Strip Dealers School, Inc.

Over the weekend I stopped by a yard sale, that suddenly became a garage sale when it started raining in Vegas. I spotted a familiar green lump of cloth that I knew to be a gaming felt, all crumpled up in a box. I pulled it out and opened up a used Stardust blackjack layout. I asked how much and everyone responded with, Oh thats Grandpa's. Somebody go and get Grandpa.

A few minutes later grandpa showed up and I asked how much he wanted for the layout. He said, Oh that old thing, just take it! I protested once, but he instisted so I said OK. Then someone asked me if I was interested in a blackjack table. Tucked away in the over-crowded garage was a blackjack table top and it had a felt. The felt was imprinted with "Strip Dealers School".

Grandpa explained that he used to work there and that they typically covered their tables with old felts removed from some of the Strip casinos. But at one point the owner bought custom felts, with the school name, and the Stardust felt was not needed.

Grandpa, a very nice and kindly person, went on to explain that while he worked at the school, they never had their own brand/issue of chips. They frequently used chips from older casinos that had gone out of business. The problem was that many employees would take these (what we now call obsolete) chips, thinking they were still good.

Some of the obsoletes included Diamond Jim's Nevada Club $5's, Circus Circus Prize Unit chips. Grandpa, whose name is Ed McLaughlin, was kind enough to give me one of each chip along with my purchase of the blackjack table. (Picture to follow.)

I saw in the TCR that there is a listing for Strip Dealers Schools, but no address. Ed's business card shows 2401 Las Vegas Blvd., So. Las Vegas, NV 89104 as the correct address.

Ed was very nice and I wanted to publicly thank him for his kindness. It was interesting to note that Ed also had some Coin Castle, yellow plastic interlocking chips, generic $1 metal slot machine tokens and Foxy's plastic free-play tokens. He had them as teaching aids for his students to handle disimilar size and weight items.

He said that the generic tokens were actually used at Foxy's, in their slot machines. He gave me both a plastic and metal Foxy token. The Coin Castle chip I already had. However, he had another yellow interlocking chip that instead of being stamped (like a rubber stamp) "Coin Castle" it was "Riverside Casino". Which Riverside is unknown.

Jim Follis