Casino memorabilia brings collectors together in Atlantic City

[clevfan]

Casino memorabilia brings collectors together in Atlantic City

By COURTNEY McCANN Staff Writer
Press of Atlantic City
Published: Monday, May 19, 2008

ATLANTIC CITY - The scene was part flea market, part "Antiques Roadshow" on Sunday in the Biscayne Ballroom of the Trump Marina Hotel Casino. Men and women sat at tables with trays of casino chips, ash trays and other memorabilia spread out in front of them. Visitors moved from one station to the next, wrangling purchases or checking on the value of a chip or a matchbook cover.
It was the scene of one of the bimonthly meetings of the Atlantic City Casino Collectibles Club, a congregation of collectors dedicated to hoarding and preserving all things casino-related.

"We collect anything that isn't nailed down," said Jerry Birl, the club's president.

The Atlantic City Casino Collectibles Club was the brainchild of the late Bob Mera, who owned a casino collectibles shop in the former Shops on Ocean One mall. Starting in 1994, the members would meet in the corner of the mall's cafeteria to swap memorabilia and stories under the watchful eye of a tuxedo-clad Mera, Birl said.

At that time, the club was part of the Casino Chip and Gaming Tables Collectors Club, a national organization founded by Brick Township native Archie Black. The Atlantic City club split off into its own entity in 2003.

These days the collector's club has more than 300 members hailing from New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware.
The club draws people from all walks of life: Pack rats who hoarded coins, stamps and baseball cards as children, gamblers who used to save a chip or two from a lucky night at the roulette tables, and history buffs who enjoy delving into the back stories of some of the nation's most notorious gambling establishments.

Ray Woods, of Jersey City, has an obsession with the Riviera, a former illegal gambling house in Fort Lee that attracted a variety of Hollywood stars and gangsters during the 1930s and '40s. Woods was one of the featured speakers at Sunday's club meeting. He showed off glass-encased photos, matchbook covers and even a chunk of concrete from the building, which was torn down years ago.

"It's the history behind it," Woods said. "I got interested in all the gangsters (that gambled there). Bugsy Siegel. Mickey Cohen. All of them."

While a casino collector will take any type of casino memorabilia he can find, the big money is in chips. Members at Sunday's meeting had collections of chips numbering in the thousands from casinos in Las Vegas, Atlantic City and elsewhere. The colorful discs sported names like Sahara, Playboy and Stardust. Some were engraved with the faces of famous personalities from sports and entertainment.

"There's no end to the type of chips people can collect," said Birl, who has more than 20,000 chips in his collection.

Collectors do most of their buying and selling on the Internet, but a lot gets done at the club's bimonthly meetings or at annual trade shows.

Each year Birl makes the cross-country trek from his home in Delaware to the Casino Chip and Gaming Tables Collectors Club's annual Las Vegas convention. Along the way, he stops at casinos in Arizona, Mississippi and Louisiana to pick up more chips.

"It's the mystique," Birl said. "Did Frank Sinatra have this chip in his hand? Or some other big gambler from Las Vegas?"

Casino chip collecting can be a lucrative hobby, depending on how many of a certain type of chip were minted by the casino. Some are worth several thousand dollars, while others can be purchased for $2.25. The net worth of a collection can change from day to day.

On April 14, referred to by collectors as "the day of infamy," construction workers in Hernando, Miss., dug up a chest containing thousands of chips from the former Playboy Hotel & Casino in Atlantic City. Nearly all of the chips from that casino had been destroyed, making those that were still left very valuable. But with that one discovery in Mississippi, the value of Atlantic City Playboy chips plummeted.

"(A Playboy chip) that was worth $3,000 six weeks ago, today you can get it for between $5 and $10," said John Chopek, a Cape May native and the club's vice president. "A lot of people got burned."

But not everyone's in it for the money.

The pride and joy of Dean Macris and Sal Acilio's collection is a $5 chip from the early days of Resorts Atlantic City. The chip is a deep purple, unlike the casino's later $5 chips that have more of a red-violet hue. The purple chip isn't even in the reference books and has no set value, the two Atlantic County natives said. They just like the fact that they have something different.

"It's not about the money," Macris said. "We want this to get in the books, for the sake of the hobby."

Casino collectors are a flexible bunch, willing to change with the times. Many of them used to collect the shiny metal tokens that would come rushing out of the slot machines on a winning pull. Now they collect "titos," the printed tickets that cashiers scan to determine how much a customer won off a machine.

"They have different writing or different graphics on them," Birl explained.

Anything to keep collecting.