Question of the Day - 12 July 2024

A shy and modest man, Terry Caudill is pretty cagey about when and where he was born.

“At night, in a hospital” is his initial answer. However, he quickly expands on that, saying that he was born in Nampa, Idaho, where he grew up and went to school, college included. The Four Queens owner says he “established a lot of my lifelong values and philosophies growing up in a very rural environment.”

He elaborates, “I knew when I was 12 years old that I wanted to own my own business. I didn’t have any idea what or where, but I didn’t like taking orders and I really liked making decisions. When my parents sent my two sisters and me to buy groceries, they said we could keep the change. My sisters took their share and bought candy. I brought mine home and put it in a jar. I wanted a baseball mitt. I’ve always been willing to sacrifice short term for long-term goals.”

Caudill made sure to stay in school through college. He majored in math, subsequently teaching it for a year in junior high school. “It was more like glorified babysitting, trying to keep their interest in math. These were 12-, 13-year-old kids. I’ve incorporated that since. When I deal with my employees, I don’t run around saying, ‘Do this. Go do that.’ I explain to them what I want them to do and why. ‘Here’s why it benefits us.’ I’ve been like that my whole life.”

Military service then intervened (this was the late '60s) and Caudill followed his tour of duty with “a year or two” of bouncing around southern California. He wound up at the University of California-Santa Barbara, where he took a graduate degree in math. “I liked practical math, using it in a day-to-day environment. That naturally attracted me to the casino industry.”

Santa Barbara was a wonderful place to live, but it’s not as good for starting a career. "You’re either a student or you’re rich and retired. I needed to make a change. Reno was about halfway between Santa Barbara and Idaho. We put everything in a U-Haul and drove to Reno in the middle of winter.”

In Reno, the logical thing to do is to get a job in a casino.

Starting as a keno writer at the now-bygone Harrah’s Reno, Caudill began working his way upwards. “Harrah’s had some of the best training schools in the business at that time. I took the crap school in my off-hours and dealt dice for the remainder of the three years I was there.”

Overqualified as a crap dealer, Caudill went to the University of Nevada Reno to learn accounting. He then faced a quandary. His then-wife wanted to leave Reno. Caudill wanted to stay. Fortunately, his UNR mentor had lined up an interview with a major accounting firm. “Because I knew how to spell ‘casino,’ I became their expert,” he reflects wryly.

One of the firm’s clients happened to be Circus Circus Enterprises. They liked Caudill’s work on their books so much that when the SEC required Circus to set up an internal-audit department, they asked Caudill to come on board to create it. 

He arrived at Circus Circus Enterprises as the head of its auditing department and was soon promoted to corporate vice president and chief accounting officer, a post he held for the remainder of his 11-year tenure.

“I have a lot of respect for Bill Bennett, because he created his own company from scratch. But he was reluctant to change,” Caudill recalls of the late casino mogul. “At Excalibur, one of the biggest hotels in the world at that time, we needed a computer system. I had to go in and ask Mr. Bennett for permission. He never liked computers. He said, ‘Wally Tolin ran this company with a cup of sharp pencils.’ I said, ‘He was a very good man, but we have 20,000 employees and you cannot run this company with a cup of sharp pencils.’

“He looked at me. He liked to stare and whoever broke the silence usually lost the argument. I knew the trick, so I sat there and stared back. He finally said, ‘Terry, you think we need these computers?’ ‘Yes sir, we do.’ ‘OK, go ahead.’”

The years at Circus were formative. “I’ve always been conscious of not wasting anything. That went hand in hand with the Circus philosophy and it's served me very well. You have to be very very careful with your money.”

All went swimmingly until new managers entered the picture. Their philosophy didn’t jibe with Caudill’s, so he bowed out in late 1994.

Tomorrow: Caudill’s career takes him into the bar business and real-estate development. Then he alights on the Four Queens.