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I stayed in Mesquite overnight recently and got to talking to a dealer who appeared to be in his late 60s or early 70s. He started telling stories about a guy name Sy Red who invented slot machines and built the first casino in Mesquite. The whole thing sounded like a tall tale. Any truth to any of it?
Well, William Silas "Si" Redd didn't exactly invent slot machines; that happened a couple of decades before he was born. But he did open the first casino in Mesquite, Nevada. So your dealer was batting 50% on the facts that you attribute to him. But it sounds like the spirit of his stories, at least, was in keeping with Si Redd's character and his influence on the gambling industry.
The son of an impoverished Mississippi sharecropping family, William Redd's entrepreneurial career began at the age of seven when he started selling magazine subscriptions. He entered the gaming business aged 18, when he purchased a used pinball machine and persuaded the owner of a hamburger stand to give it floor space in return for half the revenues.
From there, Redd moved north and progressed to operating lucrative jukebox routes in Boston before heading west to Nevada where, in the late '60s, he landed a job distributing slot machines for Bally Manufacturing. He went on to found his own company, A-1 Supply, in 1975 and a year later acquired sole rights to his former employer's video business. Around this time, people started referring to Redd as "The Slot Machine King," which is also a version of the name of the definitive biography about him by Jack Harpster, who worked in the newspaper industry for more than 40 years, then retired to Reno to write biographies and history. King of the Slots is not only the best biography we've ever read about a gambling-industry insider, but it's one of the best biographies we've ever read, period. Highly recommended.
Anyway, the company Redd founded underwent a couple of name changes, first (in 1979) to SIRCOMA, which stood for "SI Redd COin MAchines," then later to International Game Technology (yes, the renowned slot manufacturer, IGT). In its latter incarnation, the company went public on Nasdaq in the early 1980s, by which point it held 90 percent of the ever-growing video-gaming market in Nevada.
Redd was still at the helm when IGT started developing lottery-game technology, a $1 billion industry by the mid-'80s in which his company became a major player. He stepped down as president in 1986, however, amid growing competition from Japan and a slump in the Nevada gaming market. He handed over the reins to Charles W. Mathewson, who turned the company's fortunes around with heavy investment in research and development, an area always close to Redd's heart, which culminated in the launch of the Megabucks linked-progressive jackpot network.
Redd also played a big part in the growth of Mesquite, which he wanted to turn into a gambling destination as big as Reno. He purchased a truck stop and transformed its 28-room motel into the 1,000-room resort-casino Oasis, which he subsequently sold for $31 million.
It wasn't all success stories, and while Si Redd has been praised as a genius when it came to sales and marketing, his business acumen has been questioned, with flops including the failed Pride of Mississippi offshore-casino venture that cost him millions.
Still, he's remembered primarily as a visionary who played a huge role in introducing such game-changing innovations as video poker and Megabucks, a contribution to the local economy for which he was inaugurated into both the Gaming Hall of Fame and the Nevada Business Hall of Fame.
He died at his beach home in Solana Beach, California, after an extended illness at the ripe old age of 91.