Found this 25¢ deck of cards at a neighborhood yard sale today. Usually a pretty grim scene for casino/gambling geeks hereabouts. Every other car in Ladd's Addition, where I live in Portland, is a Subaru and well gosh, hitting the tables at Vegas isn’t as much fun as saving whales or thinking globally while acting locally if you get my drift. No ashtrays for sale here, no chips, no swizzle sticks, no fun. Did find 500 #000 bubble mailers for $5 last year though and bought em. Some holistic/organic mail order quack was selling out, probably got a job at city hall or somethin’.

All that aside, I looked up Jessie Beck in Dwayne Kling’s excellent Reno book just to see what time frame we’re looking at for this house. What a nice story is Jessie Beck and her Riverside Casino. Pappy Smith noticed Jessie when she was a cashier in Texas and she was able to get a roulette dealers job in Harolds Club in the late '30's as a result. She built a respected reputation while moving through the casino business at Harolds. Married to Fred Beck, she took over his keno, poker, pan and horse book concessions at Harolds after he died. When Hughes Corp. bought Harolds Club, her lease was ended but she bought the Riverside in '71 and hired on Harolds staff who left as a result of the Hughes deal. Very much a hands-on owner and easy to find on the casino floor. According to Kling in The Rise Of The Biggest Little City,

Beck, who was known as the Gambling Grandmother of Reno, spent untold thousands of hours and thousands of dollars doing favors for servicemen in Vietnam and all over the world. The Award of Merit, the highest honor the Defense Department can give a civilian, was presented to her in 1968. In 1969 then-governor Paul Laxalt named her a Distinguished Nevadan.

She sold in 1978 to retire and died in ’87, aged 83. Didn’t know any of this before today although I was aware of the name. That’s the nice thing about this hobby, you can find something new always and I like the way that chips (and cards!) always seem to lead to people. Who knows, maybe one night at the Riverside Jessie dealt some blackjack with these cards!

Images of Jessie Beck's friendly chips available for viewing at Paul Hegge's Silver State Treasures http://www.silver-state-treasures.com/reno/nvrjbrno.htm