In 1966, he opened the Riverside Resort, whose attractions included, according to the resort’s website, all-you-can-eat chicken dinners for 98 cents, a dozen slot machines and two gaming tables. In 1954, he bought the 101 Club in North Las Vegas, according to a bio on the Riverside Resort’s website.Īfter selling the 101 Club in 1964, Laughlin, searching for a new opportunity, found an empty eight-room bar and motel along the Colorado River south of Las Vegas, across the river from Bullhead City, Arizona. Laughlin moved to Las Vegas in 1952, working as a waiter during the day and attending dealer school at night. “I said, ‘I’m making three times what you are, so I’m out the door,’” Laughlin told the Review-Journal. Laughlin was making about $500 a week and felt that his choice was clear. When Laughlin was in the ninth grade, his principal told him that he’d either have to end the route or leave school. He attended high school for a year and, as a teenager, ran a slot machine and punchboard route at a time when, he told the Review-Journal, enforcement of gambling laws was relatively lax. “I must have graduated from there about 1946, the only school I ever graduated from.” “I went to a country school where all eight grades were in one room,” he told the Review-Journal in 1999.

Laughlin was born in Owatonna, Minnesota, and grew up on a farm just outside of town. Postal Service, which in 1968 dubbed its operation at the resort “Laughlin substation,” eventually prompting the use of “Laughlin” to also describe the area around the resort. The town’s name, he remembered, came by way of the U.S.

“When we came here there was a dirt road in here and you had to come in by way of the dam,” Laughlin recalled. Laughlin was celebrating the resort’s 50th anniversary at the time. The post did not share his cause of death.Ī 2016 Las Vegas Review-Journal story noted that Laughlin, then 85, continued to work 14-hour days at Don Laughlin’s Riverside Resort, the casino he opened in 1966 that started it all. Laughlin, born in 1931, died at 92 years old on Sunday, according to a Facebook post from Don Laughlin’s Riverside Resort Hotel & Casino. (Jason Bean/Las Vegas Review-Journal)ĭon Laughlin, the real estate developer and resort owner who created the Southern Nevada river town about 100 miles south of Las Vegas that bears his name, has died.

American gambling entrepreneur and hotelier Don Laughlin poses for a portrait in his office at the Riverside Resort Hotel & Casino in Laughlin on Nov.

Riverside casino in laughlin