Harolds Club, Reno: The Casino Behind ‘Harolds Club or Bust’

For a generation the sentence “Harolds Club or Bust” was painted, printed, and bolted onto the American roadside, on barns and billboards and the license-plate frames of passing cars. It named a casino on North Virginia Street in Reno, Nevada, and it turned gambling into a destination a family could drive to and talk about. Harolds Club was the work of a carnival family from the San Francisco Bay Area, the Smiths, and for a few decades it was the best-known casino in the world.

The club opened in 1935, closed in 1995, and was demolished in 1999. In between it changed how Nevada gaming looked, who worked in it, and how the rest of the country thought about it. This is the story of the Smiths, the signs, and the building that outlived neither.

A Carnival Family Comes to Reno

Raymond I. “Pappy” Smith and his sons had spent years running carnival games around the Bay Area until California cracked down on them. Nevada had legalized gambling in 1931, and the family moved to Reno. In 1935 Pappy's sons Harold S. Smith Sr., twenty-five that year, and Raymond A. Smith opened a club at 236 North Virginia Street with $500 borrowed from their father. It was a single storefront with an eight-foot penny roulette wheel and a pair of slot machines. Pappy joined within months as general manager and stayed the public face of the place until he died in 1967.

The early years were lean, and the Smiths solved them with ideas rather than money. Harolds Club was the first Nevada casino to hire women as dealers, beginning with the Smith family's own women in the late 1930s and opening the job to every woman by the early 1940s. It welcomed children and families to a gun museum and a children's theater. Pappy kept a ledger he called the Once Only Book, which let a gambler who had lost everything borrow a stake, and the Smiths funded scholarships for local students. A casino with manners was a new idea in Reno.

Harolds Club or Bust

The Smiths understood that the road was their real lobby. Beginning in the early 1940s they ran the first large-scale advertising campaign in Nevada gaming, a cartoon pioneer pushing toward Reno by wagon, raft, or whatever came to hand, over the slogan “Harolds Club or Bust.” The signs stood on more than two thousand billboards in forty-five states and in places overseas, and the Smiths bought ten thousand metal “or Bust” frames for license plates. Harold Smith Jr. carried the campaign to barns and fences around the world. By the 1950s it had made Harolds the most famous casino anywhere.

The message was friendly on purpose. Gambling was still a moral question for much of the country, and Harolds Club answered it with humor, a Western costume, and a family name on the door. That respectability was the club's real invention. Its neighbors on Virginia Street, the Mapes Hotel with its Art Deco tower and the Riverside with its divorce-colony glamour, sold Reno as a grand address. Harolds sold it as a good time. The campaign came down in the 1970s when federal highway law cleared the billboards from the roadside.

Covered Wagons, Roaring Camp, and the Mural

Inside, the building leaned hard into the West. The Covered Wagon Room opened in 1947 with a Silver Dollar Bar set with more than two thousand silver dollars under glass, and the carpeting repeated a covered-wagon pattern throughout. In 1949 the Roaring Camp Room opened beside it, a museum of Western firearms and frontier curios that Pappy had assembled, hundreds of guns in all, open to visitors of every age. Employees wore Western dress, rooms carried cowboy and pioneer names, and the club grew by buying its neighbors until it filled a seven-story building on North Virginia Street, never with a hotel.

The facade announced it all. In 1949 the Smiths hired the artist Theodore McFall to build a mural across the front: seventy-five feet wide and thirty-five feet high, made of 220 porcelain panels, a scene of Western pioneers that took four months to complete. For nearly fifty years it was a Reno landmark, and travelers who never entered the club photographed it all the same.

Hughes, Decline, and the Last Night

The Smiths sold the land and buildings to a New York investment firm in 1962 and leased the casino back. Pappy died in 1967, and in 1970 Howard Hughes's organization, later Summa Corporation, bought Harolds Club for $11.5 million. The sale marked the end of the family era. The new owners brought corporate management and new rules and let go many of the habits that had made the club special, and the same years brought bigger, hotel-based casinos that Harolds, with no rooms of its own, could not match.

A later owner planned a hotel to compete, but the financing for it never arrived. The Roaring Camp guns were sold off piece by piece in 1994, and Harolds Club closed on March 31, 1995. Harrah's Reno bought the boarded-up building in 1999 and tore it down after the mural was carefully removed. The mural was reinstalled at the Reno Livestock Events Center, where it stands today, and the corner where Harolds Club stood is now an open plaza for concerts and public events.

At a Glance: Harolds Club, Reno

• Harolds Club opened in 1935 at 236 North Virginia Street, Reno, founded by brothers Harold S. Smith Sr. and Raymond A. Smith with $500 from their father, Raymond I. “Pappy” Smith.
• Pappy Smith joined as general manager within months and ran the club until his death in 1967.
• It was the first Nevada casino to hire women as dealers, starting with Smith family members in the late 1930s.
• The “Harolds Club or Bust” campaign put the slogan on more than two thousand billboards in forty-five states and abroad.
• The Covered Wagon Room opened in 1947 and the Roaring Camp gun museum in 1949, the same year as the 75-by-35-foot porcelain mural on the facade.
• Howard Hughes’s organization, later Summa Corporation, bought the club in 1970 for $11.5 million.
• Harolds Club closed on March 31, 1995; Harrah’s Reno demolished the building in 1999.
• The mural survives at the Reno Livestock Events Center.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who founded Harolds Club?

Brothers Harold S. Smith Sr. and Raymond A. Smith opened it in 1935 with $500 borrowed from their father, Raymond I. “Pappy” Smith, who joined as general manager within months.

What did “Harolds Club or Bust” mean?

It was the club’s roadside advertising slogan, shown on more than two thousand billboards and many smaller signs from the 1940s onward. It invited travelers to head for Reno “or bust,” as the pioneers once headed west.

When did Harolds Club close?

On March 31, 1995. Harrah’s Reno bought the building in 1999 and demolished it that year.

What happened to the Harolds Club mural?

The 75-by-35-foot porcelain mural was removed before demolition and now stands at the Reno Livestock Events Center.

Conclusion

Harolds Club taught Nevada that a casino could be a brand, a museum, a family name, and a road trip at once. The Smiths built it from a penny roulette wheel and a few thousand billboards, and the corporate casinos that replaced it borrowed many of its ideas. The building is gone. The mural, the playing cards, the tokens, and the tin plate toppers are what the road kept.

We keep returning to Reno's casino era at The Eclection, from the Mapes to the Riverside. To bring a piece of that era home, explore our curated collection at The Eclection.

Resources & Further Reading

For deeper study, these are reliable, non-commercial starting points:

• Online Nevada Encyclopedia — articles on Nevada history, people, and places.
• Nevada Historical Society — the state museum and research library for Nevada history.
• Reno Historical — a community archive of historic photographs, maps, and stories from Reno and Washoe County.

Hero photograph: Bee playing cards made for Harolds Club, Reno, by AnelGTR, licensed CC BY-SA 3.0.