Don Laughlin (1931- ) has been an out-of-the-box thinker for many decades now. It was from Don Laughlin that Steve Wynn got the idea of confiscating dealers’ tips and redistributing them to pit bosses. "We don’t have elections. This is a dictatorship," is his attitude toward employee relations. But let’s go back to the beginning, when he grew up in the proverbial one-room schoolhouse.
A son of Owatonna, Minnesota, young Mr. Laughlin was a fur trapper by day and slot machine lessor by night. (Hunting lodges were his best customers.) "Every little bar and restaurant had a couple of slot machines. If you took your car to get it repaired the garage had a couple you could play while you waited," he told the Las Vegas Review-Journal in 1999. He was pulling down $500 a week – three times the wage of his eighth-grade principal. So, when given an ultimatum by aforesaid principal to abandon the slot racket or quit school, Don Laughlin chose the latter. You might say he hasn’t looked back since. Or as he once put it, "The harder I work, the luckier I get." As for his former principal, "He had strong religious convictions and thought he was doing the right thing."
In 1952, the federal government began taking an interest in Minnesota’s black-market slot business, so Don Laughlin moved to Las Vegas, where he tended bar and dealt blackjack. By 1954, he had enough scratch to buy a bar on the west side of town, which he ran as an integrated establishment back when Vegas was "the Mississippi of the West," infamous for its segregation. He flipped it and bought the 101 Club, in North Las Vegas, which he sold in 1964. He then spent the next two years honing his flying skills, living off the profits of the 101 Club sale, and generally waiting for the next good idea to strike him.
In 1966, Don Laughlin was piloting his Cessna across the wastelands of southern Nevada when his eye alit upon a lip of the Colorado River, land then known as South Point, home to fewer than 100 people. "The tiny town was a parched nullity … 150 acres surrounded by vast Bureau of Land Management tracts," wrote Eric Goodman in a Los Angeles Times profile of Laughlin. "But because South Pointe [sic] was Nevada, where the southernmost tip of Clark County extends to California, there were a few shabby motel rooms and humble casinos--four bars with slot machines--on land Mormon pioneers had used as a watermelon patch."
(As late as 1986, according to People magazine, Laughlin had "no doctor, no school and no church.")
The big draw was the Riverside Bait Shop. Aside from the fishing, there wasn’t much reason to come to South Point, a baked slab of land that routinely posts the highest temperatures in Nevada. But where others saw desolation, Don Laughlin spied opportunity. For $235,000, he bought a defunct motel, with plans for drawing upon nearby markets in Arizona and California, between which South Point was thrust like the narrow end of a wedge. Across the river lay Bullhead City, which – following the construction of Davis Dam – "survived as a laid-back community of bait shops, bars, and affordable travel-trailer parks."
Don Laughlin installed his family in four of the eight motel rooms, while he founded his casino in the bar, with two table games and 12 slot machines. Its big draw (besides gambling) was 98-cent chicken dinners.
Tomorrow: From four motel rooms, Don Laughlin builds a one-man empire.
