture and try to distract the dealer, while one of them would come down late on the winning number.
When I was dealing the wheel I'd keep it rolling real good, and keep my eye on the Greek so he wouldn't be able to past post. One night when I was on the wheel I beat him out of about three hundred, and I was just tickled to death. He stood up from the game, glared at me, and spit right into the wheel. I lunged over, grabbed him, dragged him to the front door, and threw his tall, skinny body straight out like a javelin. The boss told me, "He'll be back; he's a player."
He came back, all right. Later that night I was a relief man on the keno game. The area where I sat was enclosed with something like chicken wire, like a cashier's cage with a small opening through which to bet your tickets. (In those days, they felt that a cage was protection against anyone slipping in phony tickets.) So I was sitting there writing tickets when I heard some scuffling and heavy breath¬ ing: it was the Greek, with his long nose and big teeth right in front of the wire. He had a pistol in one hand and a long knife in the other, and in broken English he said, "Kid, don1 you evah toucha my body again!"
I said, "Fine. Don't you ever spit on my wheel again." From then on we were friends, [laughter]
|
10 |
ABOUT THE END OF November, 1941, I came down with acute appendicitis, and my appen¬ dix had to be removed. On December 7, even though the stitches were still in, I went duck |
|
Semper Fi |
hunting with friends at the Greenhead Club near Fallon. Riding back, we turned on the radio and learned that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor. You can imagine how a bunch of young guys like us felt. I was mad! I never saw a Jap I couldn't lick, so I didn't think it would be much of a job. The next day I went down to the Marine Corps recruiting station. Ed Montgomery, the recruiting officer, told me that I'd have to recover fully from my operation before I could join. As soon as the stitches came out I went back, and I was told that due to my operation it would be a year before I could enlist. So I stayed in Reno and saved every penny I was making so that I could join with some peace of mind. My marriage was not going well, and when I told my wife I was going to join the Marine Corps, she said, "If you go in the Marine Corps, we're through!" My father-in-law didn't want me to go in the service, either. "Warren," he said, "I need you here. I need you to run this place for me." "I'm sorry, John, but I can't do it. I've already made up my mind." About a week later John asked me to meet with him and John Sinai, his lawyer, in Sinai's office. When I got there, Sinai said, "Warren, Johnny will sign 20 percent of the Palace Club over to you if you agree not go into the Marine Corps." 'Well, gentlemen," I said, "you can tear up those papers. I'm going." |
68 / ALWAYS BET ON THE BUTCHER
My dad was in die Marine Corps, and I would never have been anything else. In November, 1942, I finally joined. 1 will always be a Marine.
Boot camp was tough. At thirty years of age I was the old man of the troop, with everyone else ten to twelve years younger. After a hard day's training, the young kids would flop down and say, "I'm dying . . . I'm dying." Thirty minutes later they'd be up playing football! Even though I was in pretty good shape, it took me a lot longer to recover from a day's exercises. But after six weeks of doing close order drill and training, we went to rifle camp for two weeks, and that was right up my alley. I loved to shoot, and I was good at it.
Of course, I was good at gambling too. There were some blanket crap games in the barracks, but mosdy the soldiers played poker, and playing with them was like stealing money — they just didn't know how to play, [laughter] I was beating them consistently, winning twenty-five to forty dollars a night; but these men were my friends, so I finally quit playing and started watching. I became sort of a pit boss for the guys, who relied on me to spot hustlers and cheaters.
"I want When I graduated from boot camp the interviewer
your job!" who reviewed job classifications asked me what I did
in civilian life, and I told him. Then he asked me what I would like to do in the Marine Corps. I said, "The best job I've seen so far in the Marine Corps is your job. I want your job!" [laughter] He explained the situation to the Captain, who asked me what a pit boss did. I told him that a pit boss supervises what goes on in a gambling joint; that he cashes checks for people, makes sure that everything is on the square, and sees that it all runs in an orderly fashion. So I was given a test, which I passed, and I was assigned to personnel classification . . . which I thought was a hell of a thing, just giving tests and interviewing people, [laughter]
We traveled all over doing testing and related things, everywhere from San Diego to Alaska — even to Hawthorne, Nevada, and back to Butte, Montana. But primarily I tested and interviewed Marines as they came out of boot camp. It was evident that I.Q. scores were not always the most valuable factor in judging people — people with I.Q.s of 150 and over are practically impossible to use anywhere. The best people score somewhere between 120 and 130. I was never too
I will always be a Marine.
Pat Futter would become Mrs. Warren Nelson after the war.
“The people Pat worked with were concerned about my interest in her. They weren’t too sure that a gambler from Reno would be good enough for her. ”
Semper Fi / 69
smart, and mine was just 112, barely enough to get tire job in personnel classification, [laughter]
One night on Mare Island, an air raid was conducted to simulate a Jap bombing. Sirens began wailing, and I ran out to tire gunnery site. The old gunnery sergeant looked at me and said, "Go back to tire barracks along with the rest of the pencil pushers." He was right. Most of us who remained stateside were just a bunch of pencil pushers.
Lefty Whenever I got a pass I would frequent places
recommended that had some kind of gambling going on. The no action biggest joint by far was in Hawthorne. My
brother-in-law at the time, Pick Hobson, had a brother named Joe who opened it in about 1940.
Hawthorne had a great mixture of people. About a thousand construction workers, most from Oklahoma and Texas, were building big ammunition depots, and they were all making a lot of money; and the Navy and the Marine Corps had several hundred men stationed there. About a half dozen joints were open, including the El Capitan and the Hawthorne Club, all doing unbelievable business because there was no other entertainment and the men had nowhere else to spend their money.
Everybody was stealing money in Hawthorne; it was like Deadwood was in the early days — a rough, tough place. I went into a place run by a friend of mine (a left-handed twenty-one dealer, appropriately dubbed "Lefty Dougherty"), and I was sitting at the bar having a drink. The joint was packed, and people were reaching over each other to get their money down on the games. Lefty commented, "You just never know what's going to happen in here." About then a fight broke out, and I thought, "Holy Christ! These people are killing each other!" Lefty recommended no action, and the two of us just sat there.
Suddenly a little sailor who had been hit and downed slid across the floor and landed at my feet. He jumped up and tried to punch me in the face, and I hit him hard with a left hook. He just shook his head and jumped back into the fray, [laughter] Brawls like this broke out all the time, but nobody ever tried to stop them because
70 / ALWAYS BET ON THE BUTCHER
everyone would soon tire of fighting, and the melee would just sort of die out on its own.
When I returned to duty after one furlough home to Reno. Captain Presley, the officer I had been working with, had gotten orders to go overseas. Since my marriage was falling apart, I decided that I wanted to go too. The captain said that he'd do what he could to get me over there, but several weeks after he left I got a letter from him: "Warren, no way am I going to bring you over. You're helping the war effort more by doing what you're doing. You'd be a loose cannon over here. Just stay where you are."
In the meantime another captain had taken Presley's place. Alfred J. Alpers was a little Jewish fellow, a Yale graduate who had been in government personnel classification. Alpers was just the tops in his profession. He was working on the MOS (Military Occupation Specialty) manual for the Marine Corps, writing job descriptions, and he asked me to write a particular one for him. He was so happy with the job that I did that he asked me to co-author the book, which had my name on it too. We worked well together, and I was very proud of my accomplishment.
Eventually Capt. Alpers left the department, and Lieutenant Harrington replaced him. Harrington was a nice man, but weak, and Alpers told him: "Lieutenant, you don't know what the hell you're doing, so don't make a move without asking Warren first. Otherwise, you won't make it." That really embarrassed me, so I told Harrington the next day that he was the boss and I'd do whatever he wanted. "No, no," he told me, "we'll do just like the captain said."
A pitiful I was permanently assigned to San Francisco in about
sight February of 1944. I went there as a private, but I
rapidly advanced to tech sergeant. I spent a lot of time with wounded, returning Marines, trying to integrate them back into stateside life. I took an interest in every individual I interviewed, and did my best to help each of them. This was the most gratifying part of my job.
A friend of mine, Danny Basta, was transferred back to the United States after contracting malaria in Tarawa. He was placed in the Oak Knoll Hospital in Oakland, and I would go over to visit him. Many young Marines in the hospital had been sent back missing arms, legs,
Semper Fi / 71
or other body parts, but they were recovering, and they decided to have a big party at a place down in San Jose. I was asked to come and bring some booze. When I got there, these kids were already smashed, falling down on what was left of their limbs. It was a pitiful sight, and I couldn't stand it, so Danny and I left. The war really screwed up a lot of people.
She ivas very The most important thing that happened to me attractive while I was in San Francisco was that I met Pat
Futter, the woman whom I would marry for life.
(Her name is Norma Kathleen, but she's always been known as Pat.) There were only sixteen women who were master technical sergeants in the Marine Corps, and she was one of them, actually outranking me. Pat was practically running all the offices in the Department of the Pacific. She had about thirty or forty girls working for her, and she was so well-liked and did her job so well that her superiors just worked her to death, seven days a week and sometimes nights.
Not only was Pat very competent and well-liked, but she was also very attractive. I was still married when we met, but as soon as I divorced Clorinda, I asked Pat out. The people she worked with were concerned about my interest in her. They weren't too sure that a gambler from Reno would be good enough for her, and there was a lot of controversy about our dating. On our first date in San Francisco there were a lot of people out, and I got in a fight with a sailor who was grabbing all the girls and kissing them. He wasn't about to get my girl! [laughter]
Harrah had On furloughs to Reno I would sometimes visit the a job for me ' Blackout Bar, a little joint on Virginia Street with about four or five tiny booths. The Blackout got its name from always being kept at just about midnight darkness, [laughter] During the war they had a guy named Jackson who played piano, and people came in by the droves. So many people were in there all the time that it was almost impossible to move, and everybody was spending money and tipping like crazy. That was when tipping in Reno really began. Before I left to join the Marine Corps, I didn't know what in the hell a toke was, but I think the war made hustlers out of everybody. Everybody just sort of
72 / ALWAYS BET ON THE BUTCHER
exploded with money from all the illegal black market trade, and during the war the tips at Harrah's were just incredible.
Bill Harrah had come to Reno in about 1933. He opened some Bingo games, and he became partners with Virgil Smith and Wayne Martin, who had a couple of joints that made some money during die war. But although we were both in Reno all diose years, Bill and I didn't become formally acquainted until I was in the Marines. We were introduced while I was on furlough. He knew of my work at the Palace Club, and on one of my many furloughs to Reno he said he would have a job for me after the war if I was interested. I was. We agreed that following my discharge I would go to work for him, and that I would be instrumental in opening up his new joint.
11
Joint
Duty
BY THE TIME I had been stationed in San Francisco for a while I knew all the bars and joints in the area that had any kind of gam¬ bling. Good dealers were needed in El Cerrito, and I could use the money, so I started dealing at the Twenty-One Club on weekends. The place was so busy that soon 1 was working full time.
Weekdays, the Twenty-One ran just a single shift that began at about six o'clock, and when my Marine Corps day ended I'd head across the Bay Bridge, still in uniform. At the club I'd change into my civvies. It was all pretty hazardous: Marines were forbidden to be out of uniform or to work a second job. Although most gambling was out in the open at that time, it was basically illegal — there was always the chance of a raid, and I would have been court-marshaled if I was caught. But the money was just so good that I had to take the chance, and we all covered for each other — no one in the Marine Corps had any idea that I was working a second job in a gambling joint.
I would arrive at work, Dressed for sneak in the back door, and
action change into a suit I had bor¬
rowed from Wick Williams, a friend from my days at the Palace Club. Wick's double-breasted suit just sort of hung on me, and the first night I worked, my pants kept slipping down. I was on the roulette wheel; so I'd roll the ball, clean the layout, make the payouts, and before rolling the ball for the next deal, I'd have to unbutton my jacket and pull up my pants again. After a while, the second dealer on the wheel leaned over to me and whispered, "Kid, are you wearing a sub?"
74 / ALWAYS BET ON THE BUTCHER
I was really dumbfounded, and I told him, "Christ, no! No way would I wear a sub!"
"God, I was sure you had on a sub. I wore one for twenty years, and die first time I took it off, it was like going without underwear." [laughter]
A real The Twenty-One was really a jumping, going
huckledy-buck joint. Doormen checked people as they came
joint in, and you had to have a special card or know
the doorman before you could enter. Most of the customers were Jewish people who made their money in die flourishing black market business, selling tires or gas or whatever was in demand. They spent money like water . . . the play was tremendous!
A lot of women came with their wealthy husbands, and the club had a dinner house that served black market steaks and the finest whiskeys — items that were very difficult to get during the war. Whatever you wanted, you could get: if you wanted Cutty Sark, they had it. The lure of these otherwise unattainable items just drew people in. The high living . . . people just couldn't help themselves.
Meals were free to all of the invited guests, but the club more than made up for that on the games afterward; the money was really rolling! They also had a piano player and moderately elegant decor, and the tables were set with tablecloths and candles. Most impor¬ tantly, the waiters really catered to the customers.
The club had two crap games, four twenty-one games, and two wheels . . . but no slot machines. The tables were always jammed. We were dropping a hundred-and-fifty to two hundred thousand a night. It was so crowded that there was an unspoken rule that players couldn't stand with their hips squared up to the table, because we needed more room for the customers. Crap shooters picked up their money and threw the dice with the same hand; and if one of them stood square to the table, the crap dealer would tap him on the shoulder and say, "One arm for crap shooters," and the shooter would turn to the side, [laughter]
The wheels were always full, with all the colors out on the layout with a lot of credit play. And the twenty-one games were six-handed all the time. The money was just unbelievable: you never saw less than a ten-dollar bet. It was a real huckledy-buck joint!
Joint Duty / 75
I could deal twenty-one and roulette pretty well. "God, he but there was no way I could keep up with the
looks aivful!" guys on the crap game. Harry Weitz, Dick
Greenberg, and all of these Jewish kids knew how to treat the customer, and they also knew how to hustle the players for tokes — the guys on the crap game could hustle paint off a wall, (laughter) At two o'clock in the morning we'd close a full crap game and cash everyone out. If someone was cashing out for six hundred and forty, the dealer'd take six hundred in one hand and forty in the other and say, "Six hundred and forty . . . forty for the boys! Thank you very much, sir!" And that money would just flash down into the toke box before anyone could say anything. The dealers always kept the odd change.
There was another club across the street, and the bosses from both establishments would go in to each other's businesses and make complimentary bets. Most of the time I dealt the wheel, because that's what I did best, and every time one of those bosses stopped playing he'd hand me a hundred dollar bill. You had to split the toke money with the other dealers if you worked on the crap game, but if you worked roulette you got to keep your own. So besides making fifteen dollars a day in wages, I was averaging two hundred a night in tokes. I was making more in one night of dealing than I made for a whole month in the Marine Corps, [laughter]
Once I worked fourteen nights straight filling in for someone who was sick, and I lost a lot of weight. The girls in Pat's office would say, "Gee, that Sergeant Nelson must be out drunk every night. God, he looks awful, don't he?" [laughter] And I did, working every night and not sleeping. But I always had a pocket full of money to spend on fine dining, good clothes, and just having a good time. And I bought a car, and was always the main driver for my crowd.
Everyone When I went to work at the Twenty-One Club, I
was stealing had already been a boss for five years and had been in the business for twelve . . . but nothing had prepared me for what I was seeing. It was unbelievable! Everyone was stealing — not only hustling tokes, hustling players, and putting up money for themselves, but out-and- out stealing! There was just so much money rolling that nobody seemed to care. It was just overlooked.
76 / ALWAYS BET ON THE BUTCHER
Dealers just flat-assed stole money off the game. For instance, two Greek brothers I worked with on the table would drop fifteen to twenty dollars off the game into the toke box every time they went on break. I refused to do this, but to some degree I was a participant anyway, because the money in the toke box was divided evenly amongst us dealers.
One day one of die Greeks said to me, "Hey, you! Put something in the box!"
"Count me out."
"You have to put something in there!"
I grabbed hold of him and said, "Listen, you son of a bitch, I don't have to do anything .... And if I ever do anything, you're going to be the last one to know about it!" I let go of him, and that was die end of the story. He never bothered me again.
El Cerrito was run by Pechart and Kessel, who had bribed all of the town officials. Pechart and another fairly nice fellow were partners in the Twenty-One Club with Bones Remmer, who might have been the meanest, cmdest guy who ever lived. Remmer had no regard for anyone. He had a tremendous amount of money and power, and he was probably the first person I ever saw wearing a thousand-dollar sport coat . . . but he was basically a pig.
Remmer acted like a pig, and he ate like a pig. I saw him eat a duck one time; it was one of die most disgusting scenes I've ever witnessed. He picked up the whole duck, cooked rare, took an enonnous bite from it, and just let the blood run down both sides of his chin.
One time I was eating at die dealer's table. There was a botde of catsup on the table, and one of the dealers was using a lot of it on his pot roast. Bones called one of the waiters over and said, "What is catsup doing on the dealers' table? Get it off, and keep it off. Catsup costs fifty cents a botde on the black market. Don't ever give it to die dealers again!"
Three or four old-dmers were at die table, and one of them said, "Gee, dial's a shame. No catsup. What do you think die fine should be?"
Another one answered, "Well, I don't know. Two hundred?"
"Oh, no, more than that; four hundred, at least!"
So die fine was set, and witiiin an hour after those old timers had gotten back to die tables diey had stolen four hundred dollars. I'd
Joint Duty ! 77
been around the business for a long time, but had never seen anything like it.
Harry Montague — Harry the Horse, my wise-cracking friend from the Palace Club — was also working there as a dealer, and the first time we got a moment together he asked me, "What's going on, kid? Are you taking anything?"
"God, no! Honest to God, I'm not. I swear I'm not taking any¬ thing."
"Ah well, probably a good thing . . . you couldn't get your hand in a barrel anyway." [laughter]
Another "fine" incident involved sweet old Pop Poffenburg, who was supposed to be my check racker on the wheel game. (No matter how big the game got, Pop never really helped me; he would just sort of stand there all slumped over. He was supposed to be a lookout also, making sure all the bets were paid correctly. We worked half an hour on, and half an hour off, so I spent a lot of time racking checks with my little apron on, just talking to Pop.)
Anyway, I was sitting down since we only had one player, and Pop paid off a bet. He overpaid the guy, and an ornery pit boss came over, yelling, "What's the matter with you, you old son of a bitch? You're too old to deal this game anyway."
Pop's face turned red, and when the boss left he looked at me and said, "The fine will be five hundred."
Within half an hour a gal who had earlier lost a thousand dollars on credit play brought the money over to Pop to redeem her marker. "Oh Pop, here's the thousand I'm in. My husband gave it to me."
Pop counted the money out in two piles: "One, two, three, four, five hundred; one, two, three, four, five hundred. Yes, ma'am, that's one thousand dollars." He took five hundred in one hand, rolled it up, and took five hundred in the other. While picking up the paddle in die drop box with the hand that held the rolled-up five hundred, he coughed, reached up to cover his mouth, and slipped five hundred into his inside coat pocket. The movement was really quick, and die simultaneous actions of dropping half the money, coughing, and covering his mouth would distract any viewer from what he was really doing. I learned a lot from watching this old man. He said to me widi satisfaction, "The fine is paid."
I witnessed it, and though I had nothing to do with it I would be awfully unhappy now if I knew that somebody who worked for me
78 / ALWAYS BET ON THE BUTCHER
saw someone steal from me and failed to tell me about it. But the dealers at the Twenty-One Club were treated so badly that I wouldn't say anything.
The day came when one of the bosses got even greedier, deciding that we could be making much more money by cheating the customers. Harry the Horse found out about it and told me, "They're going to bring in a mechanic on the twenty-one game and start busting these players out."
That was it for me. I was not going to be a party to cheating customers, so I quit.
12
With Harrah's Club After the War
AS THE WAR WAS ENDING Pat used her con¬ nections to get both of us discharged at about tlie same time. We had decided to get married, but first we went down to Los Angeles to help Bill Harrah buy some of the equipment and furnisliings he would need to open Iris new casino. Bill and I went to the shop where they were making these items, including the new keno counter for which I had drawn the plans. The counter was going to be very expensive, because Bill wanted it made from a rare South American hardwood that cost fifteen dollars a foot. I asked, "Why don't we use that other wood at five dollars a foot?" But there was no way that Bill Harrah was going to do anything that wasn't first class.
After a day or two in L.A., Pat and I drove to Las Vegas and were married on Valentine's Day, February 14, 1946. Cliff Jones, who later became Nevada's lieutenant governor, was the judge who married us. Howard Keogh, who had joined the Marine Corps with me, and Judge Jones's wife stood up for us. We went to Death Valley for our honeymoon, and although we didn't get the room we wanted, we had a wonderful time, anyway. Our mar¬ riage started a whole new happy life for me.
Clerk of Arriving in Reno after three the works days in Death Valley, I was anxious to get to work. Harrah's had a contractor working on the joint, but it wasn't near com¬ pletion, so in the meantime, having very little money, I went to work dealing craps in a place across the alley called tire Bonanza Club. A bunch of my old buddies were working there: Jack Duffy, who was one of the finest people in the business; Howard Farris, who later became my partner in the Cal-Neva;
80 / ALWAYS BET ON THE BUTCHER
Eddie Margolis, a real gentleman who ran die place; and another friend, Jimmy Metrovich, a big, good-looking kid, and a great athlete. Like everywhere else after die war, there was a lot of money around this joint, with everyone going for their own tokes.
A couple of mondis went by, and a guy by the name of Sundown Wells, a character known far and wide, took over the joint. I didn't care to work for him, and in the meantime Bill was having a hell of a time controlling his construction site, with a lot of supplies and equipment disappearing. So I quit the Bonanza Club on the first of April and went over to Harrah's with my first official job, "clerk of the works," supervising the new construction and doing whatever I had to do to get the joint open. It was difficult. Bill had an architect, and the theme of the new Harrah's was to be astrological — all twelve signs of the Zodiac were represented in some form. The building was only thirty-five by one hundred and forty feet long, but it was taking a lot of push to get it open, and we were running behind schedule. It seemed like everyone was spoiled from doing "war work," and I ended up doing a lot of physical labor myself. The union people were the worst. While wiring the bathrooms, the electricians would stay in there for hours, smoking cigarettes in the stalls. I'd have to hustle after everyone to get them to work.
When Bill Harrah started to do something, he always did it right. Nearing opening day I noticed a painter working on a big, beautiful, curved bar. He was applying eighteen karat gold leaf, then covering it with a clear coat of lacquer. I was impressed that Bill was going first class with everything, but the bar didn't look nearly as good as I thought it should. Bill came by and asked me what I thought of it.
"Well, Bill," I hedged, "it's all right."
"You don't like it, do you?"
"No, I don't.1'
So he turned to one of the workmen and said, "Take it off."
"God, no, Bill, don't do that. It's all gold!"
"Take it off," he repeated. "I don't care what it is; if it don't look good, it don't look good."
With some kind of solvent the painter scraped off the gold into a bucket. I asked him if any of it could be salvaged, and he told me, "Hell, no!" That's how Bill Harrah did things: anything he didn't like, he took out; and everything he wanted to buy, he bought.
With Harrcih's Club After the War / 81
Aside from being clerk of die works. I also ended up organizing and ordering all die gaming equipment, because the other execudves. Bob Ring and Wayne Martin, had never worked in a regular gambling joint. There were two crap games, two wheels, two faro games, six twenty-ones, and a keno game. I didn't know a lot about slot macliines at the time, so Bill handled their purchase, about a hundred and fifty of them. Since it was difficult to obtain parts for them, Bill just went back to Chicago and bought the Pace factory, one of the major slot machine manufacturers at the time.
A skimpy Before opening, we discussed limits. "What kind of h/inbrnll lbnoit are you going to deal on craps?" he asked. "What do they deal at Harolds Club?"
"Five hundred or a thousand." (An immense limit
for those days.)
"We'll do the same, Warren."
"And Harolds is dealing a five hundred limit on the twenty-one."
"Well, we'll do the same." Then he asked me what kind of a bankroll I thought we'd need. Everything was calculated in my head, and I told him I thought we'd need about two hundred and fifty thousand.
"Does it have to be that large?" he asked.
"Bill, if we have much less than that, it'll be too skimpy. I'd be afraid to go much less than that."
"Well, let's see what we can do."
On the nineteenth of June, the night before we opened, everyone was working late and Bill was in his office. I went in, and he threw a satchel over to me, saying "Here's the bankroll."
"How much is it?"
"Count it."
I took the satchel and counted out sixty-five thousand. "God, Bill, I don't know how we can do this. We've got to put money on the games, fill the slot machines, and if anyone gets out on us, we're screwed!"
"Well, that's all we've got."
I did some maneuvering, and instead of putting ten dollars in the nickel machines that had jackpots of seven-and-a-half dollars, we put in five dollars. Likewise, we put ten dollars instead of twenty in tire
82 / ALWAYS BET ON THE BUTCHER
dimes — we shorted fills on all the machines all the way up to fifty cents.
For the twenty-one games, we put only fifty or sixty dollars in silver on each tray; and 1 actually took big washers and rolled them up in dollar coin wrappers and put them on the twenty-one games to make the trays appear to be filled, [laughter] And of course we had table checks in five, twenty-five, and hundred dollar denominations. I had ordered as many checks as possible, because Bill always made it seem as if there was no end to his bankroll.
We opened on June twentieth with a sixty-five thousand dollar bankroll, and at first things went beautifully, smooth as glass, no problems. The joint was packed, everybody was playing huckledy- buck, and everything was looking good. Then Al Winter from Portland came in. He was drunk:
"Hi, Warren. I want to give you some complimentary play, but I'm drinking, so hold me to no more than three thousand." I gave him the three thousand in hundred-dollar checks, and he went to the crap game, where he began winning right away, rolling a hot hand. He was getting out good, and he built a stack of white, hundred-dollar checks that looked like it amounted to twenty thousand. I was really sweating, when Harrah came up and asked, "How much are those checks worth? How much has he got out"
"Twenty thousand."
"Close the game."
"Bill, you can't close the game. It's opening night."
"Close it, I said!"
"I just can't do that, Bill."
"Well, I'm going downstairs," and he nodded for me to follow him. I walked over to the game and said to Al, "Man, these dice are hot."
"Goddamn it, kid, I got you in my pocket! Can I bet the big six and eight" (Al was the guiding light and the major shareholder in the Sahara when it opened up later in Vegas. He was a neat little guy, but he always liked to show off.)
"Sure, Al."
"How much can I get down?"
"Six hundred."
So we placed the six and eight for six hundred apiece, twelve hundred all together . . . and the dice turned cold and started to
With Harrah's Club After the War / 83
seven away. Al went downhill as fast as he'd gone up, and within thirty or forty minutes he was stuck for three thousand. He decided to quit. "Hey, Warren, I owe you three thousand. Is that right?"
"That's right, Al, you owe me three thousand."
"Can I come in and pay you tomorrow?"
"Sure, Al. That's fine. Good night."
I quit sweating and went downstairs to Bill's office. He gave me a stem look and asked, "What happened?"
I answered, "That guy went broke and owes us three thousand." I was pretty pleased with myself.
"Go back up and lower the limit, Warren."
"I can't; it's not the right thing to do." But I finally relented, went back upstairs to the crap game and took the limit sign down, while telling everyone, "The limit is now two and four hundred."
I really thought that lowering the limit would hurt business, but it didn't. It went on . . . went like a bomb! With the limit at two and four hundred, we still could have gotten our heads knocked off with a hot, high-rolling hand, but no one really got out on us for about six months, and the skimpy bankroll I had been so concerned about continued to grow.
Ex-Marines I had definite ideas on how a gambling joint
from Montana should be run, and I never wanted to give in to Bill when I knew I was right. The dis¬ agreement concerning the crap table limit foreshadowed incidents to come; my hiring practices were another source of aggravation between the two of us.
As soon as I went to work at Harrah's, I began to hire people that I had known before. You had a great chance of working for me if you were an ex-Marine from Montana! [laughter] Everyone wanted to come work for me, partly because of our prior friendships and partly because Harrah's was a great new joint. Wick Williams, my old friend from El Cerrito, came to work for me; Howard Keogh, from the Marines, came to work for me; Howard Farris, my future partner in the Cal-Neva, became a pit boss for me.
Hughie Connolly, who later worked as the graveyard shift manager at the Cal-Neva, had dealt for me before the war, and he was probably the worst dealer ever; however, Hughie had a special charisma, and I loved him very much.
84 / ALWAYS BET ON THE BUTCHER
Eddie Hughes, who was in die army, had been in combat and had gotten shot in the shoulder. His elbow was lame, and he'd hold it up pitifully when someone won, opening his pocket, saying, "How about sometliing for the old soldier?" We tried to stop hustling, but tip money was plentiful and the joint was booming, so we didn't say much.
Back then, right after the war, things were different, and most joints accepted that there would be a little bit of cheating (or embezzling) by their dealers. However, after what I had witnessed in El Cerrito, I was determined that no one was going to take me off like that. Friends would alert me if any hustlers were in town, so I could be on the lookout and protect myself. It's in these kinds of cir¬ cumstances that playing favorites pays off, and I was comfortable hiring people that I knew, for I already understood their strengths and weaknesses.
Playing favorites comes naturally to me, because I always felt that I became successful through chances that were given to me. As a consequence, if a person is any good at all and if I feel that personal connection, I'll play them a favorite. But Bill could sense that I played favorites, and he felt I was giving my people a little too much the best of it. Bill had his bingo people — Bob Ring, Maurice Sheppard, et cetera — from Southern California, and I had my ex-Marine Montanans . . . and never the twain shall meet.
Putting in At Harrah's, even though I had two very knowl-
a peek edgeable guys working for me (Billy Panelli and
Johnny Angeli), I was still nervous about the faro bank game. That game brought in some big money and some big people, and it made me feel very vulnerable. There were so many ways the wiseguys could get the best of you! One of the first peeks ever put in a joint in the state of Nevada was put in at Harrah's, and it came about as a result of an attempt to beat the faro game:
A man named Jake Viles had worked for me at the Palace Club as a shill when I was dealing twenty-one there. He was a dignified- looking man, but he was crippled up with arthritis — he'd sort of shuffle along when he walked, his hands frozen as if in prayer, and his face was always nicked with razor cuts because it was so difficult for him to shave.
With Harrah's Club After the War / 85
Jake was a skilled counter who could remember die whole deck. I could be dealing twenty-one, ending up with eight cards left in my hand before die shuffle, and Jake would be able to name diem all: "Eight of clubs, queen of hearts . . . Even when he'd been drinking and was absolutely potted, he'd still remember all the cards.
At one time in his younger years Jake had managed a joint down in Tijuana. He was a bright man, and I enjoyed his company. On slow days, back at the Palace Club, we would talk, and I would ask him about liis life and about gambling. Perhaps because of my interest in him, Jake was good to me, and he showed me a lot of things.
Jake loved to play faro bank, and every