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."
