Claudine Williams, 1921-2009

Claudine Williams was born in 1921 in DeSoto Parish, La. She took her first casino job when she was 15, dealing cards at a private club in Bossier Parish.

A few years later she moved her mother to Houston and met Shelby Williams, a sports book writer. World War II broke out and Shelby enlisted in the U.S. Navy. Claudine, then 20, took the opportunity to open several restaurants that offered gambling.

When she died Wednesday at the age of 88, after a long illness, she was remembered as a pioneer who helped shape the gaming industry in Las Vegas, the first woman to run a Strip casino and also a tremendous philanthropist who contributed millions of dollars over the years to charities in Las Vegas and to the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

In 1989, she became the namesake for one of three new campus dormitories after she contributed $500,000 toward the project. She also provided scholarships for a generation of students.

Claudine Williams came to Las Vegas in 1965 with her husband, Shelby, a longtime Texas entrepreneur. They bought the Silver Slipper casino on the Strip and operated it for several years before selling the small gambling hall in 1969 to billionaire Howard Hughes, who was living across the street atop the Desert Inn.

Mrs. Williams and her husband then took the profits from the Silver Slipper sale and purchased land across the Strip from Caesars Palace for the Holiday Casino, adjacent to the Holiday Inn.

Mrs. Williams told interviewer Joanne Goodwin in UNLV's Las Vegas Woman Oral History Project that she and her husband ran the Holiday Casino "like a Mom and Pop business."

After Shelby Williams' death in 1977, Claudine Williams emerged as president and general manager of the Holiday, a first in Nevada for a woman. She sold 40 percent of the casino to Harrah's in 1979 and her remaining ownership in 1983. But she was given the title of chairman of the property.

"She took me and so many others in the company under her wing and explained to us both the gambling business and Las Vegas," says retired Harrah's Chairman Phil Satre. "There are so many people in the gaming industry that she mentored. She was a remarkable woman, and she's going to be greatly missed."

Former casino owner Jack Binion says Mrs. Williams knew the gambling business better than most of the men who operated here in 1970s and 1980s.

"She was the real deal," Mr. Binion says. "She lived the business. Some of the old time guys in the business couldn't change with the times, but she did."

In the 1980s, she also served as chairwoman of the board for the American Bank of Commerce and she was president of the Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce, the first woman to hold that position.

"Despite having only a ninth-grade education and competing in what was at the time an almost exclusively male-dominated industry, Claudine's achievements were remarkable," says current Harrah's CEO Gary Loveman.

Indeed. The generation that helped launch this city's greatest boom are now passing away. But the legacy they built -- not just steel and concrete, but a town where visitors could feel as welcome as if they'd found their second home -- still stands around us, a greater monument and epitaph than any marble slab.