April 8, 1935 - PUT IT ON THE 27
Las Vegas, Nev., brings back, in a way, the old gambling days of Goldfield and the Yukon; thousands play, but it’s too serious
The Washington Daily News—Monday—April 8—1935 Page 19
PUT IT ON THE 27 By ERNIE PYLE
(While Broun is on vacation.)
WE AMERICANS, by contrast with other nations a Puritan people, still seem to glory in memories of our “bad” days. This feeling is mixed up, I suppose, with romance and pioneering and all that. But whatever it is, there is a little thrill for most all of us in the mere mention of Goldfield, of Tombstone, of the Yukon, or the six-gun.
Most of that is gone now, but something of it is being recaptured today in that immensely few state of Nevada, where gambling is legal, there are no blue-sky laws, and anything goes.
One evening not long ago I drove into Las Vegas, Nev., lying out there on the gray desert in the little corner where Nevada juts down to join Arizona and California. If you didn’t know it was real, you would think Las Vegas was a movie set.
It is a boom town. Not that it hasn’t been there for a long time, for it has. And not that it hasn’t been a wide-open town for a long time. But today it is really a boom town—boomed by Nevada’s legalized gambling and the proximity of some 5000 here-today-gone-tomorrow men who are building Boulder Dam.
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LAS VEGAS is a town of only 5000 population. It has four high-class hotels, and a number of smaller ones. I didn’t go around counting them, but I would guess that the town has 20 big gambling casinos and at least 40 saloons.
Now that, to me, who was born on a farm and who has never broken the bank, or even seen it, at Monte Carlo—that is something. Las Vegas didn’t slip thru my fingers unexplored. No, sir. I made the rounds, playing chicken feed money, of course, came out 65 cents loser, and had a swell evening.
And maybe you think those people out there don’t really gamble. I played in about eight different casinos that evening, and every one of them had an average of 300 or more people, playing everything from keno to roulette. It was on a Wednesday night, no week-end holiday thing, just an ordinary weekday night, and yet I figured there were some 6000 people gambling that night in that town of 5000 population.
About 40 per cent of the gamblers, it seemed to me, were women. You could not classify the gamblers, either men or women, as any certain type. A few of them looked like story-book gamblers, some looked like toughs, some appeared to be society people, but on the whole they were just common garden-variety human beings. A lot of them looked poor.
The thing that impressed me most was the intensity of the players. There was no spirit of holiday here, no levity or appearance of “going on a bender.” Almost without exception those people were there for the one purpose of making some money, and they were going about it with very serious faces.
There was no rowdyism anywhere, not even loud talking. Every casino has a bar. At every bar someone was drinking. Occasionally a player would stop to go over for a drink. But I didn’t see a single drunken person that evening; there was no shouting or laughing. The players played with dead pans and closed mouths, with their eyes on the wheel or the cards. There was not, I regret to say, any shooting.
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I DID NOT see any elaborate casinos, such as you see in the movies. There are some, I believe, outside of town, in the manner of country clubs. But those in town are simple, built for gambling in any form you like, without any doodads to distract your mind.
The first place I went into had a “race-track” game just inside the door. A tall bald-headed man with a hanging jowl was spinning the wheel on the wall. You played any of six horses, and they paid from 2 to 1 to 30 to 1. There was an old old man sitting there playing, almost asleep and apparently quite bored with it all. I think the game isn’t very popular, and that he was a stooge, placed there to draw customers, for I saw him sitting on the same seat playing listlessly away, all by himself, two hours later.
Behind this came a roulette wheel. The wheel is always popular, with usually half a dozen players and a dozen watchers clustered around. Then came craps, and then chuck-a-luck. And stretched along the rear half of the side wall were tables for poker, faro-bank, twenty-one (black jack), and other card games. There were no women at these tables.
Every game, except the race track game, was filled, and watchers stood about them all, except the card games. The aisles were crowded and jammed with people arriving or leaving.
But the big game is keno. The reason, I suppose, is because it is cheaper. It is nothing more than bingo with which Washington is acquainted, except that instead of throwing arrows or doing something else under a thin veneer of “skill” to get your number, the man rolls them out of a “goose”—pure chance.
More than half the keno players were women. They watched their cards and listened for the numbers with the utmost gravity. The card costs a nickel, and the pot is $5. About every fourth game the card costs a dime, and the pot is $15. In the gutter on the table in front of you are thousands of dried beans, and you use these for markers on your card. About 200 people were playing in each keno game.
A poorly dressed woman who sat next to me shoved her card disgustedly aside as the $15 pot ended. “Damn it,” she said, “I thought sure I would win that one. And I needed that 15 bucks, too.” She looked as tho she did. She sat right where she was, laid down a nickel for the same card, and went on with the next game.
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A TENDERFOOT like me expected to see all the dealers and bankers taken right out of the movies. But they too, were unclassifiable. Some of them were very young, looked like college boys. Others were past middle-age. Some looked kindly, others bored; very few looked really hard. They all wore the traditional green eye-shade, and they all wore poker faces.
Most of the players, I learned, were workers from Boulder Dam (only 24 miles away) and their families. The workers all live in Boulder City, and altho this is in Nevada it is a Government-built city, and there is no gambling there. So they come flocking over to Las Vegas every night to lose their money or make some more.
But the glamor of ‘49 and the ‘80s is gone. Las Vegas today has all the outward appearance of the old gold-rush town—the saloons, the gambling halls, the crowded streets where cowboys, miners and millionaires jostle arms, the high prices of all boom towns, the pawn shops with their windows full of six-shooters—all this, yet the breath of life is not there. Las Vegas and its gambling 6000 is like a wax figure of Jesse James.
Maybe it means that we Americans have changed inside; maybe it proves that legalized gambling does not breed lawlessness; maybe it means that this nation has had its youth and can never be young again. I don’t know what it means, but there it is.
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