Sometimes I forget that I was there when many of the original tribal gaming facilities were developed.

I guess my first contact with tribal gaming started in 1989, at Foxwoods. Mickey Brown, a longtime New Jersey regulator, had been hired by the Mashantucket Pequot tribe and arranged funding from the Malaysian gaming company, Genting, at a time when regular banks and financial institutions wouldn’t touch Indian gaming.

I worked for Casino Player magazine at the time, and Mickey invited me up to see his operation, which consisted of high-stakes bingo. In fact, that was part of the facility’s name: Foxwoods High Stakes Bingo. I met and interviewed Pequot Chairman Richard “Skip” Hayward, who had challenged the state of Connecticut in order to offer table games, because the state allowed charities to hold “Las Vegas Nights” that included table games.

At that time, Foxwoods had just bingo, but the most massive bingo parlor I had ever seen—and being a Catholic, I had seen many. The Foxwoods hall was the size of several football fields, and it was jammed with players in every seat. The property offered games where the prizes were new Corvettes, and graduated to $250,000 and, later, $500,000 in prizes.

I returned the following year, after the courts ruled that tables could be installed at Foxwoods. Mickey gave me a tour of the soon-to-be casino floor. He pulled up some carpet and showed me the electrical conduits that would link the slots machines.

When I asked him why, since only tables had been legalized, not slots, he said, “Give me another year.”

And he was right. A year later, the tribe cut a deal with the Connecticut governor that gave the state a slice of the revenues, and slots were installed in most of the old bingo room as well as the new casino floor.

A couple of years later came Mohegan Sun, just down the road from Foxwoods. Developed by the legendary Sol Kerzner of the Sun International group, it included former Atlantic City executives like Mitchell Etess, Jim Allen, Bill Velardo and many others.

While the Foxwoods development was somewhat hopscotch to satisfy the growing demand, Mohegan Sun was born with a master plan you see continuing to be implemented today.

On the other side of the country, tribal gaming in California got off to a slower start, even though that’s where it was essentially born, following the Supreme Court Cabazon decision in 1987, which led to the passage of the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988.

Touring Southern California in 1995, I visited many of the casinos, all in fairly remote areas. Most were housed in converted buildings or the “Sprung” structures of the day—really just a big tent. At the Pechanga reservation in Temecula, it was even more basic. The “casino” was a series of trailers, weaved together and jammed with slot machines, in the middle of a dirt field. On a fiery hot summer day, the air conditioners worked at full blast, and barely cut the heat inside those trailers. Slot machines were malfunctioning, but there were still hundreds of people waiting to get in. Compared to Pechanga’s facility today, it was the Stone Age, but it shows the diligence of the tribes to offer the best to their customers.

When an Atlantic City friend of mine got hired to run the tables at Grand Casino Mille Lacs in Minnesota, I grabbed the opportunity to take another statewide tour. Again, the quality of the casinos was spotty at best. Mille Lacs, and its sister property in Hinckley, had been developed by visionary Lyle Berman, and were the most complete casinos at the time. Tribal leaders like Mille Lacs’ Melanie Benjamin and Stanley Crooks of the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community—whose Little Six casino was a literal teepee—were important players not only in Minnesota, but across the country.

I remember visiting Jackpot Junction in Morton, Minnesota, and interviewing Marlin Torguson, who was nearly jumping out of his chair, he was so excited about the future of tribal gaming. Like Berman, he later migrated to Mississippi, and was one of the founders of gaming in that state.

There are dozens of other stories I could tell about tribal gaming’s emergence. We need to remember where tribal gaming came from, and honor the people who were in the vanguard of its development, because understanding the past is key to preparing for the future. And the commitment of tribes to ensuring that their members thrive for generations to come makes that a crucial element in the future of tribal gaming.