Jack Harpster. King of the Slots: William “Si” Redd. Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2010. 273 pages.
Si Redd might have had a bigger impact on American casino gambling than anyone else in the years 1960 to 1990. He’s got some big competition–Jay Sarno, Steve Wynn, and Kirk Kerkorian are a few names that spring to mind. But those three, for the most part, changed the way casino in Las Vegas look. Redd helped change the blueprint of casinos around the country, and possibly the world.
Redd was a distributor for Bally’s in the years when the slot-maker pioneered in the electro-mechanical market, creating machines with more entertainment value and higher jackpots. Without these machines, slots would likely have not eclipsed table games in revenue, as they did in the 1980s. Later, he founded International Game Technology (IGT), and did more to bring video poker and wide-area progressives to wide popularity on the casino floor than anyone else. Redd wasn’t an engineer–he was a salesman. This doesn’t diminish his important to the development of new slot technologies; casino managers needed to be convinced to give the new machines a chance, and Redd had few rivals as a salesman. He also had the vision to encourage innovation and invest in developing new ideas that others might have turned down.
In King of the Slots, Jack Harpster traces Redd’s career, from his childhood as a sharecropper’s son in rural Mississippi, to his start in the coin-operated amusement business with pinball machines and later jukeboxes, to a successful career as a machine route operator and distributor, to a second career in Nevada as a slot salesman and, eventually, manufacturer. Harpster packs an incredible amount of detail–based on exhaustive research–into this biography, giving the reader a surprisingly vivid portrait of Redd. He is to be commended for drawing on a range of sources and melding them into a readable story.
Despite his renowned philanthropy, Redd wasn’t all sweetness and light–as a hard-headed negotiator, he didn’t always make those he did business with happy. Towards the end of his life, he had a series of regulatory reverses that may have tarnished his legacy. Similarly, Redd didn’t always have the Midas touch when it came to business. It’s to Harpster’s credit that he doesn’t minimize these negatives, and they make his biography of Redd feel more balanced and more accurate for their inclusion.
Even Las Vegas and casino history buffs will learn quite a bit from King of the Slots. It’s a well-researched look into the life of an important, but undeservedly lesser-known, gaming pioneer. It deserves a place in everyone’s Nevada/gambling library.
This is a book I want to read! A good subject and era. I love the era of ‘vending money machinery’…like pin ball and juke boxes and old slots.
The author has written several other books about Nevada, etc.
And even though the part about Redd being the “son of a sharecropper” sort of seems cliche, it’d be interesting to see that paths that led him out.
Oh boy!!
I’ve finally gotten me some new books to read. Including King of Slots!! This looks like it’s going to be good. Plus I got some DVDs to play on my computer. BTW: A real good movie (history-wise) is ’3:10 To Yuma’.
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This book died on me about 35 pages before it officially ended.
I thought the author did a great job in fleshing out a biography basically from nothing and having to do a lot of research along the way.
This book was very well written….but the story ended-up leaving me depressed. Maybe biographies don’t have to extend to the absolute last days of the subject’s life.
In this case…this book should have ended at page 188 (at the end of the chapter called ‘A Kaleidescopoc Life’ (that talked about IGT and Megabucks).
There were lots of great parts to the story of this man’s life and the author covered it very well. But I felt the last 35 pages could have been condensed into one…without any loss.
Quite honestly….this man Si Redd held little appeal for me. It’s hard to read the story of a man you don’t have respect for….and for me…(strangely enough) I grew to dislike this man pretty early on.
There are lots of books that pay homage and lay accolades to the main character…usually calling him “hard working, industrious, gifted, generous” and all that.
This book could have tried hammering all those accolades into my brain for another hundred pages….but they never would have changed my negative opinion of this man.
With a lot of so called ‘great success stories’ there is often a certain degree of corruption involved in the early years. I have a strong feeling that is the case with this man.
Regardless of my ‘personal feelings’….later on…at page 171-173 I read something that no matter how seemingly insignificant….actually said all I ever needed to know about Si Redd.
Dale Frey was the engineer who perfected Video Poker for Si’s company. Si promised him 5% of the profits…yet never gave him ANY.
Page 173 has Pete Manda saying this:
“Frey didn’t get everything Si promised him. None of us did; but that’s the way Si worked. He’d promise the world, then when it came time to deliver he’d renege on you. He did that to all his good people”.
The author says “soon forgotten promises were his stock in trade. Although they served him very well when trying to convince a skeptical prospect to buy, they were the wrong tools for the CEO’s office”.
The author does a good job at analyzing Redd’s management style.
I, for one, won’t forgive this man SI so easily.
I analyze him as being jealous of the very workers who helped him earn his greatest achievements….and of using sadistic little games and power-trips on the people behind his throne. Something very typical of lots of other so-called business geniuses.
He wasn’t a business genius. He wasn’t generous. That’s a title handed out too easily to so-called philanthropists who only ‘give money away’ for tax-write-offs and for attempting to buy social standing and their picture in the Rotary Club Newsletter.
Redd pulled many cut-throat moves to get ahead. He wasn’t a great man. I found him to be a grasping, greedy, immature, very basic man with an unenlightened mentality. He won’t get no favored treatment by me just simply because he amassed a fortune.
He ripped off his own employees ideas and had them so bamboozled by his chicanery that they didn’t know heads from tails. In my mind, he was simply a fast-talking cheater…yet I suppose I’m expected to come away from this book thinking he’s one of the ‘great men of Nevada’.
He amassed over $240 million….and was receiving $2,000 a day from his truck-stop venture alone. Take a moment to imagine that. $2,000 per day! Yet he still never rewarded those workers that got him to the top.
I tell you this. When I finished reading this book I came away with no inkling that this man ever developed any ‘life-wisdom’ from all of his experiences. He just seemed to me to be an empty-souled man whose only trait was to be a pushy salesman.
Another thing. I find that these businessmen who are never graceful enough to retire at a proper time actually show a great amount of immaturity and neediness. I don’t see anything honorable at people who need that sort of ‘limelight’ into their nineties. None at all.
I have no respect for guys in their 80s who don’t turn their lives over to some degree of ‘life-contemplation’ and a re-invention of their lives. Redd just kept on wanting to be ‘the King of Deal Making’. If you ask me….that’s a child-like mentality.
It’s really rare for me to come away from a biography not feeling uplifted a bit. This man’s story did the opposite for me. I didn’t find one redeeming quality or character trait here. His story…especially the last two decades…proved to me he was a man so unenlightened …as to really have made me depressed.
I still don’t know what great thing he did or what great legacy he left behind. IT’s like he said…he had no competition. And what little competition he had he managed to stymie or squelch.
I don’t see any part of his character or personality embedded in the current ‘business philosophy’ of IGT. It’s like he didn’t even leave any footprints of greatness like other business tycoons did (Woolworth, George Eastman, Hershey, …..movie studio owners, Walt Disney, …ad infinitum….etc, etc.)
Great businessmen usually leave behind some exceptional character traits of themselves…as a stamp of themself…for the company’s future. I don’t see any ‘character legacy’ left by Si Redd at all.
Sorry if my personal opinion doesn’t mesh with any one else’s. I think the author did a fantastic job of writing this book. I loved it until around chapter 12. But, the last two chapters talked about such a boring life (and man) that I almost forgot all the previous good things that were written. The book fizzled out.
IMO
Thank You.
Despite the things I wrote above, I actually did learn a lot from this book about the history of slots, Ballys and IGT. It also answered my wonderings about how Megabucks got started…which was sort of launched to compete with California’s new lottery.