At 3:46 p.m. Aug. 27, 1980, a half-ton bomb planted by a disgruntled high roller was detonated at Harvey’s Resort Hotel. It was a Wednesday.

Twins John and Ron Graves were working on opposite sides of Highway 50 in Stateline in 1980, one for Harvey’s and the other for Harrah’s.

Ron was working as a cage manager for Harrah’s and remembers preparing for the blast at work that day.

“My boss told me to get ready in case they decide to detonate it,” he said. “My job was to clean out the front cage cashiers. We had to get all of the money, and the chips locked up.”

The casino also started evacuating the gamblers from the casino floor, some of whom did not want to go.

“Employees had to argue with the customers, ‘I don’t want to leave my machine,’ they’d say,” he related on Saturday. “They didn’t want to leave, but it was private property, and we told them they had to go.”

Otherwise, the evacuation was orderly, and the casino prepared as well as it could.

After rounding up all the cash and chips and getting them locked in the vault, Ron said he helped prepare the front windows of Harrah’s for the blast.

Both Harvey’s and Harrah’s had big plate windows facing the highway.

“The whole front of the building was windows,” Ron Graves said. “We put duct tape on all the windows and put up some plywood. Then we evacuated the crew. By the time I left the casino, everyone was gone except security.”

Ron Graves said he drove from the back of Harrah’s to Highway 50 and over to Tahoe Shores Mobile Home Park where his brother John and family were living. John had already been evacuated from the casino.

“He said, ‘they’re getting ready,’ and then were heard it boom all the way down there,” Ron said. “There was a lot of smoke and stuff, but the main part of the blast came out of the side of the building toward the parking lot. As far as the perimeter, Harrah’s was fine, everything was fine.”

“My boss called me, and we were able to go to work the next day,” Ron said. “We called people in the next day and had a big increase in business because Harvey’s was closed.”

Harvey’s dealer Forrest Dunaetz said that when he’d gone home from his Aug. 25 swing shift everything was quiet.

Bomber John Birges Sr. was pretty familiar to the Harvey’s dealers and Dunaetz said he might have dealt to him.

“He was a high roller and they always had the pretty girls deal to them,” he said. “I knew who he was, and I knew he lost a lot of money.”

The investigation put Birges’ losses at around $750,000, so he built a big bomb and demanded $3 million. Instead, he died in prison.

As Dunaetz was driving home over Kingsbury after his shift, Birges and his crew were preparing to deliver the bomb disguised as a computer, IBM logo and all. It was rolled in at 5:40 a.m. A short time later it and the ransom note were discovered by an employee resulting in the evacuation of the hotel.

Dunaetz said he was working in his yard in Gardnerville when he heard a blast and saw a big cloud of smoke rising from Stateline.

“I turned on the news and learned that Harvey’s had a bomb, and it blew up,” he said. “Then I thought, ‘Now I won’t have a job.'”

That didn’t turn out to be true, though. Dunaetz said he worked at Harvey’s Inn, which later became the Lakeside.

“I’d worked there for one or two shifts before that when they needed someone to deal cards for a little while,” he said. “I liked it. It was smaller and quieter, and the bosses were pretty easy going.”

It would be a month before Dunaetz returned to the main casino.

“I went to the edge of the cordoned-off area and peeked over,” he said. “I could see there was a big hole in the floor above,” he said. ” It wasn’t fixed, but it was cleaned up some. I never heard about people getting fired. We worked part-time until they opened up the casino floor before the hotel opened.”

Ron Graves agreed.

“Harvey Gross treated his people really good kept most of them on the payroll,” he said.

Minden photographer Jay Aldrich was definitely at the scene that afternoon for The Record-Courier and had the photos to prove it.

“There were a lot of reporters and photographers at the scene jockeying for position,” he said of that afternoon. “I was moving away from the large group at the supposed epicenter, for a better position.  That’s when the bomb went off.  So I basically missed the shot.”

He caught the aftermath, including the smoke rising around the front sign.

“I decided to focus on the Wagon Wheel tower with smoke surrounding it,” he said. “Looking for human reaction, I turned around to catch Sheriff Jerry Maple’s response.”

Longtime R-C Sports Editor Dave Price was working for the Tahoe Daily Tribune and was in a job interview at a South Lake Tahoe restaurant with General Manager Tom Wixon.

“Tom was supposed to be covering the story, but he thought he had plenty of time,” Price said. “We were in the restaurant in South Lake Tahoe doing the job interview sitting at a window booth facing the highway. The waitress came up and apologized saying she ‘wasn’t supposed to seat you here because they just set off the bomb,'” which is how Wixon and Price learned of the explosion.

“I was totally surprised, and so was Tom,” Price recalled. “The windows didn’t rattle. There was nothing to suggest anything had happened. Tom said ‘Oh, no, I was supposed to be there.'”

Wixon mentioned the incident in the story he filed for the Sept. 4, 1980, edition of The R-C, along with a lot of reaction. It was in that story that Wixon reported the time the bomb went off.

Duaetz worked for Harvey’s for another five years before he decided to do something else in 1985. He now lives in Tucson. John Graves, a decorated Marine, died Nov. 15, 2023, at age 76. His brother Ron lives in the Gardnerville Ranchos.

Aldrich lives in Minden and continues to photograph, contributing to the last few Carson Valley Almanacs.

Price retired after working 47 years as a journalist. He is a member of the Nevada Interagency Athletics Association Hall of Fame and a 2018 Nevada Outstanding Journalist.

Harvey’s was renamed Caesars Republic earlier this year.