Frugal Fridays

We’re home from a Mexican cruise that Brad and I took with my daughter and her family. They’re now back at their home at Fort Drum in upstate New York, where they hope they can ALL stay awhile. The Army has promised that Steve will not be deployed overseas the rest of this year, but after that there are no guarantees -- it depends on the world situation. I pray for world peace all the time, but in my heart I’m afraid there’s no real hope for it.

Before I left on vacation, the news was that the Western casino on the edge of downtown Las Vegas would close, unable to meet the demands of the Culinary Union. An interesting “requiem” for the casino was written on an Internet bulletin board and I asked the author, Stuart Resnick, for permission to quote it here in this column. However, when I got back home, I found out that the owner had decided not to close the casino after all. But I decided this piece was so interesting that I would still include it. The Western WILL close someday and it never hurts to have a requiem on file! Here it is.

“When I worked in Vegas in 1990, my ‘break-in’ job was dealing blackjack & roulette at the Western. It was also the site of my first jackpot: hitting 4 deuces on the FPDW quarter machine.

“They had penny slot machines; if you played 5 pennies, you could win a car as the jackpot. There were occasionally stories of people who'd hit the jackpot but with less than 5 pennies played, so the payoff was something less than $100. When someone actually did hit the jackpot, I remember the casino manager appeared in the publicity photo, but had a look on his face like his dog just died.

“Roulette was played with 10-cent chips, so it was very challenging to deal. Low-level gamblers would buy 400 chips or whatever and spread them in stacks around the board, feeling like high rollers.

“Blackjack was a $1 minimum, so many of our customers were just there to get their free beer with an absolute minimum of risk.

“The drug dealers were among my favorite customers. Not only did they tip OK, but if they lost a few hundred dollars, they just shrugged and left, without bitching & moaning like our usual clientelle.

“Because of that one jackpot I hit, the Western for years sent me deals for 3-night stays with food (such as it was) for $16 total. I took advantage of it once or twice, till I got old enough to want something just a LITTLE classier.

“My favorite factoid to share with people to give them a sense for what it was like to work at the Western: It wasn't uncommon for players to sit down at the blackjack tables with the band-aids still on their forearms from the plasma they'd donated to get their bankroll.”