Jackie Gaughan is as much of a Wild West legend as you will find these days.
At 93, he lives in a penthouse at El Cortez Hotel and Casino in downtown Las Vegas. The public plaza outside is named for him.
In Nebraska, his name is attached to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Multicultural Center.
His grandson and namesake, a UNL alum, endowed it in Jackie's name a few years back, and the university described Jackie with these words: "An Omaha native, Jackie Gaughan is known in the hotel and entertainment industry for being one of the first employers in Las Vegas to encourage diverse hiring practices. Gaughan said he values higher education and the belief that individuals should be valued for their hard work, loyalty and strong values, not their color, nationality or religion."
True enough, so far as that goes.
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But Jackie Gaughan didn't become the man Nevadans revere, nor did he get into the second group of Gaming Hall of Fame inductees, on diversity hiring alone.
He got there by being one of the most colorful, successful and innovative businessmen in postwar Las Vegas, one of the world's most active volcanoes of money and recreation.Â
Casinos rise and fall. The Mafia, the Teamsters, Howard Hughes, celebrity chefs and entertainment conglomerates may fold, but Jackie Gaughan abides.
"He's one of the last town founders still alive," said his son Michael, 70, a gaming executive himself and also in the industry's hall of fame.
Jackie was born in 1920 in Omaha, and stories of his well-spent youth include carrying legal sports bets for the bookmakers and gamblers of the time — his own family, the Ziegman brothers and Eddie Barrick, partners who also ended up moving west to become pioneers of the gaming oasis in the desert.
They operated from the protected enclave of Carter Lake, Iowa, created by a wild shift of the Missouri River, at the near-mythical Chez Paree club.
Sports bookmaking was tolerated and protected in some quarters of the time, and wasn't a federal crime in those days. It may have been a vice, but it was also a wise and productive use of a mathematically precocious young Creighton University man's mind.
During his service in the U.S. Army during World War II, Jackie Gaughan was introduced to Nevada while stationed at the Las Vegas Airbase and while serving as a gunnery instructor at the Army Air Corps in Tonopah.
Congress horned in and passed a tax law that made bookmaking intolerable as a business in most places, including Nebraska's largest city. After that, a person had to register with the federal government as a bookmaker, Michael Gaughan said, which tended to expose one to ambitious local law enforcers. Not a great future there.
"My grandmother bought him two points in the Flamingo to get him out of Omaha," Michael said. "She thought gambling in Omaha was dying. She just wanted to get him out of bookmaking and out of Omaha. ... That's how my dad got into Las Vegas."
One of many published histories that mention Jackie is "Roll the Bones: The History of Gambling," by David G. Schwartz, director of the Center for Gaming Research at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. It says Jackie, as early as 1946, bought a share in the Boulder Club, which he followed in 1951 with the stake in the Flamingo, but his son questions the date.
"My dad's father, my grandfather, was killed in 1946 while my dad was still in the war," Michael said. "Somebody pushed him off a train. It was very tough back in those days."
Despite Jackie Gaughan's early ventures into the Las Vegas Strip, "his destiny lay downtown," Schwartz wrote. "He bought the Las Vegas Club in 1959 and the El Cortez in 1963. These acquisitions formed the cornerstones of a downtown empire.
"In these casinos, along with the Gold Spike, the Western, and the Plaza, Gaughan unleashed a slew of innovations. He invented the casino funbook, a book of coupons for free bets, match play (the casino in effect doubles the player’s bet by matching it), two-for-one specials, and the like. Funbooks are now ubiquitous in budget-oriented casinos throughout the nation," Schwartz wrote.
"Gaughan also started casino giveaways, which he used to perk up otherwise-sluggish holidays; by giving away boxes of candy, he was able to fill his casinos. With these promotions, Gaughan pioneered the mass-marketing of casino gaming — with the increasing popularity of American gambling, it was long overdue."
Some have described Jackie as the champion of "value customers," people of modest means who like to gamble for fun, rather than the more serious high rollers. That would make him the most prescient of the Las Vegas pioneers, if only for the numbers of people he attracted to his enterprises.
Jackie has since divested his holdings to friends and allies, but he remains a local hero.
"Big or small, for many years his casinos made money," wrote Las Vegas Review-Journal columnist John L. Smith in 2009. "The coins rolled, the cash flowed, and the net profits made Jackie the envy of some corporate casino titans who strained under elephantine overheads."
"When he was healthy he would walk his places every day," Michael Gaughan recalled in Smith's column. "He always knew the names of all his employees. He cared about his customers and he cared about his employees."
"That familiarity, impossible at a mega-resort, endeared him with his workers. That, and a generous pension plan that enabled porters and waitresses to retire in dignity," Smith wrote. Â Â
In fact, practically everything written and said about Jackie Gaughan lends substance to the legacy of the man whose name is enshrined on the UNL Multicultural Center.
When the endowment was announced at UNL six years ago, Jackie contributed his own comment to the press release: "It is my hope the new Jackie D. Gaughan Multicultural Center will provide students a place where they can come together and learn to be respectful of the many unique individuals they will encounter in their lives. I hope they grow to understand a diverse society is truly a richer place to live."
Michael says his father's memory has failed, but he still plays poker every day.
Nobody really quibbles about the details of these stories about Jackie. Nor should they. Â
"All the stuff I've read about my grandparents and my dad is all 100 percent true," his son concluded. "My dad was one of the most licensed people in Nevada."