Several years ago, before we started collecting casino stuff, we found this ashtray at a local flea market. I'd been to Vegas a couple of times, my husband had been there several times, but neither of us had ever heard of Joe W. Brown. Both of us thought that Benny Binion always owned the 'Shoe. We bought the ashtray for less than $1.

We got home and I started looking through some Vegas books & magazines that we had...Green Felt Jungle, Las Vegas Style magazines, a couple of books by Barney Vinson. Couldn't find Joe W. Brown's name anywhere...Benny Binion was the only name we found connected to the Horseshoe. More or less forgot about the ashtray. Then we were at an antique show; even though we didn't collect the stuff, my husband enjoyed looking through the old Nevada postcards. He pulled out a card and showed it to me "The $1,000,000 display at Joe W. Brown's Horseshoe Club" WHAAAATTTT????!!!!! We bought the card and the quest started again.

I made a photocopy of the postcard and wrote a letter to Barney Vinson (author of several books on gambling/Vegas, wrote a regular column for Las Vegas Style magazine) asking who Joe W. Brown was. Then we headed to Las Vegas for a vacation, and took a copy of the postcard with us.

One night we were having dinner at the Horseshoe Coffee Shop and overheard a couple of well-dressed guys talking, it was obvious that they worked there. We asked them if they'd ever heard of Joe W. Brown...they gave each other kind of funny looks, then said 'yes' he ran the Shoe for a couple of years in the mid-1950's...and that was all they said.

A few days later we were in an antique shop and saw an identical ashtray. We asked the clerk if she knew anything about Joe W. Brown. She said "no, but I know who you need to talk to." She left the room, then came back with a man. She told him that we wanted to know about Joe W. Brown's Horseshoe Club, and he got all excited! He said "Wait just a minute...I have something to show you!!" He dashed off and literally ran up some stairs! He came back a minute or two later carrying a game like the one on ebay. He told us about Benny Binion serving time for income tax evasion and Joe W. Brown running the place while Beny was gone. He also told us that when he was young he knew the Binion kids...and when that game came out he helped the Binion kids stuff the game parts into the boxes!

On the same trip we stopped at the Gamblers General Store and saw Art Anderson's book on Casino Ashtrays. I looked up Horseshoe and, sure enough, "our" ashtray was in there with the story about Benny doing time and Joe running the place. I HAD to buy the book. So to justify spending $20 on the book, for the story of a .75 ashtray, I wanted to start collecting Nevada casino ashtrays...and so did my husband! Which led to collecting chips, postcards, dice, swizzle sticks, decks of cards, china, glassware, etc. etc. etc.

Eventually we found a Joe W. Brown craps game and added it to our collection...