As April turned to May, vacationers and gamblers began to flock to the new entertainment Mecca. Undaunted, Harrah continued to insist on booking the top names in entertainment for two-week runs, two shows every night. The plan to attract the Olympic visitors, however, fell fairly flat: After spending their days watching the myriad events on the slopes, people were just too tired to trek to the South Shore for a show.ĭespite a massive advertising and PR campaign, shows in the first quarter of 1960 - which included such contemporary stars as Patti Page, Fred Waring, Liberace, Victor Borge, Marlene Dietrich, Nat King Cole and Ray Bolger - drew disappointing numbers.

In December 1959, Harrah opened the South Shore Room with the one-and-only Red Skelton as the headliner.

In 1959, Bill Harrah decided it was time to roll the dice and spend more than $3.5 million of borrowed money to expand Harrah’s Tahoe and build a state-of-the-art nightclub and dinner theater with “Vegas-type stars performing every night of the year.”īuilt in just nine months, with construction crews often working around-the-clock, Harrah had insisted that his dream 850-seat theater (fairly large by the standards of the day) be ready in time to host the expected horde of visitors coming to the 1960 Winter Olympics in nearby Squaw Valley. These moves gave him the property needed to realize his vision for Harrah’s Lake Tahoe. Looking to expand, the next year he bought the former Stateline Country Club across the highway and, in 1958, added the adjacent Nevada Club to his holdings. He bought the Gateway Club on the lake side of Highway 50 and opened his second gambling house in Nevada, nearly 18 years after opening the bingo parlor that became Harrah’s Reno. Harrah took a chance on the then-sleepy, seasonal resort town of Stateline on the South Shore of Lake Tahoe.

STATELINE - In 1955, budding casino magnate William F.

Sahara casino emcees 1970's