One day, probably 20 years ago (time flies!), my husband and I were searching ebay for Nevada casino collectibles. One of us found some old Nevada phone books. They ranged from 1945-1957, and each book covered virtually the entire state of Nevada. I think I kind of snorted and wondered who on earth would want 50-year-old phone books?! Then we started talking about it and thought there might be some cool ads, and casino names, maybe casino owner names, maybe even some mobster names...and maybe it might be fun to get them!?!

There were seven phone books in all, and individual auctions for each one of them. There were only 1-2 minutes between each auction, and we liked to snipe. We set our total maximum at $200. I went from one auction to the next, and the next, one right after the other. We were lucky and the phone books didn't garner much attention...they only went for about $15-$25 each. When the auctions were all over, we got an email from the seller who said something like "I don't know how you did it, but you got all of my phone books!" She gave us the total, including shipping, and we paid her.

A week or so later, when the phone books arrived, we had a blast!! There were club names we'd never heard of, there were yellow page ads from iconic clubs, there were a few recognizable names in the white pages...we were like a couple of kids on Christmas morning, showing each other what we'd found and quickly searching other books for the same or similar bits of information! lol!

We had such fun with them that we've searched for old Nevada phone books ever since then...we have about 70-75 of them now. Some of them cover the state of Nevada, others are from Las Vegas, or Reno, several others are from small towns and are only a few pages long. Our oldest book is from 1931 and the majority of them are older than 1980 (I think).

One name and address that we found in the phone books was Benny Binion. On our next trip to Las Vegas we found his house, which was no longer occupied. We've paid several visits to the house since then. The property is fenced and gated. One year the gate was open and my husband drove in. He got out of the car and the caretaker came running, to shoo us off of the property. My husband tried to bribe our way in, but had no luck. Oh well...we had to try!

When we found the house in 2006, there was a new informational plaque posted...probably from the 2005 centennial.