Casino Cheques are commonly referred to as chips. So that is how I will refer to them. Back then dealers got cash tips everyday they worked. They came in small yellow manilla envelopes. If you were on a day shift you could get them immediately. Swing and Grave shifts got them at the beginning of their shift. Dealer’s tips are call tokes. There is a toke committee made up with individuals that are dealers. I was one for 6 months. Benefits of being one was an extra $20 everyday.
Tokes were collected in plexiglass boxes handing on the back side of the game tables. When the toke box got full an extra box replaced it. At the end of the graveyard shift I stayed late, day dealers were taken off the rotation. If a swing shift dealer wanted to come they could, but normally a second day dealer served. Once the dealers all were present We had a big canvas sack and we took the keys and emptied all the tokes into the sack. Then we went to a locked room and counted them. A good day you would see a lot of green chips. They are $25. Great day you saw black chips. They are $100. Usually at lady luck it was red. They are $5 with some green and a lot of white one dollar chips. A few metal $1 coins. A tip never was turned done no matter what chip was. All the chips were spread on the table. we had empty racks to hold the chips. They usually filled a a few racks of $5, and 1/2 rack of $25 and a lot of $1 racks. Once we had them counted and racked a security guard put them on a cart and we pushed it to the vault where the workers there would verify the totals. They would give us a sheet with the total. We took that sheet to employee cage window and got a stack of actually money. We took that back to the locked room and stuffed the envelops. People who were taking vacation time or sick would get 1/2 share. We got the extra $20 in our envelope. The rest were put in a carton and taken to the pit and the pit boss to possession of them and handed them out on their shifts.
There was another group that had to count and turn in chips to the casino, The Churches often found chips from multiple casinos. So, they had to sort them for value and location. They then would go to each casino and trade them for cash. The funniest one was the Catholic Monk> He had a change cart loaded with chips so everyone called the Chipmunk. He had no security with him as they rolled the cart around downtown. At this time downtown was a lot rougher before they put up the Fremont Experience. We just figured no thug was willing to chance the result of mugging a monk in robes.
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