The State Line Country Club

How is everybody this week? I haven’t really been gone for a week; in blog-world, my posts follow each other, so I’ve always been here.

The State Line Country Club is more than just a story; it’s a piece of local history that connects residents and enthusiasts to Nevada’s vibrant past, making it feel personal and meaningful.

A dice-dealer friend of mine at the Cal-Neva in Reno brought me a few old chips from the club, and the $100 variety with an inlay showing the club’s swimming pool is my favorite chip in the world. This friend’s wife remembers being three or four years old and wandering around the offices with her father, who was also a manager/owner. Lots of great stories – I wish I could tell them all to you, but of course, you have to start at the beginning.

When Nevada legalized gambling in 1931, Cal Custer, a longtime rum-runner from Southern California, purchased the club and expanded it. By 1933, Nick Abelman and his partners, Steve Pavlovich and Bert Riddick, were interested in the sixteen-acre property, marking a key point in the club’s ownership timeline.

The club’s transformation under Abelman and Pavlovich’s leadership shows their dedication to quality, inspiring admiration and curiosity about their influence on Nevada’s entertainment history.

The club offered dozens of slot machines, roulette, chuck-a-luck, faro, and 21. It hosted big-name entertainers like Lena Horne, the Sons of the Pioneers, and the Ink Spots, making it a vibrant part of Nevada’s entertainment history and one that can intrigue readers about its cultural impact.

In the mid-1940s, as Nick Abelman approached the age of seventy, he admitted it was becoming more demanding and more challenging to make the trek from Reno to Tahoe every day, and his manager, Pavlovich, was too sick to handle the club alone. The three partners conferred and agreed it was time to sell.
At a meeting at the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco, Abelman reached an agreement with Nick and Eddie Sahati to purchase the club. A final price of $350,000 was agreed to, and the Sahati brothers took over for the 1945 summer season.

They got off to a rocky start, but eventually, the club prospered under their management. Entertainers such as Lena Horn, Sons of the Pioneers, and the Ink Spots brought gamblers into the club, and times were good.

Eddie Sahati died of Cancer in 1952 at the age of forty-one. His brother, Nick, then leased the operation to a group of businessmen, including Karl Berge, who ran the bar (Berge later owned Karl’s Silver Club in Sparks).

Bill Harrah purchased George’s Gateway Club, across Highway 50 from the Country Club, and, after a successful couple of years, persuaded the businesspeople to relinquish their lease so Nick Sahati could sell the property and auto-court to Bill.

In 1958, Nick Sahati did just that, for the same $350,000 he paid. Eventually, Harrah also purchased the tiny “Main Entrance” casino and Bud Beecher’s Nevada Club, allowing him to expand all the way to the actual state line. Harrah’s Tahoe now sits on the site.

There’s a lot more to the story, as told in The Roots of Reno ($2.99 on Kindle, free for Prime)

Thanks for reading – Al W Moe