on March 14, 1929, with "Reno, the Biggest Little City in the World". Reno took a leap forward when the state of Nevada legalized open gambling on March 19, 1931, along with the passage of even more liberal divorce laws than places such as Hot Springs, Arkansas, offered. The statewide push for legal Nevada gaming was led by Reno entrepreneur Bill Graham, who owned the Bank Club Casino in Reno, which was on Center Street. No other state offered legalized casino gaming like Nevada had in the 1930s, and casinos such as the Bank Club and Palace were popular. A few states had legal parimutuel horse racing, but no other state had legal casino gambling. The new divorce laws, passed in 1927, allowed people to divorce each other after six weeks of residency, instead of six months. People wishing to divorce stayed in hotels, houses, and/or dude ranches. Many local businesses in Reno started catering to these visitors, such as R. Herz & Bro, a jewelry store that offered ring resetting services to the recently divorced to El Cortez Hotel, which was built specifically to cater to the high number of wedded couples seeking divorces in Nevada. Most people left Nevada when their divorces were finalized. Within a few years, the Bank Club, owned by George Wingfield, Bill Graham, and Jim McKay, was the state's largest employer and the largest casino in the world. Wingfield owned most of the buildings in town that housed gaming and took a percentage of the profits, along with his rent. Ernie Pyle once wrote in one of his columns, "All the people you saw on the streets in Reno were obviously there to get divorces." In Ayn Rand's novel The Fountainhead, published in 1943, the New York-based female protagonist tells a friend, "I am going to Reno," which is taken as a different way of saying "I am going to divorce my husband." Among others, Belgian-French writer Georges Simenon, at the time living in the U.S., came to Reno in 1950 to divorce his first wife. The divorce business eventually died after about 1970, as the other states fell in line by passing their own laws easing the requirements for divorce, but gambling continued as a major Reno industry. While gaming pioneers such as "Pappy" and Harold Smith of Harold's Club and Bill Harrah of the soon-to-dominate Harrah's Casino set up shop in the