My family moved to Las Vegas in my junior year of high school when my dad’s work took him to Nellis Air Force Base. I graduated from high school there, worked for years there, returned there after my mission, and after I moved away I often drove back to visit family. My parents are gone, but most of their grandchildren, and now their great grandchildren, still live there. Las Vegas is as close as I have to a home town.
While I still lived there, friends I had made elsewhere sometimes came to Las Vegas and wanted to go out on the town. I hated that. Casinos are noisy and garish and they smell bad, and they’re designed to disorient you and drain your pockets and surround you with drunken laughter and worse behavior. There is nothing lovely or virtuous or of good report about them – but I dutifully drove visitors to places where they could get the thrills that I never wanted, while I hung around in boredom and disgust, trying to smile often enough to mask my uncoolness. All those years in Las Vegas, working in law offices smack in the middle of the downtown casinos, or working in the Clark County Fire Department’s Station 18 one block off the Strip, and I never so much as put a nickel into a slot machine – not because I was righteously abstaining, but because the whole idea bored me.
No, it took my God-fearing aunt, she of the many Church service missions, she who had sewed enough children’s dresses for Humanitarian Services to clothe an entire Primary, she who left a secret record of decades of tithes and offerings, she who had served as a sister missionary in the 1940s – that aunt – to turn me into a gambling fiend, a worshiper at the shrine of the one-armed bandit.
My aunt Evelyn got me into all kinds of trouble – she’s the one who introduced me to genealogy, after all. She’s the one who took me to the Church Archives, an Ali Baba’s cavern of treasure the existence of which I had never before suspected – and look at how that took over my life.
In the 1980s, Evelyn’s own life was swallowed up by a desire to trace all the descendants of her grandfather’s sister, a thrice-married woman whose 16 children had settled in every western state from Washington to Texas. Some of her sons had been sheriffs; some of her grandsons had been the outlaws those sheriffs arrested. Some of her daughters were incredibly straight-laced pillars of Mormon communities, and some were … not. And then there was the mystery of what had become of Camilla Augusta herself – when had she died, and where was she buried? And because it was Evelyn’s project, those details had to be tracked down from authentic sources, documented and cross-referenced and charted and filed in manila folders organized in Evelyn’s precise way.
I went with Evelyn on some of her field trips to trace Camilla Augusta’s far-flung descendants, and I was with her on the trip she made to Elko, Nevada. Not so much Elko, really, but Deeth, the hot and dry desert ranching community that had been home to some of Camilla Augusta’s children a century earlier. Wikipedia tells me it’s a ghost town now. Zillow tells me there are 0 homes for sale. I’m surprised there are that many.
After we had poked around Deeth for a while, visiting the cemetery, soaking up the landscape, trying to imagine what it had been like to live there in the olden days, we headed to Elko. There was a great little museum there, which also housed a collection of the county’s early newspapers, which I searched as rapidly as possible. We went to the county courthouse and tracked down marriage licenses and other traces of the lives of Camilla Augusta’s descendants.
And then we went to the Elko motel where Evelyn had made reservations.
When she came back to the car with the room key, she also had four rolls of nickels – $8 worth – that the desk clerk had given her, in hopes that she would spend them in the tacky little casino attached to the motel, and then, of course, that she would continue to spend her own money there. Evelyn handed me two rolls of nickels and said, “Come on, let’s go.”
I could hardly believe my ears. This was my Aunt Evelyn, in her 60s at the time, smart and sharp and a Sunday School teacher – why would she want to go into that place?! But she laughed, and insisted, so I followed her, rolling my eyes and carrying those two rolls of nickels.
It was worse than I had thought possible. The casino was dark. It stank of beer and tobacco. It was noisy with bells and whistles – literal bells and whistles – and the darkness was broken by cheap flashing neon lights. There was no action but spinning slot machines – this was pre-video machine gambling – and no roulette wheels or blackjack tables or anything else that required any “skilled” casino employees – just whirring machines and unglamorous housewives and cowboy-hatted ranchers sitting in front of them, dropping nickels, pulling machine arms, and dropping more nickels.
I watched Evelyn play the slots for a few minutes, then wandered off in search of something more interesting. There wasn’t anything. Just more of the same.
Fine, I said to myself, fine. If this is what passes for life here, I’ll do it. And I sat down and started pumping in nickels. Drop nickel. Pull arm. Rinse and repeat.
It was as boring to do as it had been boring to watch. Every once in a while a few nickels would spill back out of the machine, and the lights would flash and the bells would ring – but that didn’t make the “game” any more interesting. Drop nickel. Pull arm. Drop nickel. Pull arm. Bells and lights. Drop nickel. Pull arm.
It was so boring, so mindless, that I had to start thinking about something or I’d lose my mind. I thought about the machine I was feeding. The vulgar little thing got so excited every time it spit out a few nickels. No, it wasn’t excited – it was trying to manipulate me, trying to get me excited. But it would take more than a few buzzers, more than 30 or 40 cents worth of “won” nickels, to entertain me.
Let’s get this over with, I said to myself. I’ll get rid of this one roll of nickels, and then leave with my other roll – free money – I’ll beat the system. So I concentrated on getting rid of those first nickels.
Only I couldn’t. Or at least not easily. Whenever I would make progress toward disposing of those nickels, the machine would spit a few of them back at me. Never enough to get ahead, to “earn” more than my $2 “investment,” but just enough to prolong my agony. Sisyphus never had it so bad with his endlessly rolling boulder as I had it with those endlessly replenishing nickels. Drop nickel. Pull arm. Drop nickel. Pull arm.
The ends of my fingers grew black from handling those coins. The stink of tobacco settled more deeply into my hair. Evelyn finally got tired of her own slot machine and wandered over to find me. Drop nickel. Pull arm. She was ready to go. No, I said, I’m going to get rid of this roll of nickels first. Drop nickel. Pull arm. Dang it all! That’s almost 60 cents spilled into the tray to the accompaniment of those awful bells! It’s going to take forever to get rid of this $2. Drop nickel. Pull arm.
Evelyn got annoyed. I didn’t care. Drop nickel. Pull arm. You brought me into this place, and the only way I could keep from dying of boredom was wondering how long it would take me to get rid of this roll. Drop nickel. Pull arm.
Finally – and I have no idea how long it took – casinos don’t have clocks, for good reason – I was down to my last nickel.
Drop nickel. Pull arm. Hold breath, hoping against hope that the whistle wouldn’t sound and my tray wouldn’t fill with nickels again.
It didn’t.
I had dropped my last nickel, pulled my last arm. I could leave now, with my $2 profit and my filthy black hand.
I had beat the machine! I had forced it to take all my nickels without throwing any back at me! I had won!
I haven’t been in a casino since.
Haha! I loved this!
I too loved this. My son served his mission in those parts of northern Nevada… but of more immediate interest, my great-grandmother (whose life I am revisiting in preparation for a trip this week to her old haunts) was born in Elko in 1882.
Genealogy is worse than a one-armed bandit. For every mystery solved, two more are spit back at you! haha.
Wonderful post, Ardis! It was a nostalgia trip for me–both my parents were from Nevada. Although I’ve never lived there, I have the oddest sensation of being home when I cross the state line. I have much the same reaction to casinos as you do. I’ve never forgotten my parents, suggesting to an uncle that they go out to a casino one evening. He looked at them blankly and said, “I haven’t gone gambling in thirty-three years!” He only lived a few blocks away from the biggest casino in town.
Great story, Ardis. What do you think would’ve happened if you hadn’t come up empty on that last nickel?
Heh. Back in the early and mid-1980s, both as a commercial software developer and then as a columnist for BYTE Magazine, I attended COMDEX in Las Vegas each year. COMDEX was the major personal computing industry conference for quite a few years, and it was a great way to see what was new in the industry and what had succeeded or failed from the previous year. It was also (when I wrote for BYTE) a great way to eat lots and lots of wonderful chilled shrimp at the various vendor receptions in the evenings; I seldom had to actually go out and buy dinner.
On the other hand, I would go out and gamble one evening during each COMDEX trip. I’d take $20 cash (leaving my wallet in the hotel room) and pick one of the small “dollar” casinos off the strip — the kind with nickle (or even penny) slots, $1 live blackjack and roulette, etc. Much as in your tale, my rule was simple: when the $20 was gone, I was done. And the best lesson from all those trips was: the $20 always vanished. I could make it last 2-3 hours, but the ‘house’ always won.
My last COMDEX trip was probably in the late 1980s; haven’t gambled since. I still have fond memories of late-night live blackjack, though. 🙂
Gary, I’d be sitting there still, all these decades later, the muscles of my right arm developed to massive size from the exercise of pulling that arm, my left arm black to the shoulder from the grime of those dirty nickels, my eyes spinning in time to those cherries …
This story and its comments makes me wonder why, oh why did people live in those towns in Nowhere, Nevada? I’ve got ancestors from an old (different) ghost town, too!
This was a lot of fun. And the comments are great, too.
I used to drive in Inner City Boston. Who needs slot machines to gamble.
Also, we used to pass Deeth on our California to Utah trips. It’s near Starr Valley Road, and some other things with the name of Starr (early settler, maybe), so there is a highway 80 sign that reads “Deeth Starr, next exit.” (I know you’re not a Star Wars fan, but some of your readers might be.)
.
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Yeah, that one.
Hey! Where’d you get that photo?
Google Images. Were you the one who posted one like it a while back? I couldn’t remember who that was to ask for a copy.
Nice. Thanks for the laugh.
Yes. And Google Images probably has that from me. So I guess I can’t claim copyright infringement.
Exit sign, FTW.
And Exit No. 333 means that it’s only half way to Heck!
Did you deliberately post this on the federal tax deadline day? As I am preparing my forms for mailing, this seemed an appropriate distraction.
I love gambling stories, and your redefinition of ‘win’ is perfect. Maybe my affinity for gambling stories is because my dad was a gambler. Mom didn’t like it, but he won more than he lost, so it was grudgingly tolerated. My son, as a young man and into his college years, shared his grandpa’s deep fascination with sports and teams, and win-loss stats and whatnot, but thankfully, inherited conservative money attitudes from my in-laws side of the family, and he didn’t frequent the sports book. I always told him that the worst thing that could happen would be for him to win.
And now, Ardis, arms of equal size, but finger tips calloused from years of typing? … 🙂
Excellent, Ardis!
Sometime in the last few years, I went to a show in a Las Vegas casino. The lack of indoor smoking seems to have significantly improved the smell and the grime, but not enough to make a slot machine ever-so-slowly draining your money seem like fun to me.
My grandma said that once she was with some of her children driving through Las Vegas and when they were stopped somewhere they goaded her into putting some money in a slot machine. After a great deal of refusing she finally stuck a nickel in, expecting to lose and teach her kids a lesson about why we shouldn’t gamble. She won.
The worst thing about one-armed bandits is that they don’t have an arm anymore. You could sit at the lousy machine and push a button all day (or night) long, and never have to exercise your arm at all.
I was in Vegas one time for a seminar. I love watching people and one evening I went down to the casino floor and watched this guy drop $500.00 in 5 minutes playing the craps table. I thought to myself, dude, you could have just given that to me if you wanted to get rid of it. Never understood why people did that!
I read your blog from time to time(usually first), when I come to the bloggernacle at all. I was in a calling with your brother, and know your family a little. I am a transplant to Nevada, but this is definitely where we needed to be after I left the Army. its the home place for so many of my wife’s ancestors, including her gggrandmother, who has the distinction of having the only grave with a marker in the West Point, Nevada cemetery. My Father-in-law lived around here with his relatives for a long time, and graduated from Basic H.S. I worked at refurbishing those one-armed bandits, for a season, and they are filthy with tar and tobacco juice. I remember one time when I was moved to put a quarter in one of them, and a $5 dollar payout resulted. Thinking back, I could have gone on and become a gambling addict, but it shocked me at how easy it was, for that slippery slope to appear! Its a strange world, but this place has an active missionary field, along with all the traps of the world.
I was at a job interview in Minden, NV, during the Spring of 1996, and they put me up in a casino. The hotel gave us all a fake $1 coins that you could use all over town. When we went to lunch as part of the interviews, I was going to go pop in a slot machine but a lady beat me to it … and won $100.
My grandmother was a shutterbug, and used to take bus tours through Nevada (and other Southwestern states) to look for photo ops. She said the tours always made “rest stops” along the way at little podunk towns with nothing but little casinos like that, and give everybody on the bus a roll of nickels. She’d drop the roll in her purse and go look for something interesting to photograph while the other tourists were trying to lose the nickels. When I was a kid I thought it would be fun to go along so I could get free rolls of nickels, too.
I’ve visited Vegas twice. The last night there we walked through a casino about midnight and were amazed by the crowds of gamblers. I was expecting it to be a quiet ghost town the next morning at 6:00 AM as we headed for the airplane — nope, it was just as crowded as the night before. Perhaps by the same people?