"Shaky attribution"? Well, aside from a signed and notarized affidavit (which is somewhat unlikely), it's about as good as we're going to get, I think.

The frustrating - and also most interesting - thing about researching illegal clubs is that so much of what we know has to depend on memories, many of them more than 50 years old. And when the people with the memories pass away, the information will be gone with them. It wasn't ordinarily in anyone's best interests to commit a lot of the info to paper, certainly not when the clubs were operating.

If the person who ran the clubs says this was his chip, I'm willing to believe him. I certainly don't have any better information to the contrary. Yes, club owners were notoriously careless about silly little ol' things like mold designs and logo fonts. Heck, even in Nevada there's a place that used chips on which its name was spelled 3 different ways! And every one of them worked for the purpose for which they were intended: gambling! (Ferris Hotel, Ferriss Hotel, Fariss Hotel.) I'm not sure anyone ever noticed before chip collectors came along, but if they did, they sure didn't care!

The fact that this chip was used in MS doesn't preclude the possibility that it was also used in IL. Some illegal club chips from Northern KY, for example, were used in the Miami, FL area during the season there, which was off-season in the Midwest. Sometimes chips were moved when the heat was turned up in one gaming jurisdiction, then brought back when the clamor died down.

We all wish there were unassailable records to prove every chip attribution, but especially with illegal clubs, that just isn't the case.

Michael