Changing the Game

Women at Work in Las Vegas, 1940-1990

Joanne L. Goodwin

• Publisher: University of Nevada Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780874179613
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The growth of Las Vegas that began in the 1940s brought an influx of both women and men looking to work in the expanding hotel and casino industries. In fact, for the next fifty years the proportion of women in the labor force was greater in Las Vegas than the United States as a whole. Joanne L. Goodwin's study captures the shifting boundaries of women's employment in the postwar decades with narratives drawn from the Las Vegas Women Oral History Project. It counters clichéd pictures of women at work in the famed resort city as it explores women's real strategies for economic survival and success.Their experiences anticipated major trends in post-World War II labor history: the national migration of workers during and after the war, the growing proportion of women in the labor force, balancing work with family life, the unionization of service workers, and, above all, the desegregation of the labor force by sex and race. These narratives show women in Las Vegas resisting preassigned roles, seeing their work as a testimony of skill, a measure of independence, and a fulfillment of needs. Overall, these stories of women who lived and worked in Las Vegas in the last half of the twentieth century reveal much about the broader transitions for women in America between 1940 and 1990.

Chapter 1

CLAUDINE BARBARA WILLIAMS

Casino Owner

I was always kind of a take-charge person.

—Claudine Barbara Williams

In the world of gaming, few women have made it to the executive offices.¹ Claudine Barbara Williams is the exception. She spent most of her time since her teenage years learning games, working in gaming, and owning and operating casinos. Williams's experiences span the decades from backroom private gambling clubs of the late 1930s to corporate ownership beginning in the late 1960s until she stepped down as chairwoman in the late 1990s. She flourished in this unusual domain for women during the second half of the twentieth century.

Like many of her contemporaries, Claudine Williams learned the value of money during the hard years of the Depression. She started earning as a young girl alongside her mother, who worked in a cafeteria a few hours a week. She first witnessed the excitement of games of chance a few years later and discovered the work she wanted to do for life. Before she was out of high school, she worked in a supper club in Louisiana near her home and helped to support her family. She learned everything she could about the games as fast as she could, made lifelong friends with some of the masters in the Texas gambling world like Benny Binion and Jake Friedman, and met her future husband and business partner Shelby Williams.²

Claudine and Shelby Williams moved to Las Vegas in 1963 to pursue a business opportunity with the Silver Slipper casino located on the Las Vegas Strip. Within a few years they had turned that property around, sold it to Howard Hughes, and prepared for their next venture—building the Holiday Casino. Claudine Williams described herself as intimately involved in the daily casino operations working side by side with Shelby, even as they raised their son. The size and scale of the casino operation allowed her to manage the business in a personal way. She took pride in knowing her employees. She also knew every game in the casino and was able to step in to deal if the situation called for it. She called it a mom-and-pop operation, and it competed successfully in Las Vegas during the final era of mob-controlled properties and skimming scandals.

As Shelby's health failed, Claudine assumed more of the duties and eventually took over entirely. Respected for her knowledge of the business and for her business acumen, her transition to president and general manager of the Holiday Casino (later Harrah's Hotel and Casino) in 1977 went smoothly. Business associates invited Williams to join in ventures that facilitated the growth of the Las Vegas economy. She was not only the rare female executive of a major casino, but also the first woman to serve as chair of the board of directors of a bank in the state of Nevada (American Bank of Commerce), and the first woman to serve as the president of the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce. In 1992 she was honored by her peers as the first woman inducted into the Gaming Hall of Fame. In these roles and many others, Claudine Williams became a pioneer for the generation that followed.³

She explained her successes in a male-dominated field as being willing to do what needed to be done. “To have equality, you've got to give equality” Williams said about the first step for women in the workplace. She acknowledged the challenges faced by women workers today as they attempt to reach the upper levels of management. Yet, the discrimination she felt most dearly was that of society's scorn placed on men and women who tried to support their families and make a living in gaming. Reading more closely, Williams's success also came from relationships she valued and developed from her earliest days. Whether it was coworkers who taught her games, friends who looked in on her as a young business owner, or bank officers who gave her loans to open a club, cultivating relationships as well as her work ethic proved to be an essential strategy for her path-breaking success.⁴

Williams sold her final holdings in the Holiday Casino to Holiday Inn Corporation in 1983 and became chair of the board of directors. She saw the move as a positive change that allowed her to stay involved in policymaking without the demands of ownership. This change allowed her to devote more of her time to community philanthropy. A firm believer in giving back to the community that had given her so much, she made numerous substantial gifts to the UNLV, and endowed scholarships for Harrah's employees and their children.

I was born in DeSoto Parish, near the little town of Mansfield, Louisiana. It's about eighteen miles outside of Shreveport, Louisiana, which is in Caddo Parish. Shreveport is not a big city, but it was a big city compared to where I was born. That's where we lived in my very early years and that's where I have my earliest memories. It was big farming country with cotton, peanut, sugar cane, and all kind of farming down through Louisiana.⁵

Shreveport is very close to Texas where the Texas oil fields were—Longview, Kilgore, Gladewater. There's a thirteen-mile triangle, which is twenty or thirty miles in some spots from that area. The Texas border was in and out of the whole area. Back in the oil booms, people followed those towns. Wherever there would be a boom, they would go there to work. That's why my mother moved there—to be able to work as a waitress. She also had lots of sisters and some brothers and they all lived right around in the area of Shreveport. She was close to relatives and close to where her mother was and she could get help with us, I suppose.

My mother was by then a single mother and I had one sister two years older than I was. My mother married an oil-field worker and when she showed up pregnant with me it must have been more pressure than he could stand. He left and we never saw him again. I thought it was his loss.

When I was about twelve years old I got a job in the same restaurant she worked in. My mother worked the split shift. She worked the noon rush and then she was off four hours and went back and worked the dinner rush. They gave me a job during the rush hours after school and on weekends. I would work just putting ice in the glasses and putting butter on the little butter plates. We had a lot of oil-field workers that carried a lunch and they would put in the order and I would put them in the brown paper bags and that sort of thing. Sundays didn't matter in the oil field. They worked Saturdays and Sundays too. They had different shifts that worked all the time. Those oil wells had to keep pumping. So I started to work very early, right along with her.

The wages weren't that high. It wasn't fabulous, but it was great that there were jobs. There were so many years that there weren't any jobs during the Depression. The good salaries and the good jobs didn't really come on until after World War II started. People began needing new appliances that were hard to get. That's when jobs began to get more plentiful.

I was always kind of a take-charge person and my mother was a wonderful, generous lady. The tips that she'd make during the day, her sisters would come by and get them and our rent would come due. Once I started working I took charge of all the tips and I'd hide them where they couldn't get them. So that's one of my early memories working with my mother. She was just very childlike and she'd say, “They need it. We have to give it to them.” And I would say, “No, we don't. Not until our rent is paid.” So that's the early part that I remember.

I went to a Catholic boarding school in Marshall, Texas, which is in between Shreveport and Longview. We were eighteen miles from home. My mother would always come on the weekend and that sort of thing. But with her working at night and as we got older, she had us both in boarding school. My sister loved it. I didn't. I wanted to come home all the time. Then as I grew a little older I went to St. Vincent's Academy as a day student. That's when I went to work at the Caddo Hotel, which is in Shreveport.

They had a little newsstand and I was hired to keep the case full with the magazines filled up and the cigarettes brought forward from out of the storage. … They had a little dice board where you threw dice for double or nothing, for cigarettes and cigars and magazines. One day the lady went to the restroom and let me watch her board. Well, I was in love, then. That's what I wanted to do. It was dealing with people and it was amusing them—seeing the fun that they got from winning and the thrill I got from just being a part of it. There hadn't been a whole lot of excitement in my life up until that time. There was no cash involved—double or nothing. I'm sure they did it just for entertainment. They didn't do it to try to win a whole bunch of cigarettes. It was magazines, cigars, cigarettes, candy, and chewing gum, anything you rolled double for. So I worked there until they let me work it one day a week. Other than that, I just relieved her, which I really don't remember how long that was.

Then some people from Dallas came up and opened a big, beautiful supper club called the Forty-One Club in Bossier Parish just across the river from Shreveport. They had big-name bands and just an elegant place. In the back was a private club where they had casino-type gaming. I went out and told them I knew how to deal dice. Well, I didn't know what odds were because double or nothing was all I'd ever seen. The man said, “Yeah, you're eighteen years old and you know how to deal, don't you?” And I started crying. I said, “I've quit my job and I need this job.” So he said, “Well, shut up. If you want to learn, be out here tomorrow at two o'clock and I'll help you.” His name was Claude Williams and my maiden name was Williams, also. So I think that made him take a little special interest in me. I went out every afternoon at two o'clock while he taught me. Then I'd go home and go back in the evening to work. I was supposed to work from six until midnight. But sometimes it would be six ‘til one or two in the morning before you'd get home. So it was pretty hard to do. But I managed somehow to hang on to the job.

I was still going to St. Vincent's Academy, and if I had tests I could tell them and take off and not go to work. I finished the ninth grade and started in the tenth grade, but I don't think I went to the first report card. The job had gotten harder, so I got behind. Then I said, “I've got to quit and get caught up. Then I'll go back next year.” I never did; that was it. I think it was in January, before I was sixteen in March that I went to work out there at the club.

You've got to remember they didn't have Social Security and things like that in those days, so they just asked you how old you were. You could get a driver's license at a service station. You just filled out a paper and they mailed them in and mailed your license back to you. I told them I was eighteen. A number of young women worked there, but they were a lot older than I was. I'm sure the only reason I got the job out there was having the nerve to go out and tell that man I knew how to deal, and that his name was so close to mine, and him being amused by my starting to cry and telling him he had to give me a job.

But I did everything in that club. I worked on the door, looking at people's cards to be sure that we let only people who were members in. I took care of the equipment, putting in all the chip boxes, and I put the money away. Then, as I learned to deal, I got to deal a little more. Back in those days, by being a private club, they didn't have dealers going on every forty minutes as they do today. They had one dealer for every table and then one relief person who took over when you needed to eat. I helped relieve them as I learned. There were other women who worked in all the departments—they worked as cashiers and they worked as cocktail waitresses. There were a lot of showgirls there because they had a floor show. But no other women dealers, at all. I was the only one.

The Forty-One Club was a supper club with a show and dancing. People came to dance in those days. Back in those days when you had all of the different big name bands, that was a show within itself. They all had vocalists and special numbers that the bands did. People would drive from all over. Dallas was like 130 miles away and a lot of people came from Dallas and all of these towns around to see these big-name bands. The ladies dressed elegantly. Men had to be properly dressed just to get into the supper club, much less into the private club. You had to be a member to go into that backroom. It was a private members’ club. Usually, part of the party would be in the front dancing and a member of the party would be in the backroom gambling. It was never legal in the state. It was just that the local government said, “As long as it's your private club and it's just club members, then it's fine.” That's why they had someone on the door checking memberships all the time. It wasn't a big room. You'd have maybe two craps tables, one twenty-one table, and maybe a chuck-a-luck.⁶ That was just accepted in those days before you had the Kefauver investigation. As long as it's not open to the public, private clubs could operate.⁷

There were a lot of lovely people that worked there; some were so good and took care of me. Anything that they knew I wanted to learn, they worked with me. There were some people you wouldn't want to associate with, too. Basically you had the mixture that you would find in any nice club today—good people and bad people.

Eventually the club sold and I left Shreveport. I went to Houston, Texas, where Herman Williams helped me find a job. I was about sixteen or seventeen. I might have been a little older because I moved to Houston in late 1939, just before New Year's of 1939. That was like I was going a long ways away. It was about 140, maybe 160 miles away. I still went to my grandmother's every Sunday for dinner. I left on Saturday night. I moved my mother to Houston with me.

I worked two jobs in Houston during 1939 and 1940. In the daytime, I worked in a place called the Majestic Grill where there was a big sporting place upstairs. And then at night I worked at a place called Abe and Pappy's that had a dance hall with bands and all. They had a dice board, a small board that you could put up. … Then I took care of the cash registers and did the hiring of the cocktail girls and cigarette girls. One of the owners was Abe Weinstein. His son works for Harrah's in Shreveport now.⁸

When the war started in December 1941 I had been working in Houston for about four or five years by then. I opened a little place with a partner called the Bonita Club. It means “very pretty” in Spanish. We rented a little building in Galveston County just outside Houston at Kemah and served food and mixed drinks. Houston had to close up at twelve and people came down and we could sell drinks after midnight. And we had a little dice game, by then a little single-layout dice table. We ran that club for a long time and then sold it and moved out to a place on old Main Street Road. We bought a piece of property and built a club called the Western Bar. We had Western music and dancing.

A girlfriend and I fixed up a building in Dickinson, just outside Houston, and we were going to have a steak house. I'd saved up about $5,000 or $6,000 and then I had to go borrow some more and we were going to open this steak house. But we didn't realize the rationing had started. You had to have stamps in those days to get sugar and to get gasoline and all that kind of stuff. And we got the place fixed up so cute. We were going to have a high-class steak house. We went to call in and check what we had to do to get delivery for the kind of steaks we wanted and all of that, and a man said, “Well, what's your allotment now?” And I said, “Oh, we're new. We're just opening up.” I was dumb. I didn't know. And he said, “Well, we can't take any new customers. We're just giving allotments to the people that are already getting allotments.” So my partner got a bit hysterical because she had borrowed money. And I said, “Don't worry. I borrowed money, too. We're going to work this out.” We couldn't get steak, but we could get hamburger meat. And we just made it a fancy hamburger place. We had them lined up outside because we did all kind of cute little things on them that other places didn't. We probably made more money there than we would have if we put in with steak because they were in and out quicker.

The man that loaned me the $5,000 became president of the Bank of Houston—Bill Traylor. I still do business with him. His uncle was the biggest owner in the bank and he was a young man and a bank teller. I'd always take my money in to him. He was my banker as far as I was concerned. Those other people, I didn't know anything about them. So when I got ready to make a loan he asked me, “Claudine, what have you got for security?” I said, “Bill, my word. You have my word.” He says, “But I don't think they're going to take to that too well.” And I said, “Well, you just let me come and talk to them.” He said, “What if you lose this money?” I said, “I'll just get two jobs and pay it back. But I'm not going to lose it.” So we talked three or four times and it took him about three days, but he finally let me have the $5,000. And that's what it took to open a place in those days.

We had men working for us, but I never had any trouble with people. I've always been very good with people and people have been so good to me. … There was a big club down the street, and when it closed all of the dealers and everybody that worked there would come to our club. It was after hours. The others closed at twelve. The man that owned the [club] would always...