There are plenty of names of Las Vegas gaming pioneers: Binion, Wynn, Gaughan, Sarno, Siegel.
Don’t forget Mayme V. Stocker.
Her name is on Clark County Gaming License No. 1, issued March 20, 1931. Yes, they called it “gaming” back then, too, not “gambling.” And Mayme was a reluctant licensee.
Las Vegas was still a railroad watering station then, although the town was starting to fill up with surveyors and engineers studying sites for what would become Hoover Dam. The nation was deep in the Great Depression. Banks failed. Businesses closed. Millions of men were out of work.
For more than a dozen years, Americans could not legally buy a drink of beer, whiskey or wine. Prohibition had been in effect in Nevada since 1919. The rest of the nation hopped aboard the “dry” wagon in 1920.
This mattered little to Nevadans – even less to Las Vegans. Gambling had been popular in the mining camps since the first days of Virginia City’s Comstock Lode. Nevada legislators outlawed gambling before the turn of that century. Nevadans ignored that.
In these desperate Depression times, Mayme Stocker and J.H. Morgan plunked down $1,410 for a three-month county license for “gambling & slot machines (2)” at her Northern Club.
Back up to the time Las Vegas went “dry.” Downtown streets were paved as far east as Third Street. With the saloons closed because of Prohibition, the city treasury was running on empty. There was no money for street lights. People trudged home on unpaved streets in the dark, carrying kerosene lanterns.
Oscar Stocker, a railroad yardman, had brought his family here in 1912. There were Mayme; and sons Lester (the oldest), Clarence and Harold. A bitter railroad strike hit Las Vegas hard in the summer of 1922. Las Vegas mustered 2,304 residents then, according to census-takers. There were 366 railroad men, most of them fired during the strike for their union activities.
The tracks of the Tonopah & Tidewater Railroad were being taken up and the roadbed graded for an “auto road” to declining Beatty, comatose Rhyolite, and Goldfield. The Las Vegas high school graduated a class of five seniors. To ease the city’s money problems, the illegal slot machines started whirring and clicking again. Any signs advertising liquor had been taken down eight or ten years ago.
Two days after Prohibition began across the nation, Lou Groesbeck of the Northern Hotel (which was on the second floor of the Northern Club) was arrested with 23 pints of whiskey. His $400 fine was suspended. Bigger news was the landing of the first airplane here.
In 1923, Nevada legislators had been dry long enough. They voted to make Nevada “wet” again – although federal “prohis” (U.S. Treasury agents) continued to enforce the ban in selling drinks. Nevada had only 77,000 residents. Few of them lived south of Tonopah, Goldfield and Pioche. The federal revenuers seldom raided below that line. The pickings here were slim.
That was good news for Las Vegas speakeasies. Their front doors were locked in deference to the law. Customers entered by side doors, on the alleys. There were a lot of alleys downtown then. Fremont Street had only been paved for a year from Main to Fifth Street.
There were also a lot of “soda fountains” downtown: 53 restaurants and 42 “soft drink fountains.” Pop Kress’s State Cafe, at the head of Fremont a few steps from the railroad station, used real dark coffee mugs. Customers passed their mugs through a little window off to the side of the counter for refills, although coffee was not what was being poured.
Across Fremont was the Northern Club: soda fountain downstairs, hotel rooms upstairs for whatever railroad passengers happened to alight in this dusty little town.
In 1925, a couple years after the Northern Club began dispensing what every other soda fountain was dispensing, Lester Stocker began inquiring about chances of making gambling legal. His proposal drew little interest. Besides, gambling was going wide open in Nye, White Pine and Washoe Counties anyway.
Twenty-two seniors graduated from high school here in 1926. The feds, making their occasional sweep down here, seized 1,000 gallons of booze. Lorenzi’s opened way out west of town. Some say there was a still someplace in that Twin Lakes resort. It was considered a weekend trip, so far from downtown.
One of Mayme’s sons, Harold, had met J.H. Morgan in the Mexican border town of Calexico. Morgan ran a brothel there. He drifted up to Las Vegas and took some part in the downstairs operations at the Northern Club.
There was a gambling crackdown in the Reno area. Two Washoe gamblers were sent to prison. A Las Vegas legislator put the bug in Lester Stocker’s ear: $10,000 for “promotional work” might change legislators’ minds about legalizing gambling in Nevada.
Las Vegas’ mayor and 22 others were arrested in one federal liquor sweep in 1929. Saloons were disguised “as much as possible,” according to a story in the Las Vegas Age. In another raid, the feds seized much beer and liquor, four stills and four breweries.
Harold Stocker’s extensive notes reveal how that “promotional” money was raised. Johnnie Horden of the Las Vegas Club put up $2,500. The Stockers twisted the arms of such as Burt Anderson, Fred Alward, Jim Cashman and someone named Coradelli. The $10,000 was raised.
Assemblyman Phil Tobin, a Northern Nevada rancher, introduced the bill in the Legislature. Another bill was introduced to allow divorces after a six-week waiting period, the shortest in the nation. The quickie divorces and gambling became legal in 1931, when those new laws went into effect.
Before then, Harold Stocker noted, they had draw poker, stud poker, low ball, 500 and bridge whist. ”There wasn’t a great deal of difference with legalization,” Harold wrote. “We just had to pay taxes.”
In 1931, gaming licenses were approved for the Northern Club, Boulder Club, Las Vegas Club and Lorenzi’s Resort. Oscar Stocker didn’t want his name in the gaming license. He was afraid it would get him in trouble with the railroad. Mayme’s name went on the license instead. It provided a respectable front. Movie stars Rex Bell and Clara Bow were married after driving up from Searchlight. The feds raided nine Las Vegas establishments. Two months later, they arrested 200 Las Vegans for Prohibition violations.
When the money didn’t pour into the city treasury fast enough, the politicians weren’t shy about asking gaming clubs to pay their license fees six months to a year early. One year: $5,640 for one license. That was a lot of money in Depression times. They paid.
Lester Stocker had been ailing for three years. He died just before Christmas of 1931, just 42 years old. J.H. Morgan and the Stockers split up and, Harold wrote, Morgan “opened a little place around the corner on North First Street, next to the Golden Camel.” In poor health, Morgan committed suicide.
The Apache Hotel, three stories tall, opened in 1932 with 100 rooms, at Second and Fremont Streets. It’s the east corner of the Horseshoe (er, Binion’s) now. It boasted the town’s first elevator. That year, Las Vegas had the highest murder rate in the nation.
Notorious gambling ship owner and rum-runner Tony Cornero had been running the Meadows club out beyond the city limits, across Boulder Highway from where the Castaways (the Showboat) was). He leased the Meadows to another group and left town in a hurry. He would return after World War II to start building the world’s biggest resort hotel: the Stardust on the Strip.
When Prohibition ended in 1933, Las Vegas streets were jammed. The city’s 400 hotel and motel rooms were constantly filled with prospective divorcees waiting out their six-week residence requirements.
The city also overflowed with Hoover Dam workers. Many were eager to flop on the coolness of any lawn available after the hellish temperatures at work down near bedrock on the Colorado River dam site. Others, money in their pockets, headed for the bars and cribs of Block 16, a block north of Fremont Street.
After the dam was completed, Las Vegas was just a place to stop for gas in 1939 on the way to the dam, according to R.C. Pearson, the city’s first building inspector.
Oscar Stocker lived long enough to see son Harold elected a Clark County commissioner. Oscar died in 1941, just three months short of his and Mayme’s 50th wedding anniversary. That year, Tommy Hull opened his El Rancho Vegas way out beyond the city limits at San Francisco Avenue (Sahara Avenue, now) and the old L.A. Highway (today’s Strip). The El Cortez opened downtown. The city filled up as 6,000 soldiers arriving to train at the Army Air Corps bombing and gunnery school. Hundreds of workers started building the Basic Magnesium plant out toward Henderson. America entered World War II.
In 1949, Harold Stocker headed a local group promoting construction of a convention center in Las Vegas. Two years later, he was chairman of the state Republican Party. Brother Clarence died. Bad heart.
Harold resigned as state GOP chairman after accusing Governor Charles Russell of being a tool of U.S. Senator Pat McCarran. The senator had many tools around Nevada, but Governor Russell was not counted among them.
Mayme and Harold Stocker leased out the Northern Club. Mayme became a world traveler. The Northern became the Exchange Club, then the Boulder Club, then the Rainbow Club. Wilbur Clark, who later built the Desert Inn, leased the property from Mayme in 1954 and renamed it the Monte Carlo Club.
The Stocker property was declared unsafe in the mid-1960s. It leaned with the wind. When it was demolished in 1966, it was found that the adobe in the back wall had been plastered over a big coil bedspring for support. The Coin Castle occupies the spot today, on the alley just east of the Golden Gate.
Mayme Stocker was honored by “a whole yard full of people” at her home in the Huntridge subdivision on her 92nd birthday. She was “a remarkably spry woman,” wrote the Review-Journal’s Bill Vincent, “with bright, clear eyes and the direct manner of one of independent spirit.” She died in 1972, at age 97.
