El Morocco: Rebuilding a Westside Casino

A casino in the Jackson Avenue market

The original club is generally dated to 1945 and associated with Frank Wilson. Oral historian J. David Hoggard remembered Wilson under the name Lindsey and linked the early business to Jake Ensley, but the precise identities and legal relationship are not settled. The uncertainty concerns who held which interest, not whether El Morocco existed.

Black residents and visiting entertainers faced exclusion from many downtown and Strip facilities. Jackson Avenue supplied places to gamble, drink, eat and socialize without the same barriers. El Morocco belonged to this living commercial district, not an isolated experiment in the desert.

Games documented in directories and photographs

The 1947 classified directory advertised craps, poker, twenty-one and a cocktail lounge at E and Jackson. That period advertisement is stronger evidence of the club's offering than a general description of Westside nightlife.

A photograph cataloged as the last night before a 1954 closing shows Calvin Washington running craps beside Cleo Johns. Other sources date the destructive fire to 1955. The original operation therefore ended in a mid-1950s closure and fire sequence whose exact final night remains uncertain.

These details establish a working table-game club. They do not establish a complete table count, typical stakes or how much money the house earned.

A name that kept returning

A rebuilt El Morocco operated in the later 1950s, with Sarann Knight Preddy associated with that phase. New El Morocco opened on March 11, 1959, with Oscar Crozier among the owners; that first New El Morocco phase closed in February 1960. Later operations again used the name.

Crozier's importance extended beyond the casino. Accounts of the 1960 desegregation negotiations identify him as a liaison between the NAACP and hotel-casino owners. The club was both a product of exclusion and part of the community infrastructure that helped challenge it.

Val Ruggerio is associated with a 1963-64 phase and later moved into Reno gaming. The repeated changes caution against attaching every El Morocco photograph, chip or employee to the same ownership period.

The room people used in 1961

UNLV photographs make the 1961 operation unusually visible. They show slots, the gaming floor, a keno board, manager Q. B. Bush with liquor representatives and Good Rocking Brown's group performing. These are specific people and activities, not a generic borrowed roster of famous Westside entertainers.

Catalog annotations identify Wilbert Harris as keno checker and Willie Gomez as keno writer, with a $10,000 keno limit. That figure belongs to the dated 1961 record; it does not describe the 1945 opening or a typical customer's wager. The photographs reveal a workplace with specialized jobs as well as a social room.

For customers, gambling and music occupied the same neighborhood outing. For workers, the club offered experience in dealing, supervision and game administration at a time when opportunities elsewhere remained restricted.

What survives of repeated reinvention

Chips and tokens carrying El Morocco and New El Morocco names preserve different phases of the business. Their changing lettering, shapes and denominations can help distinguish operations, but a surviving collectible alone cannot supply an entire licensing chronology.

El Morocco's importance lies in the persistence behind these reopenings. Small clubs attempted to find capital, retain customers and rebuild after setbacks while the city's largest resorts expanded elsewhere. The documented games and named employees recover that everyday history; the unresolved ownership and closure dates are reminders of how unevenly it was recorded.