Well hey there. Been awhile! Despite having time lately, I just haven’t been doing a lot of research. I guess I relied on Gene to be that voice always spurring me on. “Ed, have you been able to look into that chip yet?” “Good stuff Ed, please write it up so we can post it!”

I recently was asked a question about the “JT” chip below and I was going to send the IOTD I was sure I had already done. I looked through my files and nope, couldn’t find it. For some reason I did all the research and never wrote up the results.

Gene, where are you man? We need you!!!

From the card we can see that there is a lot of information. Without doing a deeper dive, the chip would be attributed to the Panama Hotel. As I’ve discussed before, Galveston was not like Dallas or Houston where much of the illegal gambling happened in hotels. For the most part, gambling occurred in designated clubs.

(Side note – there is a lot of interesting history between the powerful Maceo and Moody families of Galveston. The Maceos ran the gambling, the Moodys ran the hotels. One time Sam Maceo started construction on an apartment complex and was visited by W. L. Moody who said, “Now Sam, we’ve stayed out of the gambling business, and we expect you to stay out of the hotel business.” The next day bulldozers were tearing down instead of building up.)

It didn’t take long to find that the “T” stood from Tripo Pavlovich, and although he was to become and man of substantial means, he had decided to live in his basic fourth floor single room at the Panama Hotel for 26 years.

Now that we know the Panama Hotel was his home address, we need to find out if he was involved in the Galveston gambling scene. Spoiler alert – he was!

Tripo Pavlovich, a native of Austria, landed in America as a young boy and quickly made his way to Galveston where he made a life as a sportsman. It was here that Tripo and his good friend and longtime business partner Jimmy Alexander plied their trade.

Our first glimpse into the boy’s illicit business occurs in 1935 when the Texas Rangers made their way down from Houston to check out a few gambling complaints. At the U Club, 2012-1/2 Market Street, they entered the premise and asked for the keys to the locked room upstairs. The receptionist claimed there were no keys and thus no way to open the door. Unfortunately, the patrons upstairs didn’t get the message and when the Rangers knocked on the locked door, it was opened. Inside, the officers found playing cards, dice, poker chips, and card and dice tables. The eight men inside were charged with “loitering around a gambling house” and fined a whopping $1.

After the raid, Tripo was charged as owner. He wisely fought the charges on the grounds that no actual gambling was occurring at the time of the raid, and the courts agreed. There was no doubt that it was a gambling house, but without witnessing it directly, there could be no fine. (I wonder if the patrons got their $1 back?)

Not included in the indictment was Tripo’s business partner Jimmy Alexander, although he was indeed part owner. The two of them had a long history of co-owning clubs in Galveston and would remain close friends and associates throughout.

The partners had other interests in Galveston as well. One place, the Venice Club on 69th and Broadway was constantly running afoul of the liquor laws. Then, in 1937, news of a new construction project being built west on 61st Street on the Galveston-Houston highway. They reportedly invested $30,000 in expanding the Sportsman’s Inn into a new dance and dinner club. After years of starts and stops, the new Sportsman’s Club opened to much fanfare and prospered.

The 1940s were a good time financially for Pavlovich and Alexander. Their Sportsman’s Club was prospering and both men lived the life of leisure and indulgences – perhaps a little too much. As 1950 rolled around, Tripo was tipping the scales at 300 lbs and his health was quickly declining. Severe arthritis and heart disease made his life almost intolerable.

At the end of October 1951, the suffering Tripo made an appointment with Jimmy Alexander’s two sons and signed over his interest in the Sportsman’s Club to the next generation. Two hours later, the manager at the Panama Hotel heard gun shots and after investigating, found Tripo Pavlovich dead on his bed from a gunshot to the head.

Despite the fact there were two shots fired (one bullet hole), the death was clearly a suicide. He had written a pile of notes saying goodbye to friends and business associates. On a postcard, next to his body was written, “My property and money to my dear friend Jimmy Alexander” then signed “Tripo”. He was 56 years old.

The Sportsman’s Club would continue operating under the guidance of Jimmy’s two sons – Harry and Chris. It was damaged in 1953 by a fire set by an arsonist. Details are sketchy, but at the time the city was in a battle to close gambling and bingo parlors (perhaps by any means) like the Sportsman’s Club. It would be rebuilt and opened for a few more years until 1957 when Galveston was effectively shut down in a city wide crackdown that brought everyone to a close.

The “JT” chip at the beginning of the article represents the end of one man’s life and the culmination of a great partnership between (J)immy Alexander and (T)ripo Pavlovich.

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Good to be back at it.

I touched on the “U Club” above and some of you might be wondering why I didn’t post pictures of the “GAY” chips many have attributed to them. The reason, quite plainly, is that I don’t like them.

I’ll be posting a follow-up post explaining this and some other corrections.