The post office said if he wanted delivery service he had to give a name to the town. And so in 1970, Laughlin, Nevada, was added to the map. Don Laughlin had moved to the “community”, if it could be called that, four years before. He had been looking for a place to put a gambling hall, and he found a patch of land at the extreme south end of the state, near Davis Dam and across the Colorado River from a small town called Bullhead City, Arizona. Laughlin had run a small casino called the 101 Club in North Las Vegas for five years before he sold it in 1964 for $165,000. That was his stake as he entered the barren desert 100 miles south of Las Vegas.
Don Laughlin did not come to Nevada as an amateur in the gambling business. He was born and raised in Owatonna, Minnesota, in the 1930s and 1940s. There he saw gambling machines and other paraphernalia and instantly found them fascinating. As a teenager just beginning high school, he somehow ordered a slot machine from a mail-order catalog and was able to place it in a local club. Using profits from the machine, he bought more machines, and soon he ran a route of machines, punchboards, and pull tabs. Of course, all of this was illegal. He was forced to leave school because of his activity, but he did not mind, as he was making very good money for the time. It was not until 1952, following the work of the Kefauver Committee, that Minnesota cracked down on this illegal activity. With the passage of the Gambling Devices Act of 1951 (the Johnson Act), manufacturers could not easily ship gambling machines into the state. Laughlin knew there had to be better places to ply his trade. He vacationed in Las Vegas and quickly repeated the words of Brigham Young, “This is the place”. In his twenties he worked in casinos and bars and then purchased his own beer and wine house. He added slot machines. His modest success allowed him to have funds to buy the 101 Club.
In Laughlin, Don Laughlin acquired an eight-room motel, which became the basis for expansion. He called his resort the Riverside. By 1972 it had forty-eight rooms and a casino. Eventually the Riverside grew to 1,400 rooms and a recreational vehicle (RV) park with 800 spaces.
Today the Riverside is but one of ten casino hotels in a community having 11,000 rooms. Certainly Laughlin was gambling’s boomtown of the 1980s as Harrah’s, the Hilton, Circus Circus, Ramada (Tropicana), and the Golden Nugget all built there. In the 1990s business fell off as Native American casinos in both California and Arizona picked off customers on their way to the river resort. Laughlin has also been hurt by large casinos in Las Vegas and by the fact that commercial air travel to the town is very limited. The essential market for the town is drive-in traffic from southern California and the Phoenix area as well as a steady stream of senior citizens from all over the United States and Canada. Laughlin features many RV parks near all of its resorts as well as the most inexpensive hotel rooms in a gambling resort in North America. Don Laughlin continues to be a booster for the gambling town, seeking to have events that will attract both younger and older patrons. Country music artists and motorcycle rallies are always part of the fare.
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