Question of the Day - 24 February 2019

Yep. It's true. 

In North Las Vegas on Lake Mead Boulevard, a 30-slot storefront casino operated for a time as Beverly Hillbillies Gambler Casino. The Las Vegas Sun paid a visit in 2009. The occasion was that the Dotty’s chain coveted it as a potential location for expansion. "Dilapidated would be a compliment," reporter Mike Trask wrote of the property’s condition.

We get questions about Max Baer Jr. and his casino quest from time to time, but this one had the odd angle, so we're responding to it. Here's the whole tale. 

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 CBS sitcom "The Beverly Hillbillies," which ran for nine seasons and 274 episodes. Baer appeared in 272 of them.

Jethro, as everyone remembers, is the son of patriarch Jed Clampett’s cousin Pearl. Sharp as a beach ball, Jethro is a big good-looking dunce, though the Clampetts like to brag about the fact that he finished the sixth grade. Actually, Max Baer graduated from Santa Clara University with a degree in business administration and a minor in philosophy.   

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. 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; we know of a few that remained as late as 2014 at the Las Vegas Club that had a progressive jackpot.

Meanwhile, Baer refined his ideas for Jethro Bodine’s Beverly Hillbillies Mansion and Casino, planned to incorporate the "warmth, humor, and good old-fashioned American fun" of the sitcom, with such attractions as the 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 would read, "Y’All Come Back Now, Y’Hear?"

Great ideas. But their implementation proved to be somewhat more challenging.

In the late '70s, Baer made a brief attempt at taking over the building at Stateline, South Lake Tahoe, 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 on S. Virginia Street. However, the owners of the mall ultimately decided against selling him the property.

In 2003, Baer bought a closed Walmart in Carson City for $4.3 million. Though the area was zoned for gaming, the shopping center's own restrictions disallowed it. 

Sometime around 2005, Baer sublicensed the theme to the North Las Vegas grind joint in question, in return for a 10% stake in the operation; he appeared before the Gaming Control Board in August 2005 seeking licensing as part owner of the Beverly Hillbillies Gambler Casino. But the location didn’t last long in its Beverly Hillbillies incarnation; only a few years later, it was sold to new owners.

In 2007, Baer 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. His plans for the property included a five-story 240-room hotel, 40,000-square-foot gambling floor with 800 slot machines and 16 tables, showroom, and movie theater.

About a year ago, it was reported that Baer, Douglas County, and a couple others were involved in litigation that delayed the project “indefinitely.”

Contrary to what some people believe, the Carson City casino Bodine’s has nothing to do with Max Baer and “The Beverly Hillbillies.” In fact, CBS asked the owner of Bodine’s, Mike Pegram, not to use the name for his casino and Max Baer called naming the casino after his character “unfair.” But Pegram successfully claimed that he bought the name when he purchased the property from the owners of Bodine’s Restaurant.