Max Baer Jr., the son of legendary boxer Max Baer, was born in 1937 in Oakland, California. He grew up in Sacramento and moved to Los Angeles in his early 20s. In 1962, he landed the role of Jethro Bodine in the "The Beverly Hillbillies." This TV sitcom was extremely popular, running for nine seasons and 274 episodes.
After the show went off the air in 1971, Baer became a screenwriter and movie producer. He developed and acted in the 1974 movie Macon County Line. According to Wikipedia, "It was the highest-grossing movie per dollar invested at the time (a record that would later be dwarfed by The Blair Witch Project). Made for $110,000, it garnered almost $25 million at the box-office."
Another huge money maker for Baer was the 1976 drama Ode to Billy Joe, based on the Bobbie Gentry pop song. Baer produced it for $1.1 million and earned back $37 million.
Baer moved to the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe in 1978, where he became interested in the gambling industry and hatched the idea for a "Beverly Hillbillies"-themed casino. In 1991, he bought licensing rights to the brand from CBS for an estimated $1 million; in 1999 a few dozen "Beverly Hillbillies" slot machines were manufactured and installed in a dozen or so Nevada casinos.
Meanwhile, Baer refined his ideas for Jethro Bodine’s Beverly Hillbillies Mansion and Casino. The theme incorporates the "warmth, humor, and good old-fashioned American fun" of the sitcom, with such attractions as a five-times-the-size Clampett mansion for the casino exterior, a 200-foot-tall flameless oil derrick, Granny’s Shotgun Wedding Chapel, Jethro’s All-You-Kin-Et Buffet, Ellie May’s Buns (a bakery), Granny’s White Lightnin’ Bar, rough-hewn log bedframes in the hotel rooms, even bleached-wood outhouse doors with brass beer-bottle door handles. Of course, a sign over the exit will read, "Y’All Come Back Now, Y’Hear?"
Great ideas. But their implementation has proved to be somewhat more challenging.
In the early 1990s, Baer made a brief attempt at taking over the building at Stateline, at the lake, that housed John’s Tahoe Nugget. However, that quickly fell apart when the restrictive Tahoe Regional Planning Agency would allow neither hotel rooms to be added to the casino, nor a hillbilly-type jalopy to be placed on the roof.
In 1999, Baer received approval from Reno officials to build his hotel-casino at the Park Lane Mall, just up the street from the Peppermill hotel-casino on S. Virginia Street. However, the owners of the mall decided against selling him the property. (They might be kicking themselves now; the Park Lane closed in 2006 and not much has happened there since).
In 2003, Baer bought a closed Wal-Mart in Carson City for $4.3 million. Though the area is zoned 'commercial,' including gaming, the shopping center's own restrictions disallowed it. Baer claims he had a variance lined up, but it got quashed at the 11th hour.
Finally, in May 2007, Baer announced that he sold the Carson property and bought a 2.5-acre parcel just south of the Carson City Capital District boundary in Douglas County for $1.2 million. He also announced plans to purchase another 20 acres, as soon as he received the zoning variance for his casino, which would be part of a proposed 95-acre Douglas County redevelopment project owned by a local car dealer and a developer.
The first phase of the casino project would comprise 300,000 square feet, including a five-story 240-room hotel, 40,000-square-foot gambling floor with 800 slot machines and 16 tables, showroom, and movie theater. Two 12-story towers with a total of nearly 500 additional rooms, along with convention space, are planned for future phases.
So that’s where the project stands at the moment. We’ll keep you updated on the progress of Jethro’s Casino.
For a look at the artist’s rendition of it, go to www.jethroscasino.com/.
