Commonweal: Not a good bet - gambling

The parochial school I attended in Kentucky may have been the only one in the nation where kids made book in the fifth grade. Our indigenous junior achievers took bets for pennies and nickels and then led us over the fence at Churchill Downs two blocks away to see how they ran.

At recess you would hear a lot more talk about fast workouts and track conditions than about fast balls and batting averages, talk no doubt picked up at the family dinner table from parents whose livelihood depended in one way or another on the horses. In my sister's class, two grades behind me, there was a girl with celebrity status. She was like a movie star's daughter. Her father was the jockey on Donerail, a long-shot Kentucky Derby winner paying odds of 91-1. And Derby week, it was a festival.

The school itself was the site of the weekly parish bingo games. The games were so well-known that streetcar motormen on their routes would announce the stop as "Bingo Junction." Off-track betting parlors, though illegal, were tolerated, sometimes leading to comic scenes reminiscent of Damon Runyon's Guys and Dolls. In one legendary instance, patrons in a second-floor book on Jefferson Street spotted the police approaching for a ritual bust. When the law arrived, however, no betting apparatus was to be found. There was merely a group of pious souls listening to a program called "Hymns of Faith."

In view of all this, you can't say that I emerged from a puritanical background, or that I was taught gambling is the fast lane to perdition. Even now, I don't think that all gambling is evil. But increasingly, I find myself turned off by the all-pervasive spread of commercialized gambling.

Why was it that on my first arrival in Las Vegas at some postmidnight hour (I can't tell you the exact hour; the Time of Day Service is an unlisted number in Las Vegas), I looked at shadowy figures in the hotel casino endlessly pulling levers, dealing cards, rolling dice, and thought it could well have been one of the circles of the damned in Dante's Inferno?

Why do I find TV spots suggesting that I celebrate the Christmas season with a visit to a nearby Indian casino or ads touting the state lottery more distasteful than commercials for hemorrhoid relief or remedies for acid indigestion? And why is it that in my heart of hearts I applaud when I hear of another river boat gambling referendum going down to defeat, or boo when I read that another city has voted to open a gambling casino?

Why is it that I thought of Calvin Coolidge the other day when I heard on TV that legalized gambling is now a $300-billion-a-year industry in the United States? Silent Cal's pronouncement that "the business of America is business" has become "the business of America is gambling." (Come to think of it, $300 billion could go a long way toward balancing the budget without taking food out of the mouths of babes.)

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And therein, I think, lies my revulsion. The gambling I grew up with was mom and pop stuff. Sure, it wasn't all innocence. In one of James T. Farrell's Studs Lonigan novels, set in the 1930s, there is a sad episode in which a housewife turns to prostitution to replenish the grocery money she lost betting on the horses. And no doubt there were payoffs, too; you can't have illegal enterprises without some degree of corruption.

But even with the evils it wasn't the large-scale hyperactivity we find today. The little old ladies playing bingo at the commercial bingo parlor may well be the daughters of the little old ladies who played bingo at my school. But then there were not so many, and there was no big-time advertising to pull them in.

When I was in school, the only game at the drug store across the street was a penny pin ball machine. Now drug stores across the nation hawk state lottery tickets enticing people who can ill afford it to throw away money better used elsewhere. While it is heartwarming to see a janitor on the TV news receive a $5-million check from the state lottery, in all fairness equal play should be given to the bankruptcies and suicides of people who just couldn't quit. The jackpot is always in big print; the real odds are in print so fine it is unreadable or voiced at the speed of gibberish.

Unfortunately, so long as state politicians look on legalized gambling as a painless way to raise revenue, the wheel of misfortune will continue to spin. But as every taxpayer knows, even with an annual take of $44 billion, state-operated gambling is never enough to pay the bills. One wonders what's next: state-sponsored drug dealers?