On New Year’s Day, the California Hotel and Casino in downtown Las Vegas turned 50. That meant it also was the fiftieth anniversary of Boyd Gaming. Both of them are success stories.
The California opened as an eleven-story hotel with 325 rooms. Today it also has a 14-story tower and a grand total of 781 rooms. The main owners were Sam Boyd and his son Bill. Each of them had 25 percent. They had dozens of other stockholders, led by their longtime associates Perry Whitt and Chuck Ruthe.
Sam Boyd had moved to Las Vegas in 1941 to work in casinos. He climbed the ladder at the Sahara and ran the Mint Hotel and Casino for its owners. In 1971, he and partners Frank Scott, Jackie Gaughan, and J. Kell Houssels, Junior, opened the Union Plaza. Boyd’s son Bill was a successful local attorney and joined his father and their family in the Eldorado Casino in Henderson.
The California was the first big project that was truly a Boyd project. But when it opened, it wasn’t an overnight success. Then Sam Boyd turned to some of his old stomping grounds. Before coming to Las Vegas, he had worked in Hawaii. He reached out to contacts there and catered to the market with an island ambience and Hawaiian food. The California also offered special vacation packages with low airfares. Eventually, well over 70 percent of the California’s clientele came from
Hawaii, and Hawaiians are frequent guests not just there, but at other Boyd properties.
This had an impact on Las Vegas. The Asian American Pacific Islander population in southern Nevada has grown until it is more than 10 percent of Clark County’s residents. You can find plenty of reasons to explain that, including the resort industry. Boyd Gaming has been crucial to that development.
And the California’s increasing success helped launch Boyd Gaming to still greater heights. In 1979, they opened Sam’s Town on Boulder Highway. The Showboat had pretty much had that road to itself since opening in 1954. Sam’s Town featured a western theme, and Boyd Gaming went on to add bowling, an RV park, an atrium, and several restaurants, in addition to other expansion. The property also included a building used by Nevada Public Radio for nearly two decades.
We’ve grown, and Boyd Gaming certainly has grown. Now it’s publicly traded and it includes more than two dozen properties in ten states. At one point it co-owned the Atlantic City Borgata with MGM Resorts. Boyd took over and turned around Main Street Station, and a merger with Coast Casinos led to its ownership of several of those properties.
Maybe this is the best way to explain the importance of Boyd Gaming. When I was governor and the state had to crack down on the
Stardust and Fremont, our regulators asked Sam and Bill Boyd to take them over because we knew they were not only smart operators. They also were clean of mob taint. They ran the two properties, then bought them, and made them far more profitable. The state made a good investment there, and the Boyds have invested in our state and its top industry, including a good deal of philanthropy, with UNLV’s law school bearing Bill Boyd’s name. In the Hawaiian language, holomua means success. That’s fitting for the California Hotel and for Boyd Gaming.