Ultimate Guide to Slot Machine History

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Gawd I'm old I remember when a person had to put an actual coin into a slot, nickel or quarter, and people would be walking around with plastic cups full of coins

Not promoting slots or gambling, just remembering old Vegas.

Flame away and mods pull if inapproriate.

Sure I remember those plastic buckets. They also had trays for $1 coins, $100 per tray 20 coins deep 5 wide, and the casinos had machines to paper wrap rolls of quarters and nickels you had to buy from the cage or cart lady. Nothing like the sound of 100’s of coins dropping into the tray.

They don’t call em one armed bandits for nothing. :)

My Mom grew up in Idaho, so we visited her folks there every couple of years throughout the 50s and into the late 60s. We would drive out west from New York State to visit the grandparents and many other relatives along the way. My parents would drag us kids to the country bars around Potlatch -- in those days, they barkeep didn't mind kids in the bar. I remember the slot machines in the bars back in those days in the 50s.

An article nine years ago in the Idaho Falls "Post Register" says "Idaho’s brief affair with legal slot machines ended more than six decades ago. From 1947 to 1953, one-armed bandits could be found on the outskirts of Idaho Falls, Pocatello and Garden City. But once the Idaho Legislature declared slot machines unconstitutional, machine owners faced the option of “destroying them or shipping them to Nevada,” according to an Associated Press report from 1984. Many were stolen as a result of the ban, however, only to be tossed into rivers. As of the 1980s, scuba divers were still finding abandoned old-timey slots with silver dollars in them."

Grandpa used to pull silver dollars out of my ears and give them to me. It was the coolest magic trick ever for this kid back then. My mom's folks weren't rich and for him to give us kids silver dollars from the slots was very generous. Silver dollars abounded in North Idaho back then, maybe because the biggest silver mine in the USA was in the "Silver Valley" east of Coeur d'Alene.

I've been enjoying watching all the episodes of "Death Valley Days" from 1952 and onward. The episodes frequently show the "Dewey Upright Slot Machine" from the early 1900s (photo below). I never saw any of these in the taverns in Idaho. The ones I saw were the typical mechanical one-arm bandits. People today don't know what they are missing not pulling a mechanical lever and listening to all the whirs and clunks as the rotating wheels dropped into their final position and, if you were lucky, the machine plunking your silver coin winnings into the metal tray. Those sounds were magical!

When I worked for a couple weeks in Las Vegas in 1974, you could still play 5 cent and ten cent slots.

I've never played a modern electronic slot machine out of respect for the "true" one-arm bandit machines. It just isn't the same.