A Family Affair
Harolds Club and the Smiths Remembered

From World War II to the early 1960s, Harolds Club was the largest casino in Nevada and probably the most widely known in the world. A Family Affair is the story of Harolds and the remarkable family that owned it. It is also a revealing chronicle of the gaming industry’s colorful, vigorous, and sometimes outrageous youth.
    A semi-itinerant family of carnival game concessionaires named Smith founded Harolds Club in Reno in 1935, starting in a rented “hole-in-the-wall” storefront two doors from the First National Bank. No casino owners were ever more idiosyncratic in their approach to the business than the Smiths. Pappy, the patriarch of the family, and his sons, Harold and Raymond A., were capable of audacious strokes of genius in advancing the fortunes of their club, but they also broke every accepted rule of business and management, doing many things that should have led to the ruin of their enterprise, but somehow did not. They quickly became the most successful operators in Nevada.
    In popular memory, the Smiths and their club have come to exemplify “the good old days” of the gaming industry, when personal connections mattered more than experience and credentials, gaming regulations were weak and poorly enforced, and the bottom line wasn’t everything. Former employees remember Harolds Club almost as if it were one big extended family and they were all part of it. It was so much fun to work at the club that many people actually looked forward to going in every day. One longtime employee even went so far as to liken working there to being on “a paid vacation.”
    By the mid-1960s, the club’s relaxed, unconventional approach to business was no longer paying dividends, and its competitors were beginning to get ahead. In addition, there were significant cash flow problems, brought on in part by the habits of some members of the family. With Pappy’s death in 1967, the family and the club lost the one person who could hold it all together. It was time to get out of the business.
    In 1970, Howard Hughes’s Summa Corporation bought Harolds Club, and the new bosses quickly set about changing the culture of the operation to bring it into line with their corporate values. Employees found the changes so disturbing that in less than a year, most had fled to other casinos. An era was ending in the history of Reno’s gaming industry, and Harolds Club was the first casino to experience conversion to the new ways.

A Family Affair: Harolds Club and the Smiths Remembered. Reno: UNOHP, 2003. (342 pages, 110 illustrations, paperback, $24.95)