Tripp Plastics: Casino partner and pioneer

Warren Tripp remembers the first time

he saw Las Vegas about 50 years ago

when it was smaller than Reno and had

fewer casinos.

He was 8 years old and accompanying

his father,Wally Tripp, who was meeting

with customers there.

After World War II, in which he served

with the U.S.Navy in the Pacific,Wally

Tripp started a slots repair business to support

himself while he took advantage of the

GI bill to study engineering at the

University of Nevada-Reno.

He stuck with the repairs business once

school was done, running it with one or two

other men who repaired slots around the

clock in the Reno area. Looking for new

business opportunities, though,Tripp took a

correspondence course in plastics after reading

a glowing article about it in Popular

Mechanics.

"The plastics industry had all this capacity

after the war and they were looking for

ways to use plastic," said Warren Tripp.

Wally Tripp found a way. His experience

listening to the woes of slot operators and

his own genius for innovation gave the

entrepreneur an idea. In 1950, the slot repair

business that became Tripp Plastics manufactured

the first slot sign for the Frontier

Casino in Las Vegas.

Now all slot machines boast signs - television

shows from the 1960s such as "I

Dream of Jeannie" are the most recent fad -

and most are made by Tripp Plastics.

"He is a very creative guy," said Warren

Tripp, now president of the Sparks-based

company, referring to his father, who still

stops by the office almost every day to take

his son to lunch.

In fact,much of what you see as you

wander through a casino is manufactured by

Tripp Plastics - from the slot signs to dealer

shoes for card decks to the name tags worn

by dealers.

The company also makes several gaming

products you don't see - such as the seethrough

tables and chip racks used in a casino's

so-called soft money room where cash

is counted. (Everything used in the process

is translucent to prevent theft.)

Many of those products are not only

manufactured by Tripp Plastics, but were

also dreamed up by the company's founder.

In addition to the slot signs,Tripp developed

the slot candle, the light atop a slot

that blinks when a jackpot is hit. That was

the first time slots used electricity, when

Tripp installed plastic candles using small

car batteries for the power source. (Until

then, slots were entirely mechanical.) The

company now makes between 200,000 and

300,000 slot candles a year.

Tripp also developed a punch card for

slots that printed a receipt every time the

machine hit a jackpot. Before that, slots

didn't record jackpots; the casinos had to rely

on the word of the change people who paid

out the jackpots. As a result, the gaming

industry was losing millions paying out

imaginary jackpots, said Tripp.

"As soon as you get the price high

enough on a winning you have a problem

because there are crooks out there," said

Warren Tripp. "You have to build safeguards

into the system."

The gaming industry owes a lot to Tripp

Plastics but some of the company's most

important items were developed when gaming

products couldn't be patented. Anyone

can now manufacture the ubiquitous and

essential slot products that owe their existence

to Wally Tripp's imagination.

The laws eventually did change, and

Tripp Plastics now has patents on four

products, including the auto Keno vision, or

AKV, system.

Most Keno systems use plastic rabbit

ears into which the balls are blown. It

requires three people to operate, including

one who programs the winning numbers

into the large screen that players look at

longingly to see if they've won.

Tripp Plastics still makes the rabbit ear

systems, but about five years ago the company

designed the AKV. The Keno balls are

blown into a plastic pole from a crystal ball

made from the mold of San Francisco street

lights that Tripp owns the rights to use.

(Plastic produces too much static electricity

and can't be used.) The system uses a camera

that reads a code on each chosen ball and

transfers that to the large screen. As a result,

it requires only one person to operate.

About 70 percent of the company's business

is with the gaming industry. The company's

business is nearly impervious to a

downturn in local gaming that may be

caused by the California Indian casinos

because it sells to both slot machine manufacturers

and directly to casinos.

Its business wasn't immune to the events

of Sept. 11, 2001, though. Customers

retrenched, said Tripp, and didn't place

orders for several months. "The casinos were

considering dropping a shift," said Warren

Tripp. "We had never heard of that before.

They don't even have locks on the doors."

That forced Tripp Plastics into its first

major lay-offs. It let go 35 percent to 40

percent of its 250-person workforce. The

company now is back up to more than 200

employees.

The other 30 percent of its business consists

mostly of signs made for other industries.

The company makes name tags, for

example, for Manpower, La-Z-Boy, the

Nevada Department of Wildlife and other

non-gaming customers. It also makes a stop

sign that is graffiti-resistant as well as many

public signs that adhere to the American

Disabilities Act.

Warren Tripp isn't an inventor like his

father, but he's made a great contribution

to the business, according to Howie Tune,

the company's sales manager. The company

uses a line of computer-operated

machines - so-called computer numeric

control or CNC machines that Warren

Tripp had installed to manufacture many

of its products.

Tune attributes the company's healthy

growth rates - double-digit growth for the

last 10 to 15 years, except for flat growth in

1994 - to the CNC processes.

"He has incredible vision for what is

needed in the industry," said Tune.

The company, which is 100 percent

owned by Warren Tripp, is developing new

products all the time. It takes, on average, a

year to take a product from concept to sales

and Tripp is reluctant to discuss any of the

ones now in development.

But rest assured the company is working

on adding to its already prolific portfolio of

products and to maintain its history of innovation

and invention. Said Tune: "We're

always looking for new products."