The low-profile, self-effacing Boyd clan has come a long way from Enid, Oklahoma. There, on April 23, 1910, company patriarch Sam Boyd was born. At age 18, he headed even further west, in a roundabout career that eventually led him to Las Vegas. Legend has it he arrived with but $80 to his name – some versions of the saga say $30 -- and began working his way up through the ranks of the casino industry. He already had another mouth to feed, son Bill having been born in 1931. In classic old-school fashion, Sam Boyd broke in as a dealer. (Bill Boyd is not to be confused, by the way, with poker legend William Walter Boyd [1906-1997], although both men would become downtown casino executives.)
Sam Boyd was not without experience. As his New York Times obituary explained, "He began his gaming career in 1928 running bingo games on a gambling ship anchored off Long Beach, Calif. He later ran games of chance in Hawaii, before returning to run the bingo concession aboard the gambling liner S.S. Rex, billed as ‘the world's largest floating casino.’" Offshore gambling was outlawed during the waning days of peacetime and Boyd forsook California for Las Vegas, where he fatefully arrived on Labor Day, 1941. He dealt penny roulette and learned the ropes at long-vanished joints like the El Rancho and the Jackpot Casino, later becoming a shift boss at the Sahara and the Flamingo.
"He thought a seven-day week was slacking off," recalled College of Southern Nevada history professor Michael Green and such diligence by the elder Boyd would make him a wealthy man. He wasn’t hard to spot, either: His signature fashion statement was a tall, white Stetson. Father and son always went by "Sam" and "Bill," indicative of the informal atmosphere their eponymous company maintains to this day, even after growing into Southern Nevada’s fifth-largest employer, with a 9,300-person workforce.
Sam Boyd eventually amassed sufficient capital to make deals, first for a percentage of the Sahara, then for three percent of the The Mint (where he became general manager) and eventually for the Union Plaza, in 1971, where he broke with tradition by hiring female dealers. The latter move may have been partly a marketing gimmick but it also was, as Boyd Senior put it, "just the right thing to do." The Mob was omnipresent in those days and Boyd had to walk a tightrope. As former business partner Al Garbian described it, "We knew all of them. We weren’t connected, but we knew all of them."
Bill wasn’t initially inclined to follow in Dad’s footsteps. The U.S. Army veteran (1953-55) took a law degree at the University of Utah. He was in his early thirties before Sam could entice to go him to go into business together. Bill bought his half of Henderson’s Eldorado Casino in 1962 by swapping pro bono legal services for a stake in the joint, which remains in the Boyd corporate portfolio to this day. The younger Boyd was once arrested there, actually, when Henderson police deemed the exotic dancers’ work papers not in order. Bill Boyd took the lawmen to court and won. The Eldorado was a humble place back then: 41 slots and three table games. Today it has 10 times as many slots – but only four tables. The steakhouse, incidentally, is named for one of three third-generation Boyd executives: Vice Chairman Marianne Johnson, Bill’s daughter. Sam Boyd II is an executive host at Sam’s Town (fittingly) and William Jr. has been a Boyd Gaming vice president for the past 23 years.
After The Mint was sold, the Eldorado and nearby Jokers Wild were all the Boyds had. But, in the mid-Seventies, they began thinking big, recruiting co-investors and forming the Boyd Group in 1973. (It would become Boyd Gaming in 1988.) Their first property was the California Hotel, which opened in January 1975. Trouble was, they would have to build their client base from scratch.
According to former Boyd exec John Woodrum, in a 1999 interview, Sam Boyd assembled his team and told them that Hawaii was going to be their target market for their new property. He knew from first-hand experience that Hawaiians tended to get "rock fever" and loved to gamble. He parlayed his connections in the 50th state into a signature Boyd marketing strategy. The Boyds also stocked the California Hotel with amenities that would make islanders feel at home: rice cookers in the hotel room, not tiki torches in the lobby. Dealers wore Hawaiian shirts; island delicacies (like oxtail soup) dominated the restaurant menus.
To this day, Hawaiian vacationers are the mainstay of Boyd’s downtown business, which grew to include the Fremont Hotel and Main Street Station, purchased in 1985 and 1993, respectively. Long-distance flights chartered by Boyd Gaming channeled the bulk of Las Vegas’ Hawaiian clientele to Boyd’s doorstep. The annual Lei Day is an important event on the Boyd calendar.
Tomorrow: The Boyds take a gamble out on Boulder Highway and are recruited to help clean up the Las Vegas Strip.
