I wrote my first little story about the Primadonna Casino in Reno for my chip collecting friends in 1984. We weren’t a big group, so the front side of the first of four pages had an actual post card stuck to it. Below the scalloped edges of the Reno-Tahoe Advertising post card were a few paragraphs about Ernie Primm, who had clubs in Gardena like the Monterey, and opened the Primadonna in 1955 along Virginia Street directly across from Harold’s Club, after fighting the Reno City Council for the right to have a club outside the “red line district” that protected the existing casinos from competition.
The story was short, but the old postcard from the early 70s was cool. It was still being sold at local souvenir shops in Reno, even though the Primadonna closed in 1978. At the time, the Primm family still had their casino in Primm Nevada, an unincorporated town previously known as Stateline.
But let’s get back to me. I continued writing short articles with a list of casino chips I wanted to sell or trade, and a year later started a quarterly newsletter. Eventually, after talking to anyone involved with the gaming industry silly enough to talk to a 25-year-old about the good old days, I wrote the book Nevada’s Golden Age of Gambling.
Since that time, I’ve written several other books on Nevada casinos and gaming, hundreds of articles on Nevada, casinos, casino games, probability, and the house edge.
If you read this far, thank you. If you clicked just to find out I’ve made a couple dozen YouTube videos about Nevada casinos with lots of old photos and some of the casino memorabilia (dice, chips, tokens, post cards, matches) I’ve collected over the years, here’s the list:
Murder – Bad Luck – and Trouble at the Tahoe Village
The Rise and Fall of Harold’s Club Casino
The El Capitan Club and the Casinos of Hawthorne
Nevada Casinos – The End of Silver Dollars – and the Rise and Fall of the Franklin Mint
Tonopah and Goldfield – Nevada Casinos Before Las Vegas
El Rancho Vegas Casino and How it Burned Down in 1960
Milton Farmer Page – King of Los Angeles and Las Vegas Casinos
Moe Dalitz – From Cleveland to Las Vegas Casino Icon of the 1950s
Tony Cornero’s Life of Gambling – On Land and at Sea
Who Kidnapped Frank Sinatra’s Son from a Lake Tahoe Casino in the 1960s?
Did Bugsy Siegel Invent Las Vegas?
Who Killed Reno Cashier Roy Frisch?
Reno’s First and Most Fearsome Casino – the Bank Club
Who Killed the 1960s Lake Tahoe Casino Owner?
Who Bombed Harvey’s Casino at Lake Tahoe?
Al W Moe's Nevada Gaming History 
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