Thirty-one years ago this week, the Silver Legacy was celebrating its grand opening (specifically on July 28, 1995).
Hopes were high for the $350 million casino/resort, as R.V. Scheide discussed in the Aug. 2, 1995, issue of the RN&R. R.V. centered that discussion on a marketing ploy used by the Silver Legacy: the creation of Sam Fairchild, the benevolent silver baron who, in 1895, founded the casino with a (fake) mining rig at its center.
While Fairchild was pure fiction, Silver Legacy’s ad campaign—bolstered by slobberingly positive coverage by the local daily, and even remarks by the mayor—presented him as the real deal.
Here’s R.V.’s piece in its entirety:
In a doctor’s office in Sacramento, a one-eyed man peruses a recent issue of People magazine, squinting through the wrinkled, leathery flap of skin covering his good eye as he turns the pages. Suddenly, his good eye pops open and he nudges his wife.
“This is the new Silver Legacy up in Reno,” he rasps, pointing to a full-page ad. “It shows you how to mine silver. This guy made enough money mining silver to build his own casino.”
The guy the one-eyed man is referring to is legendary silver baron Sam Fairchild, founder of the Silver Legacy, the new “themed” $350 million casino/resort which opened in Reno this past weekend. It’s a good thing, the one-eyed guy explains to his wife, that benevolent men like Sam Fairchild put money back into our communities.
Thing is, Sam Fairchild isn’t real. He’s just a marketing concept dreamed up by the Silver Legacy’s advertising department. But I don’t let the old couple in the doctor’s office in on that. Besides, I’d only just learned Fairchild was a phony myself.
Chalk up another victory for media hype.
When it comes to last weekend’s grand opening, hype is the word. For months, residents of Northern California and Nevada had been bombarded with Silver Legacy publicity in the forms of both advertising and news stories. Distinguishing between the two forms has grown increasingly difficult.
For instance, in the days before and immediately after the opening (July 16-30), the Reno Gazette-Journal, the area’s major daily newspaper, ran no less than six separate cover stories on the Silver Legacy, all with a positive spin.
“This is incredible,” “I’m astounded” and “It’s colossal” read the introductory kickers to the paper’s July 29 cover story on the opening. The July 30 Sunday paper, besides the obligatory cover story, featured a 40-page Silver Legacy advertising insert filled with ad copy that differentiated little from Gazette-Journal “news” stories.
By far the most bemusing aspect of this media saturation has been the presentation of Sam Fairchild as a “legendary” or “mythical” figure, as if these adjectives offered distinct clues to Fairchild’s fictional status. To demonstrate this is not so, consider the title of a popular non-fiction book dealing with mid-to-late 19th century silver barons: Legends of the Comstock Lode.
You won’t find Sam Fairchild listed among the real-life legends presented here or in any other book dealing with the era, but that didn’t stop Reno Mayor Jeff Griffin from thanking “Sam Fairchild” for creating a machine that “continues to drop silver coins into our economy” with deadpan earnestness during opening ceremonies.
The machine Griffin referred to is the Silver Legacy’s centerpiece, a 120-foot-tall mining rig that stands squarely inside the center of the casino’s 180-foot diameter dome. The rig, constructed of steel and brass painted in primer green and red, actually works as a piece of postindustrial art, combining contemporary visual, tactile and auditory elements into a cohesive whole which transcends the average casino experience.
Visually, the structure, with its exaggerated cogs, wheels and belts, is expressionistic in nature; a distorted, funhouse mirror embrace of the near-past. When the rig is operating, the casino floor actually vibrates. A state-of-the-art audio system broadcasts the sound of chirping crickets. On the inside of the dome, 2,000 gallons of paint create a kitschy sky scene, and if one looks up continuously, the feeling that you’re strolling around in a Texas oil field is impossible to suppress.
At the same time, Sam Fairchild’s magical mining machine conjures up a conundrum. While the Silver Legacy’s publicity for the most part avoids any comparisons to the themed mega-casinos of Las Vegas (one press release compares the Silver Legacy experience to “Disneyland” and “Disney World”), there is no doubt about who Reno’s major competitor is.
“… (T)he Silver Legacy is the beginning of a modernization and rebuilding of the biggest little city in the world,” predicts general manager Gary Carano in the most straightforward press release. It is a re-launching of Reno’s gaming and tourism industry that will make the city a viable competitor to Las Vegas.”
Maybe so, but there’s a fundamental difference between the Legacy’s approach to the kind of glitzy overkill that brought upwards of 25 million tourists to Las Vegas last year. The themes of the Vegas casinos are based on fantasies that are ostensibly more appealing than visiting a mining rig. Consider Steve Wynn’s Treasure Island. Or how about the Luxor, with its Ancient Egyptian theme? Need a place to drop the kids? How about in the $1 billion MGM Grand’s adjacent amusement park, with its eight themed areas?
True, Silver Legacy visitors can drop the kids at neighboring Circus Circus (which, along with the Eldorado, combined forces to build the Silver Legacy, which now acts as a centralized hub for the three hotel/casinos). However, there’s an ominous subtext underlying Circus Circus president Clyde Turner’s opening ceremony statement that “silver really touches the heart and soul of Northern Nevada.”
The way Rodman Paul tells it in Mining Frontiers of the Far West, Turner would have been well-advised to choose “cuts” as his verb—cuts like a knife. According to Paul, much of the xenophobia expressed by Northern Nevada natives toward Californians today can be traced back to the Silver State’s alleged glory days during the Comstock Lode, circa 1859-1880.
“Nevadans have been protesting ever since that in the short space of twenty years, California stripped their state of Comstock silver and gold, used it to rebuild San Francisco, and then abandoned the Comstock Lode to the unhappy future that faces all gutted mining properties. There is considerable justification for the complaint.”
Perhaps this accounts for the fictitious Sam Fairchild. Most of the real-life silver barons were, as far as Nevada was concerned, pretty darn stingy. George Hearst, William Ralston, William Sharon, John Mackay, James Fair, James Flood and William O’Brien invested almost all of their silver profits in California, not Nevada. Thus the necessity for the creation of a benevolent baron, who “made a promise a century ago.”
Whether that promise will be fulfilled remains to be seen, despite the ebullient boosterism Reno’s latest addition has received from the press. Certainly, there are bugs to be worked out, such as the visible seams in the dome’s sky mural and the confusing time warp caused by the juxtaposition of staff uniforms from non-coincidental points in the space-time continuum. Why, for instance, are English bobbies waiting outside the parking garage?
These problems are solvable. The larger question the Silver Legacy must answer is the most obvious, the one that is always asked in Reno: Will people, i.e. Northern Californians, come over to the hill to see it?
If they do, there will be a cruel sort of irony at work. By 1895, the year Sam Fairchild made his promise, the bonanza days of the Comstock were long over. Reno, struggling through the depression at the end of the last century with limited natural resources, began diversifying its economy the only way it knew how: by capitalizing on human weaknesses, in this case, the national demand for more lenient divorce laws.
A century later, the rest of the nation has eased its divorce laws, and Reno no longer has an advantage in that realm. The very same thing is happening with gaming—casinos are legal in nine states now—but for the time being, there remains a window of opportunity.
The opportunity for Reno’s revenge.
That’s the potential beauty of Sam Fairchild’s magical mining machine; that’s where the irony comes in. Wouldn’t it be something if people did come over the hill to see the rig beneath the Silver Legacy’s egg-like dome, and the Comstock Lode was gradually returned … one silver quarter at a time?
Paybacks, as they say, are a mutha.
Those paybacks would not come to be.
Not quite 17 years later, Sam Fairchild’s property was broke, and its real-life owners had to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
“The 35-story Silver Legacy opened in 1995 at a cost of $350 million. But in the past decade, the proliferation of tribal casinos in California has taken a toll on the Reno-Lake Tahoe region’s gambling industry,” The Associated Press reported at the time.
—Jimmy Boegle
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