Why Nobody Wants to Visit Laughlin

My book, The Times You Grew Up With, takes you back: https://paulmcallister.store In 1966, a ninth-grade dropout from Minnesota bought a boarded-up motel on the Colorado River and started serving ninety-eight-cent chicken dinners. Within thirty years, Don Laughlin had built an entire casino town from nothing — no mayor, no city council, no government at all — and it was drawing more than four million visitors a year, making it the third-largest gambling destination in Nevada behind Las Vegas and Reno. Then the visitors stopped coming. This is the story of Laughlin, Nevada — how one man’s vision turned empty desert into a strip of casino towers generating over six hundred million dollars a year, and how Indian gaming, lost airline service, an eight-hundred-million-dollar failed megaresort, and a deadly biker gang shootout on a casino floor slowly unraveled everything he built. It’s a story about cheap rooms, loose slots, the Colorado River, abandoned hotels, and the strange twilight of a budget casino town that refuses to die — even after the man who created it was cryogenically frozen by Alcor at the age of ninety-two. Sources: Don Laughlin oral history interview, UNLV Special Collections & Archives (special.library.unlv.edu) “Laughlin looks to halt decade of tourism declines,” Las Vegas Review-Journal, 2015 “Laughlin: The town the recovery forgot,” Vegas Inc / Las Vegas Sun, 2014 River Run riot, Wikipedia (sourcing Clark County District Court records and federal indictments) Emerald River Resort history, Las Vegas Review-Journal and Clark County public records Nevada Gaming Control Board, annual gaming revenue reports (gaming.nv.gov)