I have been inspired by Pam G, Frank Steward and Richard Siri to organize my collection so I can make a post for each casino in Aruba. Early in my chip collecting, I was inspired by Pam, Charles Davis, Doug Deems and Mark Englebretson, each of whom collected other casino items. I had playing cards long before I ever had any chips, and I was fascinated by the more complete picture the various items gave. Eric Miller correctly pointed out that matchbooks contain a lot of information. Clearly this is true of brochures and other collectibles, too. So, I set out to expand my collection to anything reasonably small that I could easily store that had the casino name (and sometimes not even that, but connected to the hotel).

Anyway, I have decided to focus on one casino a day. In Aruba, the casinos are generally affiliated with and often located in a hotel, but have different casino management companies which run them. So, when hotels change names, they usually change the casino. Sometimes, the hotels stayed the same, but hired different management companies, thus changing the name of the casino. One casino, The Casablanca, survived a few hotel ownership changes. So, it seemed most logical to organize the casinos by location, focusing on each casino at a location in chronological order.

I will begin with the first casino in Aruba, located in the first resort in Aruba, The Aruba Caribbean. The Aruba Caribbean was built and owned by a hotel company jointly owned by Dutch and U.S. owners. The Hotel was managed by Henry Steeber, who was born in the Netherlands, but lived in the US, working at one of the other hotels owned by the hotel chain. He took many beautiful photographs, some of which I have copies of, but I was told I was not allowed to publicly display them, since his son is now a professional photographer and plans to use them in a book someday. The hotel and casino opened at 81 JE Irausquin Blvd, Palm Beach, in Noord on July 18, 1959. The casino was run by Jake Kozloff, and owned technically by Kozloff and Clifford Jones. These are the CJ/JK whose initials show up on chips and dice from casinos all over the Caribbean and in South America as well. It is believed that they were working as fronts for Meyer Lansky and other mob shadow owners, but I have never been able to find any evidence to support this. If anyone knows of any, I would love to see it. Interestingly, Kozloff became the Godfather of Henry Steeber's son. Steeber's son had never heard of any mob connection to Kozloff, but he said it fit his personality.

They opened up using the parrot chips, and later switched to a starfish-like design:

In Aruba, there are often two different chips for the smaller denominations. Sometimes, the different colors represent rack and credit chips. Sometimes, some are used at specialty tables, such as Caribbean Stud (a game that originated in Aruba, but long after these chips were made). I don't know what they used these two sets for:

There are only three tables of roulette chips known (and only one color for table C, of which very few are known):

They used a lot of swizzle sticks. I have a different colored blue coming to me right now:

I also have saved a ton of scans/pictures from eBay auctions and otherwise on the internet. Here are some of those:

I hope this wasn't too much! Anyway, I don't have nearly this much for most of the other casinos. Tomorrow, 81 JE Irausquin, part 2.

Michael Siskin