David Spragg bought these chips then asked the IOTD team if they knew anything about them.

Like father, like son… or so the saying goes. Today’s IOTD is a perfect example of a multi-generational gambling family. Let’s go to Evansville, Indiana.

C.W. Lee
505 Richardt Ave
Evansville, IN – 1938

Evansville is the furtherest south you can get in Indiana and not be in Kentucky. It borders the Ohio River on the other side of Henderson and down the road from Owensboro, both on the Kentucky side and both with gambling history.

In the year of the chip order, 1938, Charles W. Lee left the hotel business and opened a tavern at 103 Main Street which he called Lee’s Tavern. (The address on the chip order was his home.) Lee’s use of the mysterious RMC chips at his tavern was done quietly as I found no evidence of raids or other negative attention there. What can be observed however is that he was prospering. A few years later Charles moved his wife and young son Charles Jr into a bigger house and moved his operation two blocks away. His new bar at 222 NW 2nd Street was christened the Spot Tavern and new casino chips were ordered.

(note: I’ve never seen these chips before)

Fuzzy picture of the Spot Tavern from the 1960s:

The anonymity he received at Lee’s Tavern did not follow him to the Spot. The pressure was mounting and it doesn’t look like Charles Sr cared too much for it.

Charles Lee Sr looks to have left the tavern business around 1960 and turned his attention to a new kind of gambling – the oil business. While dad turned in his craps dice for drill bits, Charles Junior was gearing up to take over where dad left off.

In the early 1960s, Charles W. Lee Jr starts doing business at the Spot Tavern and ordered a new set of fancy inlay chips from Taylor and Company.

It doesn’t take long before the cops are busting through the doors and Charles Jr starts his decade long dance with the law. Finally, in 1967, the doors were busted down and the Spot Tavern is raided alongside other Evansville clubs in one of the city’s major crackdown on gambling and vice.

But the Spot Tavern was not Junior’s only game in town. The bigger one was happening in the backroom of the local Pancake House. Lee and his cousin/partner Ray Metcalf were doing it bigger and better over there. So big in fact that it caught the attention of the Feds who decided that their enterprise encouraged interstate travel and therefore warranted not only gambling charges, but racketeering as well.

The 1969 raid confiscated tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of equipment, as well as a mountain of evidence. There was little Charles Lee and his cousin could do but sit back and take the convictions. They received a sentence of five years in prison and were ushered off to start it around Christmas 1971.

There is no doubt that Charles Senior made off better than his son. Whether he encouraged him to go down his same path is unknown, but ultimately it was a mistake. Perhaps if Senior’s story had been more tragic it would have served as a lesson for future generations.

I’m still not sure what the “RMC” initials on the chips stand for, but they are an important starting point for the decades long story of the Lee family and Evansville’s gambling history.