California Hotel and Casino: Hawai'i's Home Away from Home (review)

Las Vegas, America's gambling Mecca, provides numerous facilities where visitors can escape to Americanized recreations of exotic places such as Venice, Italy, or catch exciting shows such as Cirque du Soleil. What about those who sense only the lure of the casino, where they can spend their time whiling away the hours at the roulette wheel or craps table? Sam Boyd's California Hotel and Casino is just such a place. The long-time entertainment entrepreneur who had worked for part of his career in Hawai'i came up with the idea that his facility, the California Hotel, would make a concerted effort to attract Hawai'ians to Las Vegas. Boyd's story is related largely through the memory of his long-time employee, John M. Blink, in collaboration with University of Hawai'i scholar Dennis M. Ogawa, in the entertaining new book, California Hotel and Casino: Hawai'i's Home Away From Home. While Blink's memories form the core of the publication, interviews with other employees and tour operators and escorts are also a part of the story.

Why make the all-out effort to attract Hawai'ian clientele? According to Boyd and Blink, Hawai'ians are the greatest gamblers in the world, and it occurred to them that the Hawai'i market was largely untapped in Vegas. Not only do Hawai'ians love the challenge of gambling, but they are also very methodical about it. They like going to gambling venues for that purpose and that purpose alone. They do not care as much about seeing the shows or even trying foods not normally a part of their cuisine.

The California Hotel's location off of the Las Vegas Strip has always made it a less desirable venue than those facilities that are on prime real estate. Thanks to the oddities of flight routes, it was easier and cheaper to travel from Hawai'i to Reno than to Vegas. So when Boyd began to tap the Hawai'i market, he and Blink wooed tour operators and worked with Western Airlines to bring the people from the fiftieth state to Vegas' California Hotel. By providing complimentary rooms and food, all the customers needed were airfare and gambling money. Blink noted that while their Hawai'ian clientele enjoyed the complimentary rooms, they were less than enthusiastic about the food. These complaints led Boyd to hire a chef who prepared Hawai'ian cuisine. While ostensibly counterintuitive—most people who travel often seek out foods that they do not normally get at home—with the Hawai'ians it was different. They came to gamble; the food was merely sustenance. Boyd's understanding of Hawai'ian culture from his years spent on the Islands paid off. The California Hotel soon became "Hawai'i's home away from home." Blink commented that "Without the Hawai'i market, we could not have made the California Hotel so profitable that we were able to build or buy other properties—including Sam's Town that catered to local Las Vegas residents, the 450-room Fremont Hotel in downtown and the Stardust on the Strip—all within a period often years" (xv).

John Blink's history with Sam Boyd and later, Sam's son, William, forms the basis of California Hotel and Casino, a story that evolves as Blink talks about his career in the casino industry beginning as a young adult. The book does center on the California Hotel, which Sam Boyd purchased in 1975, but the book also discusses some of the other venues in Boyd's empire, including the management of the Stardust and Fremont hotels, where Blink comments on their labor issues when they were unionized. Bill Boyd, who was then managing the company, took some heat in Hawai'i about his treatment of the unions, because, as Blink states, "Hawai'i is...