The Pioneer Club: the casino beneath Vegas Vic

A familiar corner gets a new casino

The Pioneer occupied the First and Fremont corner after the Las Vegas Club moved across the street. The location already had a layered commercial history, including theater, restaurant, clothing-store, hotel, and gambling uses in different parts or phases of the property.

Tutor Scherer, Farmer Page, Bill Curland or Kurland, and Chuck Addison were among the original operators. Historical accounts connect them with California gambling and bookmaking circles that were moving into Nevada as reform campaigns disrupted illegal operations in Los Angeles.

Attorney Cliff Jones handled licensing work and reportedly took a business interest in place of a conventional fee. The connection illustrates the overlap of legal services, political relationships, and casino investment in early Las Vegas. Precise ownership shares require more than the public names on the storefront.

A compact gambling house

The original Pioneer was a downtown gambling establishment rather than a self-contained resort. Visitors approached through Fremont Street’s concentration of signs, shops, pedestrians, and neighboring casinos. The street supplied part of the atmosphere.

Its western identity appeared in covered-wagon designs, cowboy imagery, and the Famous Pioneer wording. A cocktail lounge, dining references, and surviving hospitality objects show that the operation had a broader social setting than the gaming tables alone.

The casino changed names and operating arrangements in the 1950s, including the New Pioneer phase. Its game mix also changed over time. Later licensing and collector records should not be projected backward into a single opening-day inventory.

When advertising became a street performance

The cowboy character began in city promotion before the famous full figure appeared at the Pioneer. YESCO installed the large mechanical neon Vegas Vic in 1951, drawing on the Chamber of Commerce’s western character.

The roughly forty-foot figure waved an arm, held a cigarette, produced a smoke effect, and greeted visitors through a voice system. Patrick Denner is associated with the design. The sign made the casino visible as an experience before a customer entered its doors.

Vic’s voice and mechanisms changed over the years. Zack Hale Jr., a former circus performer, became a later recorded voice after meeting Jack Elardi in 1969. His contribution is distinct from the original 1950s recording.

The story that actors Lee Marvin and Woody Strode attacked the noisy sign with arrows remains a frequently repeated anecdote, not a settled explanation for every period of silence. More securely, construction of the Fremont Street Experience brought physical alterations to fit the figure beneath the canopy.

New owners, a brief hotel, and more floor space

The New Pioneer Club Hotel opened in August 1965 in the former Elwell Hotel behind the casino at 200 South First Street. It closed as the Pioneer hotel by 1968 and later became the Golden Hotel. This short lodging phase should be kept separate from the much longer casino operation.

Margaret Elardi joined the casino’s ownership in 1967. Accounts describe her close attention to the business, including sleeping in an upstairs office. The exact slot inventory at the takeover is disputed: one account gives twenty machines and another gives 192, while both mention nine tables.

Later ownership changes included the Richardson and Ensign group. In 1983, the Pioneer acquired the neighboring Club Bingo premises and expanded westward. That addition explains why records may identify the casino with both 23 and 25 Fremont Street; the larger frontage was not all part of the original 1942 operation.

Elardi’s later associations with the Frontier and the Pioneer in Laughlin belong to connected ownership histories. The Laughlin casino is a different property, despite the shared Pioneer identity.

Covered wagons, cowboys, and commemoratives

The Pioneer’s surviving chip record spans low-value pieces through one-hundred-dollar denominations, along with numerous roulette checks and slot tokens. Early covered-wagon imagery and later Vegas Vic designs show the casino carrying its western identity onto objects used inside.

The catalog records several different molds, issue periods, and conditions. A drilled or attributed example is not equivalent to a documented complete production run. Likewise, a reported quantity for one issue is not the casino’s lifetime chip total.

A separate twelve-piece five-dollar Nevada-history set was marketed to collectors around 1994–1995. Steve Cutler’s first-person account connects the project with Paul-Son’s Paul Endy and artist Will Hart, while a contemporary collectors’ publication advertised the set.

This commemorative project should be distinguished from ordinary circulating casino chips. Both belong to the Pioneer’s material history, but they were produced and collected for different purposes. Matchbooks, ashtrays, tableware, and postcards widen the record beyond gambling denominations.

The casino closes, the landmark remains

The Pioneer casino closed on June 29, 1995, during the period in which the Fremont Street Experience was transforming downtown. Its compact scale placed it in a different market from the larger resorts around it.

The building was reused as a gift shop in 1998 instead of disappearing in a casino implosion. Vegas Vic’s survival gave the former property a continuing public identity after gaming ended. The sign and building therefore have an afterlife distinct from the casino’s operating history.

The Pioneer helps explain why casino history is also urban history. Ownership and games changed inside, but the exterior became a shared landmark, recognizable through street photographs, films, souvenirs, and the memories of people who simply passed beneath it.