Don Laughlin was one of those casino characters who might be a challenge to explain to a new generation of gaming-industry executives educated in esteemed centers of higher education.
Laughlin, a true gambling pioneer who turned a care-worn motel and gas station into a Colorado River casino boomtown that bore his name, died Sunday at age 92, his family announced on Facebook.
In his long relationship with gambling, Laughlin started as a Minnesota teenager growing up around Owatonna. Although he lasted just a year in high school before chucking his textbooks and chasing his fortune, in his prime he could easily have taught graduate courses in the sawdust end of the casino business and the spirit of bootstrap entrepreneurship. Any person who manages to create a boomtown with his own name on it is worth listening to.
In an interview with Nevada newspaper Hall-of-Famer A.D. Hopkins for the book The First 100: Portraits of the Men and Women Who Shaped Las Vegas, Laughlin said of his old principal, “He said to get out of the gambling business or get out of high school. I couldn’t see what one had to do with the other.” As Laughlin explained it, “Every little bar and restaurant had a couple of slot machines. If you took your car and got it repaired, the garage had a couple you could play while you waited.”
We’ll leave the discussion of the colorful world of punchboards and suspicious slots for another day. Suffice to say, Laughlin broke into the business like so many of his generation, on the short side of propriety. I like to note that he was born in 1931 in Minnesota, the same year gambling was legalized a short 1,600 miles away in Nevada.
Laughlin learned the ABCs of gambling in the grind of Minnesota’s illegal, but rarely prosecuted, slot-machine and punchboard rackets back in the days when no one of sound mind could have predicted the spread of legalized gambling across America.
On the strength of his hustle and head for numbers, he moved west and wound up in Nevada, where the action was legal and the profits plentiful if you were on the house side of the table and able to risk your bankroll for a shot at the big time. With Las Vegas way above his means, after some searching, Laughlin found his way to the Colorado River just across from Bullhead City at a time free-spending construction workers building power plants were hell-bent for action of any kind. He bought six acres and an eight-room motel and went to work.
I still marvel at how he looked at a homely construction supply camp with a post office and saw a future for himself that would eventually blossom into a hotel-casino called the Riverside in a place called Laughlin.
He did it with uncommon tenacity, an ability to risk everything on himself, and a personality that made him a throwback to the generation of operators who gladhanded customers and weren’t afraid to rub elbows with common players.
Laughlin let the sharks in the desert have the Strip. He stayed right there on the shores of the Colorado and for some years had the only game in town. Even after the town grew to nearly a dozen casinos and more than 11,000 rooms, drawing headliners to its showrooms and snowbirds all the way from Minnesota and beyond, he kept working literally day and night.
One secret to his success, he said, was his location. Despite its seemingly remote spot on the map, he was right where he wanted to be. And when Laughlin needed a bridge across the Colorado to improve traffic safety, not to mention access to his place, he had it built himself.
“I wanted a place on a state line,” he said, “because I’ve always known that a place on a state line gets much higher play than anywhere else.”
In a business where everyone seeks an edge, Laughlin found his at the edge of the Colorado.
