Tuesday, March 3, 1998 | 10:09 a.m.
A few years after retiring as casino manager of the Four Queens hotel-casino, Charlie Stump was still holding court in the downtown resort's poker room.
Nearly every day, he sat in seat No. 10 in the $1-$2-$5 pot-limit Texas Hold 'em game so that he could have easy access to the telephone, which was located just over his shoulder. He would use that line to conduct business between raking in pots and flipping sizable tokes to the dealers.
"Charlie was still writing comps and getting gamblers hotel rooms at the Four Queens in 1983 -- that was two years after he had retired," said Gene Trimble, former Four Queens poker room and keno manager.
"If a customer had a complaint or just needed something, he'd go to Charlie instead of the casino manager."
Charles W. Stump, who helped open the Four Queens as a shift boss in 1966 and in recent years was a successful competitor in the daily poker tournaments at The Orleans hotel-casino, died Friday at Columbia Sunrise Hospital. He was 84.
Services were to be held this morning at Palm Mortuary downtown for the Las Vegas resident of 43 years.
"He was just a pleasant guy to be around," said David Hricsina, poker room manager at The Orleans.
"Charlie loved to play in the daily tournaments whether it was (Texas) hold 'em or Omaha (hold 'em). He won quite a few of the tournaments when he was playing regularly. But he had been ill in recent months."
Hricsina was poker room manager at the Gold Coast hotel-casino when he met Stump in the late 1980s. Stump, along with a majority of that card room's regulars, became a daily player at The Orleans, a sister property to the Gold Coast, when it opened in December 1996.
Trimble, who today is bingo and keno manager at the Fiesta hotel-casino, was a Four Queens poker dealer about the time that Stump retired and during the years he was "running" things as a non-employee.
"Charlie never won a pot where he didn't tip the dealers real well -- especially if it was a big one," Trimble said. "For the longest time, the Four Queens was the only place for him. Then, he just stopped coming in around the mid-1980s. When he did, the pot-limit game also left."
Trimble said that when he became card room boss in 1984, Stump gave him good advice.
"He told me to always look at things in a positive light," Trimble said. "Charlie did not berate people. He would take someone aside and say 'this is how I would do it,' rather than tell them they were doing it wrong."
Hricsina agreed, calling Stump "a real gentleman -- always."
Born Dec. 29, 1913, in Letts, Iowa, Stump came to Las Vegas in 1954 and began working in the gaming industry.
In June 1966, he went to work for pioneer hotelman Bennie Goffstein, who opened the Four Queens, then an eight-story building named for his four daughters -- Michelle, Bonita, Faith and Hope.
Stump was one of the resort's four original shift managers, along with Jim Garrett, Jack Sullivan and Glenn Neely.
In August 1967, Goffstein, former president of the Flamingo in the 1940s and '50s and the Riviera in the early 1960s, died. But Stump remained with the company and climbed up through the ranks.
In the early 1970s, Hyatt Corp. bought the property for $17.5 million and ran the Four Queens through its wholly owned subsidiary, Elsinore Corp.
In 1977, Stump was named casino manager and became a vice president at Elsinore, under Jeanne Hood, who had taken over for her husband, David, when he died in June of that year.
Stump also served on the four-person executive committee with Hood, Vice President and General Manager Bill Kozloff, who had operated the Last Frontier and Silver Slipper in the early 1950s, and Vice President and Comptroller Leonard Marxen, who had been comptroller at the El Rancho Vegas in the 1950s.
A July 28, 1977, SUN story about those appointments to the Elsinore executive committee, noted that Stump "has more than 40 years experience in the gaming business, with more than half that time being in Las Vegas."
Stump, who also was owner and operator of the Pastime Sport Shop and Horseshoe Club in American Falls, Idaho, retired from the gaming business at age 68.
It was not surprising to those who knew Stump that he would spend his retirement years around gamblers and as a familiar face in poker rooms frequented by locals.
"I would see Charlie hurrying by the poker room and would tell him that we were about to start a pot-limit game," Trimble said. "He'd look at his watch and say he just didn't have the time to play. Five minutes later he'd be in the game."
Stump was a lifetime member of the Elks Club.
He is survived by his wife, Gladys Stump, of Las Vegas; a daughter, Sharon Buck, also of Las Vegas; two grandchildren; and 10 great grandchildren.
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