Local casino owner John Wolfram has told me how he sat in a car way out of town, on the Boulder Highway where Flamingo Road began. He was with Sam Boyd, and Sam asked him to look at the cars and count them. Sam told John that each of those cars was worth a dollar, or some such number. A certain number of cars would pull into a casino if it were located right there. As the story goes, Wolfram said that he was not into that kind of speculation and that he would pass on the offer to buy a piece of the action. Wolfram has been successful in his own smaller casinos; in later years, he owned the Klondike at the far south end of the Strip. Sam Boyd not only was successful, but he became a phenomenon in Las Vegas gambling. But it did not start when Sam’s Town Hotel and Casino opened at the corners of Nellis, Flamingo, and the Boulder Highway; the seeds of success were planted decades before.
Sam Boyd was an “Okie,” born in Enid in 1910. His father did well as the owner of a small town taxicab company, but he died when Sam was only nine years old. Sam’s mother was a nurse who felt that to support her family, she needed a job in a more prosperous location. Eventually, the family relocated to Long Beach, California. Not only did Long Beach have better jobs for those in the medical fields, but it also offered opportunities for other people who liked to “hustle.” And Sam Boyd as a teenager came to like hustling a lot. He worked as a barker and a carnival games operator on the Pike. The lessons he learned on how to draw people into games were lessons he would use throughout his lifetime. He came to use “fun books,” flags, balloons, parties, anything to make the player feel the game was exciting. He also learned that the operator could make a lot of money if he went after the masses—a few dollars from everyone was worth the same as many dollars from a single player. After the carnival gaming experience, Sam Boyd learned all about casino games on one of the gambling ships that worked out of southern California. He dealt each game. He also became a bingo game operator.
He married Mary Neuman in 1931, and the following year their only child, Bill, was born. Sam always emphasized to Bill that his career would be much better if he received a formal college education. Bill got an undergraduate education, and then he received a law degree. His “enhanced” career began in a law office, but soon he found that he could be helpful as the attorney for his father’s casino interests, and then he could be even more helpful as a casino executive himself. He eventually helped the Boyd organization make the transition to a corporate property with interests in many locations besides Las Vegas.
In the late 1930s, Sam Boyd spent five years in Hawaii involved with a variety of bingo establishments. In those short years he came to appreciate the Hawaiian population with its Asian heritage and love for gambling. This appreciation became the nexus of his marketing efforts when he set up operations in Las Vegas several years later.
Sam came to Las Vegas in 1941, in response to a federal crackdown on gambling in California. His first jobs were in small casinos on Fremont Street. He went on to work at the El Rancho Vegas, the first casino on the Las Vegas Strip. After a tour of duty with the army in World War II, he was employed at the Flamingo, after “Bugsy” Siegel. He also worked in northern Nevada at Lake Tahoe. His son, while a student at the University of Nevada in Reno, worked with him during summers. Sam also held positions at the Sahara and the Thunderbird. Sam Boyd loved working, and he was very diligent about saving as much of his salary as possible. In 1952, he had a chance to buy 1 percent of the Sahara. Hard work habits now became a compulsion. Sam purchased more shares when the Sahara developed the Mint downtown. He kept working and saving. In 1962, Sam, his son, and two others purchased the casino that became the El Dorado in downtown Henderson. In 1971, he became a partner in the Union Plaza casino at the end of Fremont Street. There he was innovative, as he used women as dealers at blackjack games. His goal was to build a player base. He also brought musical plays onto the property.
Sam Boyd took his money out of the Plaza so that he could become the major investor in the California Hotel just off Fremont Street. Quickly the California Hotel became the venue for Hawaiian players. His controlling interests in the California and the property in Henderson necessitated that he drive the thirteen miles that separated the two properties each day. (This distance is significant to me, as the Boyds sponsored an official minimarathon race in which I participated, between the doors of the two hotels.) It was on one of these drives that he realized there might be a market among the many cars that were on Boulder Highway each day.
Realtor Chuck Ruthe was on the board of directors of Boyd Casinos and used his expertise to put together the land deal that allowed the construction of Sam’s Town and its opening in 1979. Many establishments had previously tried to target local gamblers for their market—most were on Fremont Street, but there was also the Showboat, at the top of Boulder Highway. The Sam Boyd touch, however, made his efforts to get the local gamblers especially lucrative. His Sam’s Town ushered in a new genre of Las Vegas casino—the locals’ casino. Without Sam’s Town showing the way, it is unlikely there would have been an Arizona Charlie’s, Santa Fe, Texas, Boulder Station, Fiesta, or Sunset Station. As the 1980s went on, however, Sam Boyd realized that the old management styles would not be totally effective if Boyd’s were to expand into a public company and go into new jurisdictions. He yielded corporate power to his son and enjoyed his final years as an elder statesman representing the days of the personal touch in Las Vegas. He was able to see his company set higher goals under Bill’s leadership. Sam Boyd died in 1992 before the company entered the Tunica, Mississippi, market with the largest hotel in the state, established a riverboat in Missouri, and made a management agreement with a large casino for the Choctaw tribe in Mississippi.
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