On the Back Roads by Bill Graves Read Free Book Online

Dam. Obviously, that drive was an inconvenience for customers, a condition casino operators adore. Gamblers are not gambling when they are driving. The boomtown needed a bridge.
    Rather than wait for two state and two county governments to decide where a bridge should be located, casino owner Don Laughlin built one where he wanted it and then gave it to them. It cost him $3.5 million. Generous? Sure, but cleverly so. The 745-foot span is right next to his property—his roulette tables, poker games, and a couple thousand clinking, chiming, chrome-plated slot machines that take everything from nickels to twenty-five dollar tokens. Don Laughlin’s Riverside Resort Hotel and Casino gets first crack at the gamblers pouring into town across his bridge.
    I left Needles at 8:00 this morning, crossing from California into Arizona and into a later time zone. An hour later, I crossed Don’s bridge, leaving Arizona and entering Nevada. Now I am back in the earlier time zone. So I get to pass through the nine o’clock hour twice this morning. It’s great how these magical things happen on the road.
    I turned into Don Laughlin’s 800-site RV park across from his casino complex. It is Sunday and very busy. I have stayed in Laughlin many times, but it grows so fast, each time is a visit to an updated version. I have met Don be fore, but I am going to look him up again.
    Don lives in a rooftop penthouse over the twenty-eighth floor of a new wing of his 1,404-room hotel. A lady in his office told me that Don does not show up there until late in themorning. He usually works after midnight, especially on Saturdays. I arranged to meet him later at the tea dance, a Sunday-afternoon tradition at the Riverside, where Don is a regular.
    Don started here in 1964, when he plunked down $35,000 for a small bar and restaurant on six acres of land next to the river. Called the Riverside, it had twelve slot machines and was on a brush-lined, dirt road that led nowhere. “When it rained, the road was one long mud puddle,” recalls Danny Laughlin, who grew up in the town named for his father.
    Although Don’s contribution is deserving of the town being named after him, he claims that it was not his idea. Relaxing at a table in the ballroom between dances with his girlfriend (he is divorced), Don explained, “A lot of people look at it like, boy, you must be on a big ego kick. You got the town named after you. My answer is jokingly, ‘No, they named it after my mother.’”
    He had wanted to call the town Riverside or Casino, imitating another Nevada border town named Jackpot. But the people at the post office changed his mind. “The man who came down here was named O’Neil,” Don explained. “I forgot his title. Postal inspector, I think. He said that they didn’t like my suggestion of Riverside or Casino because they are too common. He said Laughlin was a good Irish name. O’Neil liked it, so that’s how it happened.”
    The son of poor farmers in Owatonna, Minnesota, Don knew early on that he didn’t want to be a farmer. Although gambling was illegal in Minnesota, many people, including his mother, played slot machines. They fascinated him. Don bought his first one out of a mail-order catalog. Until his high-school principal came down on him, he was taking in more money as a student than most full-time workers in Owatonna. So he quit school to operate his six machines, placed in taverns and stores, until Minnesota stopped turning a blind eye to gambling.
    Don moved to Las Vegas in 1952 at the age twenty-one. Finally in his element, he worked as a bartender and went todealer’s school at night. Don saved his money and two years later bought a bar and restaurant. He sold that after ten years, moved here, and made a boomtown that never closes.
    Don is probably many times a millionaire. What’s important, he’s doing what he wants to do with his life and very much