The Bank Club: Ely’s downtown gathering place

A place on Aultman Street

A September 1937 photograph in UNLV’s collections identifies the Bank Club among Ely’s Main Street businesses. The image also records the Palace, Ely Theatre, State Cafe, Miners’ Club, and Capitol Casino. Gambling was part of a mixed commercial street, not separated from the town behind an enormous resort entrance.

Collectors’ indexes identify the Ely club at 448 Aultman Street and commonly give a 1937–1968 operating period. A much later advertisement celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 1987, supporting the tradition of a 1937 beginning. The anniversary is useful corroboration, although it is not an opening-day license or notice.

The club’s later history is more complicated than one continuous date range suggests. Specialist accounts describe a subsequent 1976–1987 phase, while period tourism publications show the Bank Club being promoted during the 1980s. Those records establish a later presence without proving uninterrupted ownership or operation across the intervening years.

Café, cocktail lounge, game room, and bingo

A 1944 White Pine County High School yearbook advertisement describes four parts of the Bank Club: a café, game room, cocktail lounge, and bingo room. That small advertisement is unusually helpful because it explains what the establishment offered in its own period, rather than asking a modern visitor to imagine a generic casino.

The local newspaper record gives bingo a more precise history. September 1941 advertising announced a new Bank Club bingo parlor, and an October notice identified Cliff Greenman as its manager. Holiday promotions and special awards show an operation that used recurring events to bring patrons back.

Food service also appears in later advertising and personal histories. Accounts of waitress Helen Ashworth and chef Benny Chan connect identifiable workers to Ely’s Bank Club and Hotel Nevada. Their presence reminds us that the casino’s public life depended on dining and service work as well as gambling.

A surviving interior photograph reproduced in Casino Collectible News shows a long bar and red stools. It supplies a concrete view of the room’s character, but it should not be stretched into a complete floor plan or an inventory of every game offered over several decades.

Ely on the touring entertainment circuit

The Bank Club booked entertainers well before its late-period tourism advertisements. Trade publications place Paul Savoy’s touring acts on routes that included Ely in 1942 and 1943. A December 1942 Billboard report names Duke Montague’s variety unit, and a 1947 item places Charlie Whitfield’s combo on the club’s schedule.

In October 1962, Cash Box reported a four-week engagement by Bill Goodwin’s country dance and show band. A booking of that length indicates an entertainment program capable of sustaining an extended visit, rather than simply an occasional performance.

By 1987, a Nevada tourism advertisement promised entertainment five nights a week alongside gambling and food. The performers and styles changed across the years, but the surviving notices show that live entertainment was a recurring part of the Bank Club’s identity.

Casino business in a copper town

A later obituary of Michael Ensign recounts a 1962 plan by Lee Warren, Mike Milovich, and Norm Gohringer to buy the Bank Club and Hotel Nevada. In that account, Milovich moved to Ely to manage the club despite having no previous casino-management experience.

The same account connects the business to a Kennecott Copper strike. It says gambling activity increased as unemployed mineworkers spent their checks, followed by disagreements among the partners and the sale of Warren’s and Milovich’s interests to Gohringer after roughly a year.

This is a retrospective account, not a complete set of licensing or partnership records. It should be read with that limitation in mind. Its broader significance is the close relationship it describes between a local casino and the economic fortunes of the people living around it. In Ely, casino business and mining-town life could not be separated neatly.

Beyond the casino floor

The club also appears in the record as a meeting place and sports sponsor. A 1965 Toastmasters listing names the Bank Club as a meeting venue. A 1983 Nevada events guide advertises the Ninth Annual Bank Club Tournament, a men’s fast-pitch softball event at Marich Field.

The location of the softball tournament matters: the club’s name on the event does not mean the games took place inside the casino. It shows the business supporting activity elsewhere in Ely. Later events guides list jackpot arm wrestling at the club, adding a different kind of local competition to its social life.

These details widen the picture of the institution. A person might know the Bank Club through a meal, a performance, a meeting, or a tournament, as well as through gambling. Its place in local memory therefore extends beyond the surviving chips.

Surviving chips and the later Bank Club

Collectors document Ely Bank Club chips in several denominations, including fifty cents, one dollar, five dollars, twenty-five dollars, and one hundred dollars. Catalog descriptions associate particular pieces with different issues and dates, but the surviving listings do not establish a complete chip inventory or prove which tables used each denomination.

Paper items preserve another side of the business. An auction catalog records opening-night menus dated 1987, while that year’s tourism advertising celebrated the fiftieth anniversary and the Ely centennial. Together these sources show that the Bank Club name remained an active part of the town’s visitor economy long after its earliest photographed appearance.

The exact relationship between the early casino, the reported closure and reopening, and later operators remains unresolved. A single final closing date would conceal that uncertainty. The clearest lasting story is of a downtown business whose gambling, dining, entertainment, and community roles can be recovered across several generations.