You can't have just one.

So I scored this beautiful chip (Wow!) at the convention auction in August. I was so excited about this baby I had to buy it's brother the next day. Jeez, where's this gonna end, buyin' Bank Club Hundies and all. Luckily I found I already had the next one in the smkey series, a Golden Bank Club that I bought from Mike Spinetti several years ago. Lousy scan but... Meantime I got the thing sitting on my desk and find it hard to keep my eyes off it for long. It sits next to another die-cut Hundred from the Hotel Last Frontier 21 Club. 1948 was a very good year for chips.

I use the yellow Bank Club to pop the eyes of non-collectors and I used it to gain entree to some stories from a beautiful woman about the old days in Reno. "Ah yes, the Bank Club." she said, Dwayne Kling's The Rise Of The Biggest Little City gives an excellent rundown of it's history and some of the "gentlemen" who owned the joint. Graham and McKay who started gaming in a Reno basement and were ready to take the Bank Club upstairs when it was legal in '31. Sullivan who looked after the place while G & McK were "away" under the hospitality of Leavenworth. Baby Face Nelson, Bugsy and Lanskey and the time Bill Harrah called the cops on that Bank Club bartender. Guns going off, fires starting, people going through doors head first. It was a place where the house did the cheatin' thank you and woe betide you if you tried it the other way around. "The famous Back Alley..." my story teller mused. Harold Smith tells us in his book that he stared down the gangster element from around the corner, backed up by a pit crew that was packing iron that night. Quite the place and quite the chips.