Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Chip by chip, collectors hope to build a museum

After years of gobbling up cocktail napkins, lighters, matchbooks and chips and swapping them with like minds, members of the Casino Chip & Gaming Token Collectors Club are looking for a home.

Not just any home. A fly-by-night storefront won't do. POST Modern isn't big enough, and a casino wouldn't be considered neutral territory.

The nonprofit group wants a permanent facility to showcase the past before it's forgotten. It has $104,000 for the endeavor.

But then what?

Is there really a shortage of Las Vegas history? This city is researched, studied, written about and celebrated. UNLV Special Collections has a vast selection of memorabilia. The Nevada State Museum and Historical Society has newspaper records. The Las Vegas News Bureau has photographs and B-roll footage. The Neon Museum rescues signs. Smaller groups are taking a preservation and educational approach to architecture. The history is out there ; it's just fragmented.

"You can go to UNLV and see everything we have and more, but you have to make an appointment to go and see it," Florida collector Donald Durnin says. "How many people staying on the Strip are going to leave the casino to go do that?"

Sheldon Smith, a collector from Chicago in love with all things Las Vegas, says many of the group's history buffs want to see a memorabilia house open to the public.

The truth, they say, is in the object.

Carey Burke, the group's historian, made his pleas last week in a Riviera conference room pasted with keno cards, enlarged photographs, albums of postcards and hotel brochures: "Our history is getting wiped out. The gambling industry doesn't seem to care about its own history."

Like small-town residents at a community meeting , those attending nodded their heads and talked about their mission as collectors. Some suggested grabbing cocktail napkins, stationery and keno instructions from each hotel they visit. Foresight, rather than hindsight.

"Gamblers, we always leave things in our pockets," Smith says.

Some items are precious and invaluable and offer a personal experience of a bygone era that's much more visceral than what you might read in a book.

It's one thing to hear about entertainers who played the Sands, El Rancho and Flamingo hotels. It's another to see a mailer touting Edith Piaf in her "first Las Vegas appearance" or a hotel calendar promoting Pearl Bailey and Judy Garland. The names are as golden now as they were then.

Rick Olsen of Las Vegas has all of this in his collection , which includes items that date to 1906. He has a newspaper from 1931, the year gambling was legalized. The El Rancho cigarette holders and a Landmark hotel employee's uniform can really launch the imagination.

One man had a satchel made from carpet taken from the Dunes.

All of the collectors love Las Vegas history, the myths and reality. Some are millionaires, some are blue - collar, paying no more than $100 for an item.

They've got a lot of stuff and are searching for more.

Like art collectors, they don't damage what they have, they live with it for a number of years, then pass it on when it comes time.

More than 20 percent of Burke's collection are duplicates that he plans to donate.

A lot of what the group has is stored in a climate-controlled warehouse in Las Vegas. The rest is with those who have vast and valuable collections, but want to see a safe, permanent home.

Burke, who moved to Las Vegas in 1946 as a child, started collecting chips, then gravitated to other items.

"You get to looking at a chip. It's pretty, but there's not much information on it."

Matches, he says, fill out the story. They promote bars or buffets or tout the 400 rooms with air conditioning.

But the question is: Just who will come to see the chips, research archives and seek nostalgia in cocktail napkins from the Mint?

Unlike the restored neon signs on Fremont Street, Durnin says, small memorabilia require concentration, and museums in Las Vegas are short on visitors.

But the collectors are hoping.

archive