Real to Reel; Laughlin Boomtown in the Nevada Desert

The Nevada desert is dry desolate and seems uninhabitable and yet the gambling and entertainment Mecca of Las Vegas is carved from this land and now 100 miles south of Las Vegas the tiny community of Laughlin is emerging as Nevada's fastest growing resort area now. The bright lights and neon glitter of Las Vegas attract 12 million tourists a year. Tourism and gambling provide the financial backbone for the Southern Nevada economy. But Las Vegas was a small railroad town in 1946 when the notorious Bugsy Siegel built the Flamingo Hotel. And few people envision the Las Vegas strip of today when they saw a few hotel casinos along the old L.A. highway miles from the center of town. But legalized gambling

first class entertainment a friendly casual Western atmosphere chuckwagon buffets and bargain prices attracted tourists and gamblers from all over the world. Now the cactus and sage brush of the Southern Nevada desert is spreading. Another resort area 100 miles south of Las Vegas. That's 100 miles of isolated seemingly endless desert that extends to the extreme southern tip of Nevada along the Colorado River where it meets Arizona and California. In 1966 one building comprised the area called South Point the Edgewater had 12 bar stools a few slot machines and eight motel rooms. Well there wasn't a lot here there was just this. One building here with this resort and an old house on the parking lot. It was close to a bar. And it had closed up. They're out of business. And we.

But the property Don Loughlin bought that bankrupt isolated club and six acres of riverfront property for two hundred thirty five thousand dollars. The longtime gambler had just sold the one to one club in north Las Vegas. The Riverside opened in August 1966. After the one room bar was expanded so that a blackjack table and craps table could be added to the 12 slot machines. Laughlin says he saw great potential in that isolated stretch of desert along the west bank of the Colorado River. At that time even I was thirty or forty thousand people within. 30 miles of us so we figured we had good potential. For a casino because the Las Vegas was over a hundred mile drive. And. Flying over the area. It looked like a centimeter to be a successful business. In 1966 the closest town was bowhead city on the Arizona side of the river. That small community had about 600 residents most lived in mobile home parks on the Nevada side the South Point area had so few residents there wasn't even agreement on its name.

Some people called it saw a point some people called it Davis dam Nevada. Some people call the bullshit about it. So I had several. They had several names in the multi named sparsely populated area received its mail in Searchlight a town 45 miles to the north. It was a bureaucratic mix up in the application process for its own post office. That gave the town its present name. Well I don't know if it's named after me or not. When we applied for a post office down here Why gentlemen I think his name was O'Neill who came down representing the Post Office Department and we asked that it be called Riverside because the name of the casino was Riverside and then. He said But what would your second choice be and we said Casino one of them in Nevada because there is a jackpot of that. And then he said well what about lawful and I said well I'd prefer one of the first two. And when the paperwork came through it came through off line. So when I saw him Mr. O'Neal. A few months later I asked him why they made that decision and he said Well there are too many Riverside's we don't want any more every state's got to

Riverside the mail gets mixed up. And as you know we don't really Force Office Department really doesn't like to use a gambling name. Because they're a government agency and he said why not use Loughlin as a good Irish name. Loughlin was named postmaster and the town post office can still be found in a corner of the riverside casino behind a bank of slot machines. In 1966 the one casino resort had few other amenities even such basics as electricity for air conditioning weren't guaranteed. I can remember when we were first here in the one that one would have a thunderstorm the power would go off it might stay off for two days. A lot of times it would it would be in the summertime and it would get well over 100 degrees in the casino and we never lose a customer because there was no one else to go. There wasn't any place else to go for nearly five years until the bobcat and Monte Carlo were opened. Expanding the Laughlin skyline to include three casinos with a grand total of twenty seven motel rooms. The Monte Carlo

was closed after a cheating scandal but was reopened in April 1978 as the Crystal Palace when it was purchased by a Las Vegas gynecologist and two dentists. The Crystal Palace is the only Loughlin casino that is not on the banks of the Colorado River. It's on the west side of Casino Drive near Laughlin only market. In January 1980 disagreement over management policy among the owners led them to file for bankruptcy reorganization under Chapter 11. The Crystal Palace Casino remains in operation and the 100 plus employees get regular paychecks. However the sale of the Crystal Palace for just under four million dollars is in the works along with plans for a multimillion dollar highrise expansion a converted bar. The bobcat opened in 1970. It was later sold and renamed the Southpoint Nevada club. A third sale in January 1979 to the Del Webb corporation gave the Nevada club its present name.

The owners of the Sahara and mint in Las Vegas spent a reported 15 million dollars to buy and renovate the Nevada club along with 40 acres of prime riverfront property. The Del Webb Corporation also owns the 78 room wing tree in just across the river. Reportedly a five story 150 room addition is planned for the Nevada club which now has nearly 600 employees but only 23 hotel rooms. The Riverside Crystal Palace and the Vatican have class C unrestricted gaming licenses which allow them to have an unlimited number of slot machines and table games. Loved one's casino population stabilised with these three resorts until 1980. The next two casinos opened after passage of a 1973 Clark County ordinance. It required a resort to have one hundred fifty hotel rooms and certain customer services to qualify for an unrestricted license. The Regency opened in January 1980.

Its builder Bud Soper was the former owner of the Monte Carlo. With no hotel rooms a class-B restricted license limits the Regency to 75 slot machines and five table games the smallest Loughlin casino has 40 employees. The Colorado Bell opened in November 1980 also with a restricted Class B license because it was exclusively ACC seen O. While Colorado Bell management says a 10 million dollar 10 story hotel addition is planned informed sources say the casino will be sold by advanced patent technology operators of a Nevada slot vending company. The Colorado club had opened in 1979 before the Regency and Colorado bell but it closed in December 1980. Tom and Margaret a lardy who had operated the Pioneer Club in downtown Las Vegas for 16 years spent an estimated 12 million dollars to purchase renovate and rename the Colorado club. The pioneer with one hundred fifty three hotel rooms opened on the first day of 1982

and it brought ninety seven foot river twin brother of Las Vegas landmark Vegas Vic to the Laughlin shoreline. What do you prefer to Las Vegas now. At this point I really do and I think one of the one of the big reasons is Los Vegas is going through a little bit of a transition transition change right now. I think we're going to have to back away from the very heavily commercialized way they handle people and really kind of get back to kind of old style Las Vegas. This was 20 years ago. Well I don't know about 20 years ago. Loughlin is the way it was 16 years ago. The LRT sold the Las Vegas Pioneer Club in November 1982. With the first year operating budget that approaches 20 million dollars. Dillard is

optimistic the Pioneer Club will end its first year in the black. Crowds of gambling tourists and locals. Keep the 500 plus employees busy and with the scarcity of hotels. One pioneer has 100 percent occupancy almost every day of the year in June 1981. One's tallest building the six storey Edgewater Hotel opened Edgewater casino opened a few months later making it last one seventh a C-note. With one hundred sixty two rooms the Edgewater has 400 employees. In August 1982 it opened the only sports book in Laughlin the Edgewater got into the business of bringing customers in on junkets shortly after its casino opened. And in August 1982 I began organizing airline junkets from Los Angeles and Phoenix areas. So at the end of 1982 the booming metropolis of Laughlin has seven casinos. Five with hotel facilities too with limited size casinos one in

bankruptcy but almost a multimillion dollar hotel casino and restaurant expansion. The five member town board wants to see planned growth in Loughlin. Its chairman Jack Dotson is a retired San Fernando police chief. He now operates the county owned sportsman's park located at the base of Davis dam. Dotson is bullish on Loughlin because of the atmosphere the congeniality. The friendliness and the ability to the water sports and that sort of thing. And if you ever are down here at sundown or early in the morning to see the sunrise. It will go on. Dotson and his wife moved to Laughlin in 1074. Since then he's been a leading advocate of growth in Laughlin. But housing for both employees and tourists is a major issue. We need the rooms. We turn away people here all the time.

That airport across the way we have somewhere around a thousand planes a week coming here bringing people out of all. Phases of California Nevada Arizona and even some farther away than that. We have people here right now from Australia. We have people here from my part Minnesota New York Montana Wyoming Laughlin has a grand total of five hundred fifteen hotel rooms another three hundred sixty two RV spaces with hookups and on weekends the casino parking lots become a sea of campers and RV life once 93 permanent residents live in a condo complex a trailer park and one house is what many people incorrectly believe Las Vegas to be a casino town where nobody really lives. Despite this Dotson predicts Loughlin will become the lake of Southern Nevada. Before that can happen more hotel rooms must be built and housing must be made

available for the Laughlin workforce. Most of the thirty five hundred people work in Laughlin Nevada. Live in Bullhead City Arizona. This creates some unique problems like commuting to work on a ferryboat living and working in two different time zones. It also creates some financial problems. The data has no state income tax. Arizona does commuting to work across a river. Well it's exciting and fun because I mean across the river is like going to a vacation every day. You live in the city and work in Laughlin How do you feel about the commute. It's not bad. I just drive across it's not that hard. If there was housing in Loughlin would you live on this side. Yes I would. Housing construction and resort expansion in Laughlin are limited by two major factors. Lack of a sewage system and lack of available land for development. The federal government owns 90 percent of the land in Laughlin the town presently only has

about twelve hundred acres some of it is impossible to develop but nearly 1000 acres of federal land is being sold to a developer for twenty four million dollars. Responsibility for selecting that developer on the Colorado River Commission. That commission is a state agency created by the Nevada legislature in 1935. Its purpose is to oversee development sale and use of the land power and water resources along the Colorado River. The chairman of that commission is optimistic about the future of Lochlann. I don't see any reason not to develop it. It's not what you would consider an area that should be set aside for anything else so there's going to be development down there Claudia and I think we have to deal within the framework of reality but also I think development can if it's done properly be a major asset to this part of the state. The multimillion dollar development will include streets housing shopping centers schools and recreational facilities.

We were looking for people not just people who were going to dump some money on us and then sell the land catch as catch can. We're going we've set up parameters on the way we would like to see that area developed. We're working as I said within the framework of the Clark County master plan and seeing that there is orderly proper development down there. That the sewage facilities are adequate and if necessary we can provide some water down there with the profits from that land sale. The Colorado River Commission plans to purchase an additional 9000 acres of federal government land for five million dollars. That land may also be sold to qualifying private developers in the future. Another very serious problem for the future development of Laughlin is the lack of a sewage system. Now each of the seven casinos has its own sanitation facilities most of which are overburdened. We've tried to go down there using just packaged plants with packaged plants. Really a pain in the neck quite frankly. We've got to be operating we maintain they're expensive.

And even that has not allowed the kind of growth down there that it is potentially there. The Clark County Sanitation District will be constructing a 1.5 million dollar sewage system for the Laughlin casino area slated for completion by early 1984 while Laughlin lies alongside the Colorado River. Water can't be taken from that without federal government approval. Now that is allocated 300000 acre feet of river water per year. Most of that is targeted for the Las Vegas Valley. Although Las Vegas doesn't use the full allocation now population growth estimates indicate it will use the entire 300000 acre feet by the year 2000. At this point Laughlin has no share of that river water and growth there could create problems for the Las Vegas water supply. Indeed the need for water resources whether it be in Loughlin or any other community and the stress that it brings on the. Of billable total water supply is certainly there.

Is there a possibility that Laughlin sitting on the edge of the Colorado River could have its growth limited because of a lack of available water. Certainly. There's only a certain allocation legal allocation to the state of Nevada in Lawson's within the state and about it. That was decreed by the Supreme Court in 1964 for all of the lower basin states. It could be that California was to develop some areas down there and they have exhausted their allocation of the river and they could sit right on the river and not have the water. That's true in Laughlin as it might be in Arizona as it might be in California. It's one of those things that you see the water and it's right there but because of prior commitments and legal recall requirements that water is not available for use. If Colorado River water is not available for Laughlin further development could be jeopardized. The present ground water supply may not even be adequate now. The existing development in the Laughlin area. The casinos primarily are on wells and do have most of them have permits now. The status of those

permits. I'm not sure of. I've been told rumors are some of them are not illegal. Some of them are. I'm sure that this is going to have to be addressed. We do feel there is water adequate for what we're doing right now. Is there a possibility that the groundwater that's being used in Laughlin right now is really Colorado River water and that that could create problems at the state of Nevada and the federal government. You're certain you have possibility. Absolutely. Well we're very close to the river. So just for purposes of discussion 50 feet from the river is a real question a valid question. Are you pumping groundwater or you're pumping river water. Ironically the recreational aspect of the Colorado River is a major attraction for a lot of visitors. You know water is magic in the desert. And even if the people don't like to fish. And so that way the fishing is actually down here. They say they don't like to fish or water ski at least they're letting their ferry boat ride. And 24 hours a day. A lot of people just like to look at the water watch the river go by.

This is probably the biggest attraction we got. That river is also the boundary between Nevada and Arizona on the Arizona side Bullhead City was first populated in the 1940s as a housing site for the Davis dam construction workers. A huge rock that allegedly looks like a bull's head gave the city its name. That Rock has been covered by the waters of Lake Mojave since 1953 when the dam was topped off the unincorporated area in Bullhead City stretches nearly 40 miles south to Needles California. It includes holiday shores Riviera and Riverbend. Bullhead city's location in the Sun Belt and proximity to the legalized gambling of Laughlin has brought rapid growth. Approximately 600 trailer park residents live there in 1966 when Don Laughlin opened the riverside. That population now exceeds 20000 with another eight to ten thousand snowbirds mainly retired people fleeing the cold weather of the winter months. Average daytime

temperatures in Laughlin Bullhead City are in the upper 60s. Well that city is a stretched out community of mobile home parks real estate offices gas stations and restaurants. More than 3000 Loughlin casino workers live in what was once a retirement community. Ten years ago it was primarily retired. Now we're here towards the tourism in the resort industry. Just recently and a slowdown of the average age approximately five years ago was around 62 to 63 years of age. Today it's about 40 to 43 years of age. So it has dropped in sort of way fishing camping and water sports play a large part in Bullhead city's tourism £30 striped bass are regularly pulled from the Colorado River. The record catch is a 62 pound bass and trout are also plentiful in the summer when temperatures can reach 100 and 20 degrees. The younger crowd comes in to sun water ski and carouse lifelines casinos are an additional magnet drawing people to the lower Colorado

and city has been described as a supply base for Laughlin. We're kind of the retail district up here Bullhead City as you know and Laughlin is the the fun part of boyhood city which is on the other side of the river. BI Are people going over there working naturally and coming back over here and spending their money. It is very important to our economy. Of course a lot. Of reports are. That way. Despite their geographic proximity Laughlin and Bullhead City are very distinct communities. Well had city rolls up its sidewalks when the bars close at 1am. In contrast Laughlin has no sidewalks and the casinos never closed. Bullhead City has 600 motel rooms 300 sites for RV hook ups mobile home parks houses apartments condominiums and unlimited space for campers. Its airport handles about fifteen hundred small planes each month. For Laughlin casinos the Riverside Edgewater pioneer and Nevada Club own land on the Arizona side with parking in their lots alone for seventeen hundred

vehicles. The 100 room River Queen motel is owned by Don Laughlin the original I bought into the motel business over there because we needed a place to run our ferry boats. Or hauling between sixty and seventy thousand people a month on our ferry boats from the Arizona side and that we only caught them coming in late. We don't call them on the return. A 13 story addition to the Riverside Hotel is underway with two hundred fifty rooms it has the distinction of being the town's first skyscraper. Don Loughlin this resort has come a long way from the 12 slot machine one room casino and expansion has been a continual piecemeal process. We've actually been under construction ever since we've been here. There we were never able to get any bank financing to build so every time that we've accumulate a little money we just add another room on. So we've got a series of additions. The Riverside now has an eight hundred fifty seat showroom where visitors can see first run movies nightly for 99 cents. That price includes popcorn. It's also been used for conventions sporting events and even female mud wrestling

which reportedly drew a large crowd. With Riverside revenue estimated in excess of 20 million dollars in 1982 Don Loughlin has come a long way from his illegal gambling days in junior high school called in the principal's office in my hometown of autonomous sauda and informed by the school principal that. He was very upset about the me being in the slot machine business which wasn't really legal. It was tolerated but in those years and. I was given an ultimatum. I'd have to get out of the gambling business or get out of the school. So I got out of the school. Do you ever regret that decision. Oh I thought about it many times. I would have liked to have had an education but. I think the business comes first. Now each year Laughlin and his mother fly back to Minnesota where August 13th is Don Loughlin day in Tanakh. Laughlin sees expansion in the future of the town that bears his name.

I think that. Eventually we'll probably see 15 or 20 casinos down here within the next 10 years in this area support that kind of growth. Oh not now there's a couple of the clubs in the area that really aren't doing too well right now. I think it's at this time it's overbuilt. In time that all. Of the business the increase in business will become. Here for example were up 22 percent over last year in a recession period. And I just I think it's mostly with what Vegas runs off. To Vegas in a month in a front page story. The Wall Street Journal observed quote While Las Vegas and its diamond studded high rollers have been slowed a bit by the recession blue jeans and t shirt crowd are rolling right along although at a lower level unquote. Of course it is much smaller than Las Vegas but it's made incredible gains in its casino winnings. Fiscal Year 82 saw a five point five percent increase in Clark County gaming revenue while Laughlin had a 38 percent increase in the first quarter of fiscal

year 83 was even more impressive. While Clark County winnings rose only seven point three percent and registered a 54 percent gain. It's interesting to note that accounts for one and a half percent of the seven point three percent Clark County increase the gaming and entertainment capital of Las Vegas and the small but rapidly growing share several similarities in their backgrounds. In the early 1900s Las Vegas was a dusty desert Depot but the railroad between Los Angeles and Salt Lake City Laughlin sits on the banks of the Colorado River which was once a major north south transportation route. Both had major dam construction projects Hoover Dam 30 miles south of Las Vegas and Davis dam just north of what is now Laughlin. Both have grown and desert land that was thought to be uninhabitable. Las Vegas was believed to be recession proof until recently. Now the neophyte Loughlin is flourishing.

Despite this economic downturn with these similarities should Las Vegas feel threatened by its newer and much smaller cousin. Oh I don't think so. Las Vegas is a very strong market. Las Vegas is really it's probably feeling a little bit of pain right now strictly due to the recession. Why aren't you feeling the recession. I think we deal to a different clientele. You know we we really heavy. Or we try to market very heavily to the Mid-America. And price structure brings a lot of people down here. People come to Laughlin for a variety of reasons. Oh I just love this area for fishing and hunting and everything. When we come over here to go fishing and my wife does all the gambling and we started here by staying overnight last year. Eight days and probably two weeks this time. What do you like about Laughlin. The gambling. The river the food everything. I can picture you attempt your blood. People are friendly.

Yeah very. I hear it every day people say while Las Vegas is cold and they don't people don't treat us right I don't mean by that I don't mean everybody in Las Vegas is that way but it only takes one out of town and mistreat somebody to undo what the 10 good ones do. And most of our business is business that used to go to Las Vegas and they come down here because they get treated better and they get. Other places are a lot better. I don't know it's it seems more homey and it seems easier to get around. It's more glamorous there but it's nice here. We like it here. It's not that we don't do any advertising. We do very little. And most of it's word of mouth. And the reason we can't actively go out into the market. Is more people visit this area now than we actually have capacity for. Why offline has three key elements legalized gambling desirable winter weather and the water of the Colorado River. When these assets are combined with the low prices and friendly Western atmosphere of the early loss they get stays

there seems to be no limit to its growth potential. But if any of these elements are removed Loughlin could fade back into oblivion like the mining boom towns of the Old West. A.