Club member and regular BB poster Steve Passalacqua found the Star and Crescent chips some time ago and put them on the BB recently. New Indiana illegals are hard to come by. The "Illegal Of The Day" team got a set and our "Friend Of The Hobby" went to work on the history of The chips. The operators son is 94 and still going strong. I talked to him. Without him we may never have know for sure where the chips were used.

star & crescent

The records of Hunt & Co. of Chicago show that the chips pictured below were delivered to
Bud Gott at the Corral Tavern in Valparaiso, Indiana in March 1952:

pics of the exterior of The Corral from 1952:

Gerald Thad “Bud” Gott was a well known gambling figure in Valparaiso for many decades.

1952 Christmas greetings from Gott and The Corral:

The Corral opened its doors on September 9th 1948. It was located in downtown Valparaiso, across the street and a block west of the Porter County courthouse.

Guy Wellman and his family operated The Corral at the location for almost 10 years.
Prior to The Corral, Wellman and Bud Gott had been involved in various enterprises together
including the Palace Café in 1948 and The Club, which operated from the 1930’s through the late 1940’s.
According to Guy Wellman’s son Bill in his 2006 memoir “It’s Made to Sell—Not to Drink”, the main activity at The Club was gambling: poker on the first floor and a horse book upstairs.

Circumstantial evidence would seem to suggest that The Corral would have offered activities similar to those found at The Club. However, this does not appear to be the case. In a phone conversation with Gene Trimble in April 2016 Bill Wellman stated that there was never any gambling at The Corral, it was a family restaurant and bar. Wellman, who worked at The Corral and knew Bud Gott well, said that at the time of the chip order Gott operated a “horse bookie” in the basement of a building directly across the street from The Corral which was known locally as “The Hole” (going down a stairwell located in the front of the building took you to The Hole’s front door).

My note: Bill Wellman's exact words were:
"Never gambling at the Corral. The Corral was a family restaurant and bar. My mother would have thrown a "FIT" if we would have even mentioned having gambling there. The chips were used across the street in "The Hole.
Without Bill's info we would have attributed the chips to the Corral. Classic case of "Big Time" gamblers bowing to a Mom pitching a "Fit."

Bud Gott had operated a place at the location as far back as the 1930’s when he opened “Bud’s Billiards” there.
For many years Gott received and distributed race wire information from the basement.

ad from 1940:

View looking west on Lincolnway from the 1940’s--
Bud’s and The Hole were located in the basement of the three story building at 65 (below Bloch’s Hotel sign);
The Corral was at 66:

View looking east on Lincolnway from the 1940’s--
the trees visible on the right side of the street are in front of the Porter County Courthouse:

A list put together by a 1950 U.S. Senate committee investigating the transmission of gambling information shows Gott as the sole Valparaiso subscriber to the racing information supplied by the U.S.A.’s principal distributer: Continental Press Service--described by Kefauver as
“America’s public enemy #1”:

In 1951 when the Federal Government introduced the wagering tax stamp, four stamps were purchased in Porter County, three in Valparaiso--all for 65 W. Lincolnway. When this info was made public in December of ‘51, things heated up at Gott’s basement location and he locked its doors. When law enforcement showed up at the place the local paper was able to report:

Yep, it’s locked—a local newspaper photographer looking down into The Hole’s entrance snapped this pic of
Valparaiso’s chief of police checking the front door:

Three months later the star & crescent chips are delivered to Gott across the street at The Corral. In addition to handbooks, Gott was known to run poker games in downtown Valparaiso.

In the late 1950’s a reputed Cosa Nostra member from Gary, Indiana named Tommy Morgano—with backing from the Chicago syndicate—wanted to take over all gambling and pro$titution in Porter County. To do so, he began by introducing himself to Porter County’s new chief deputy sheriff Harold Rayder with the question: “How’d you like to make a fast buck?” Rayder, while pretending to show interest in brokering a deal with Porter County legal authorities, allowed himself to be wired for sound by a special investigator working for a
U.S. Senate anti-racketeering committee. During a conversation recorded while sitting in Morgano’s car Rayder expressed concern about how the new set-up would affect the local gambling fraternity and specifically asks about Bud Gott:

The “Lowia” mentioned by Moragno is most likely Lewis Parker “Louie” Deck who, in partnership with Gott, ran poker games in Valparaiso at the time. Gott and Deck were partners in various gambling enterprises through the years and in the late 1960’s were charged with being “professional gamblers.” In 1970 when both were in their early 60’s they plead guilty
to Federal indictments charging that they were part of a multi-million dollar northern Indiana gambling ring.

A lifelong resident of Porter County, Gott died there in 1983 age 78.

This is "Illegal Of The day" #314.