The late journalist Leon Mandel coined a terrific phrase when he described Bill Harrah as a "pathological car lover." It might be the most apt description ever hung on anybody in the history of this hobby because, when it came to collecting cars, Harrah had no peer, and almost certainly never will. At one point, Harrah owned an estimated 1,400 cars, many of them enjoying only-one or best-in-world status. When it came to collecting, he was like that reed-thin guy from Japan who somehow wins the Nathan's hot dog-eating contest every year. The Schlumpf brothers of Molsheim were hapless pikers by comparison. Yet even though his mania drove him toward financial distress and very possibly an early grave, Harrah was unquestionably the greatest high-end collector who ever lived. The means that made him such came from an almost instinctive understanding of how to make the volatile business of casino gambling function effectively.
We know, at least tentatively, that Harrah was very much enthused by cars as a young lad, having been caught like so many of us, doodling them in a copybook while still a schoolboy. He was born in 1911 in South Pasadena, California, to a father who was a politically connected attorney. Harrah started out in gaming at the side of his father, who after being nearly wiped out in the Wall Street crash, helped to promote an offshoot of bingo known as "the Reno game," which was supposedly a test of player skill, not a game of chance. This purported distinction didn't stop police from raiding the games. Harrah's father sold him the rights to operate the game for $500, and the son managed the games until they were strongly profitable, despite harassment by the authorities. Harrah was raking in money, but moved his operations to Reno, Nevada, in 1937 and opened the first Harrah's Casino.
At that time, Reno was one of the few locations in Nevada where wide-open gambling was legal. Many of the gaming operators in early Reno were outright crooks, abetted in some cases by corrupt officialdom. Harrah was insistent upon running an honest operation, but his betting parlors grew only gradually. Like many people in his line of work, though, Harrah enjoyed taking risks, and in 1946, wagered everything he had on taking over a Reno casino. The new operation was called Harrah's Reno Club and turned into a swift success. One of his ideas was to keep the club open year-round, something no other casino operator would attempt, given the suffocating snows that crush the area around Lake Tahoe. Other gambling promoters guffawed when Harrah sent tour buses around northern California to round up players, and then transport them deep into the mountains and ply them with top entertainment that Harrah also imported. The "bus people," as people in the gaming industry still call them today, were born. That was in 1948.
That same year, Harrah acquired his first collectible car, a 1907 Maxwell. The great rise of Las Vegas was still a few years in the future and that's why, for many years, Harrah was the single most successful casino operator in Nevada. The enormous inflow of capital allowed him to indulge his passion for mechanical power, which encompassed not only cars, but also aircraft and unlimited hydroplanes. The University of Nevada Reno has maintained an Oral History Program that has framed the lives of people who mattered in that community, including Harrah, whose story was told by his peers in the book Every Light Was On. In that volume, one of the voices that were heard belonged to Clyde Wade, who started out as a mechanic when Harrah began his collection and retired some 20 years later as its general manager.
Wade described the first home of the collection as being in a onetime icehouse in Sparks, when he arrived on the scene in 1961, the year before the Harrah collection was first opened to public view. At that time, the collection ran the gamut from a Model A Ford to a 1910 Mercer, plus a 1938 Rolls-Royce Sedanca De Ville that Harrah had gotten from Merle Norman heir J.B. Nethercutt. By most indications, Harrah, a heavy drinker for most of his life, had begun to neglect his hard-won business success during the 1960s and began to focus most of his attention on expanding his fleet -- "collection" is really kind of inadequate in his case -- as Wade recalled to the university.
The restoration staff alone at the collection grew to about 70. Harrah was probably the first collector in the hobby's history to rely on computers to keep track of his exploding inventory, which came to include a 1931 Bugatti Royale and a 1929 Duesenberg J, among many, many others. The printout tracked the car, its location -- by the early 1970s, the collection had stuffed numerous buildings -- and its condition, on a Harrah scale of one to nine. Wade estimated that restoring the Royale alone consumed something like 8,000 man-hours. Based on its findings, the Oral History Project has an estimate that Harrah had sunk an incredible $40 million into his collection.
Harrah died in 1978 while undergoing surgery for an aneurysm at the Mayo Clinic. Oral History Project director Tom King told us that upon his death, Harrah's heirs sold the casino network and collection to Holiday Inn's parent company, which culled the best of the collection and began selling it off. A California consortium paid $28.7 million for 82 vehicles, including the Royale, in 1987. King said the top culls brought enough money to cover the purchase cost of the Harrah empire. The rest formed the core of today's National Automobile Museum collection in Reno.
