Pair-O-Dice: the roadside club before the Frontier

A club built around the motorist

Frank and Angelina Detra are identified with the early Pair-O-Dice operation. The club stood outside the original city limits on the route used by Southern California motorists, at a location later cataloged as 3120 Las Vegas Boulevard South.

The setting offered space and a different kind of visit from Fremont Street. Travelers could leave the road, park, eat, dance, and spend an evening at the club. This motorist-oriented model helps explain why casino development eventually spread along the highway.

Oscar E. Klawitter is credited as the builder and George D. Clark as the designer. Builder, owner, operator, and gaming licensee were different roles, and the property’s surviving legal papers include several people associated with them. The simplified story of a single founder misses that complexity.

Dine, dance, and escape the heat

UNLV’s photographs identify a Spanish Colonial Revival façade, a rounded tower, and painted lettering advertising a nightclub and dining and dancing. A small outbuilding stood beside the main structure. The open surroundings show how different the experience was from a later continuous wall of resorts.

Cooling was a practical attraction. A July 3, 1931, newspaper report described a Fisher air-cooling system that changed the air every four minutes and advertised an interior roughly twenty degrees cooler than outside. Those figures were part of the period’s promotional claim, not a modern performance test.

Reports cited in the historical chronology describe remodeling in September 1931 and enlargement in February 1932. The club was adapting within its first legal-gaming year, although the precise additions to seating, food service, or gaming space are not established here.

Roulette, craps, and blackjack

Historical research identifies authorization for roulette, craps, and blackjack in the early licensed phase. Those three game names provide a more specific picture than a generic claim that gambling occurred there.

The record does not establish that there was exactly one table of each game, nor does it supply a complete opening slot inventory or betting limits. Game authorization and the number of installed tables are separate facts.

Claims that Pair-O-Dice was the first Strip casino depend on what is being counted: a nightclub, the start of legal gambling, a county license, or a later resort. County histories also differ in how they describe the first licenses. The property is best understood as one of several early highway experiments alongside places such as the Red Rooster and Meadows.

Guy McAfee turns it into the 91 Club

Guy McAfee acquired the property in the late 1930s after operating in the Los Angeles gambling world. UNLV’s photographic catalog places the purchase in 1938 and the refurbished 91 Club reopening in 1939. March 15 is the established reopening date in the local visual chronology; an earlier February date appears in accounts of the plans.

The new name put the highway itself at the center of the identity. A surviving exterior view records advertising for food and cocktails. A Mob Museum account describes plans combining casino games, a café, nightclub, bungalows, and an airstrip, aimed at fashionable visitors from Southern California.

McAfee’s association with Los Angeles also lies behind the often-repeated story that he brought the Strip name from Sunset Strip. That is an attributed naming tradition, rather than a documented single moment when a roadway received its name.

The old club becomes part of a new resort

Nevada Humanities’ McAfee biography describes his sale of the 91 Club and adjoining auto park to R. E. Griffith for $35,000. Griffith and William “Bill” Moore then developed Hotel Last Frontier, which opened in 1942.

UNLV’s Frontier collection and the property narrative identify the former club structure with the Carillo Room, a themed bar associated with the new resort. The name honored Western actor Leo Carrillo; sources vary between Carillo and Carrillo in describing the room.

This was physical reuse as well as a change of ownership. The precise walls and furnishings retained are not established, but the older roadside club was absorbed into a larger Western-themed destination. Later Frontier and New Frontier histories belong to subsequent resort phases, not to an unchanged Pair-O-Dice operation.

Separating family stories from ownership evidence

Al Capone appears in later family recollections about Pair-O-Dice, including stories of visits and possible involvement. Historians Robert Stoldal and Eric Moody told the Associated Press that they found no documentation linking him to the property. The strongest ownership identification remains Frank and Angelina Detra; a Capone financial interest is unproven.

The Nevada State Museum’s Pair-O-Dice Papers, covering 1931–1939, include legal and transaction material such as bills of sale, mortgage and title documents, correspondence, and a partial inventory. The collection description establishes a valuable documentary record without making every uninspected item evidence for a specific claim.

Collectibles require the same care. A later postcard using Pair-o’-Dice and craps language is cataloged to 1954, after the original club had changed identity. Its title cannot establish that Pair-O-Dice was still operating in that year, and later Frontier chips cannot automatically illustrate the earlier club.

Photographs and transaction records together tell the most secure story: an early highway business created a place to stop, dine, dance, and gamble, then became part of the next generation of Las Vegas resort development.