Robert A. Ring, a native of Missouri, was born in 1913. He spent most of his childhood years in California, attending schools in Ocean Park and Santa Monica. Like many of his young contemporaries, Ring sold papers, did odd jobs, and learned valuable lessons about the American economy. He became interested in sports and games, first as a member of school teams (he was captain of his high school basketball team), and later as a worker with games of skill and chance played in the southern California resort areas.

Just out of his teens and still a college student, Robert Ring met and became acquainted with John and William Harrah, father and son entrepreneurs in California's sporadically-legal bingo parlors. By the summer of 1938, their association resulted in Ring following the Harrahs to Reno, Nevada. John and William Harrah had moved the year before to the place where games of chance were legal at all times, instead of at the whim of local politicians. Within a short time, William F. Harrah, with Robert Ring and a few other employees, developed a gaming business that ultimately came to dominate northern Nevada's tourist industry. The huge resort-hotel-casino-entertainment complex grew under Harrah's management—and Robert Ring's active participation—to be the largest such organization in the state. Robert Ring gives his observations and discusses the processes leading to the maturing of the entertainment complex and the public offering of stock in the corporations.