| Posted by: PortolaSteve on Thursday, July 4, 2013 at 3:26:21 PM
We lived in Portola, about 45 miles north east of Reno, through 1961 and visited Reno at least monthly for groceries, movies, clothes shopping, etc. My parents built a new home in the 1950s and acquired used brick from the ORIGINAL Nugget for its construction. The original was a small brick building of perhaps 5,000 square feet (about the size of three standard family homes). It was across the street, north of the newer Nugget, which featured Last Chance Joe near the main entrance.
After one particular visit to Reno we drove from Reno to Sparks to see if the older facility had been vacated yet -- information needed as construction of our new house was scheduled, or even underway.
It was a scary, dark drive from Reno to Sparks on the scary, dark and empty industrial neighborhood streets of Sparks.
We arrived to see that equipment, slot machines, tables and all the rest were being wheeled across the street from the old building to the new. Perhaps it's only my imagination, but I believe I recall that about eight slot machines, in rows of four and back to back were mounted on wheeled carts, and that players continued to play their machines even as the slots were in the midst of being relocated.
The new Nugget had five restaurants, including the Golden Rooster Room. Apparently we had become such regulars there that the head waiter always saw that my parents were served wine in a very unusual carafe... it was a very delicate blown glass vessel, about eight inches high by about ten or twelve inches long. And it was in the form of a bull, head down, pawing the earth with one hoof. A small cork was located at mid-spine, and when removed to equalize air pressure, the wine flowed from the bull's lower abdomen... yep, it flowed from the area of its genitals.
To this day I can still taste the creamed spinach that was always served with their golden fried chicken. And, to this day, I still have a small ceramic drink mug in the shape of Last Chance Joe, purchased during an early visit.
One last memory to share is of a small room on the second floor where parents could leave their kids as they gambled away on the main floor. It was up a narrow starway and down a hallway, past the always-opened security office door where they had an eye-in-the sky room.
The room was absolutely the worst place to show movies, in part because the projector was on a wheeled cart in this small "theater" and because it was all hard surfaces. You could barely hear the soundtrack over the machine gun rat-a-tat-tat of the 16 mm projector. It seems that they only had one film and ran it over and over -- "Mighty Joe Young," a low-budget, latter day version of King Kong. I HATE Mighty Joe Young!!!
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