My dad was a card player. He liked to play all sorts of games. He, like me, had just one rule. “Tell me the rules before we start.” He played euchre, 500, gin, pinochle, double-deck pinochle and tonk, but most of all he liked poker and blackjack. His favorite place to play blackjack was Las Vegas.
The last two trips that he made to Vegas were with my Uncle Harry Barner, my friend Jim, and me. Both my dad and Uncle Harry just wanted to go because they liked the action. My dad’s health was declining so I asked Jim to go to bunk with my uncle while I looked after my dad. Jim and I traveled to Vegas enough that when we went the casino “comped” our rooms. Without hesitation, Jim said “yes”. He liked Vegas too.
My uncle was a widower when we made our first trip. He talked about the lady he was dating, Louise, throughout the entire trip. She was special.
One morning as we gathering together to get ready for breakfast, Uncle Harry stopped the change girl who was walking through an area filled with dollar slot machines. It was the 1990’s and at that time you still fed nickels, quarters, and dollar tokens into the machines. Today everything is digital. You receive printouts instead of tokens or coins.
Tokens and coins took longer to play because you fed them into the machines one at a time or in groups of two or three. Today you just insert your cash and push a button.
Tokens and coins made the games more exciting because they made a single lonely sound as they dropped into the machine. They also made an exciting clang, clang, clang as they spewed out when you won. That was an exhilarating sound.
On this particular day, Uncle Harry asked the change girl for eight one dollar tokens. He handed her eight dollars and she complied. I thought that the request was unusual. Most people bought two dollars worth of nickels (a roll) , ten dollars worth of quarters (a roll), or dollar tokens in lots of 20 (a $20 bill) or 100 ($100 bill). I had never seen a purchase of eight tokens.
He fed the tokens into the machine one at a time. The maximum bet would have been two at time, but he chose to double his fun by dropping a single token, pulling the handle, followed by another single token, and pull, and so on. He would have been able to do this a total of eight times if he didn’t win but he didn’t make it to eight. On the fourth or fifth pull all hell broke loose and the coins started clanging. As they dropped he filled plastic coin buckets with handfuls of $1 tokens. He filled the buckets as fast as he could and when the clanging was done he had one thousand $1 dollar tokens in several plastic buckets. He needed help carrying them to the cage. Jim and I were happy to assist. Dad just smiled and laughed a bit. Good fortune didn’t always grace a group like ours.
That was the biggest “hit” that any of us had. We all made a little money on the trip, but Uncle Harry won the most. On the flight home, he told Jim that he had won enough to buy Louise an engagement ring and shortly thereafter he did. I expect that he would have purchased the ring anyway, but our Vegas trip made it a little easier.
After Uncle Harry married Louise our foursome made its final trip to Vegas. Dad was slowing even further and it was evident that if we didn’t go now, we may never have the chance again. Once again, Jim accepted our invitation to join with us, booked another comped room and bunked with Uncle Harry. Comped rooms provided extra cash to wager. It makes you feel like that you are getting something for free, but nothing is really free in Vegas. You’re expected to gamble and the odds of winning are clearly on the side of the house. The one thing you can be sure of is you’ll gain another memory.
On this trip we had one night that outweighed all the other nights. Jim liked to shoot craps from time to time. Uncle Harry had no idea how to play but was willing to try. Dad preferred blackjack so he sat at a table within our view while we shot dice.
The rules of craps are pretty straight forward. If you roll your two dice on the “come out” (your first roll) , and make a 7 or 11, you win. If you roll 2, 3, or 12 – that’s crap – and you lose. Any other number made 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, or 10 becomes your point. If you roll one of these numbers, you must roll it again before you roll a 7. If you roll your number (the “point”) before you roll a 7, you win. If you roll a 7 before your “point”, you lose.
It sounds complicated but once you get the hang of it it’s pretty easy. There are a lot of additional bets, “hard ways”, “horn bets”, “taking odds”, “field bets”, “buying numbers”, etc. We tend to keep it simple.
The longer you keep the dice, and thus “make your point”, the more money you win. You start over after each time you win, and pass the dice to another player when you lose. The players at the table want you to win because when you win they win. Everybody roots for everybody and so there can be a lot of hootin and hollerin when someone is able to win several times in a row. If you are able to keep the dice for fifteen or twenty minutes, that’s considered very good.
On this night Jim stood to my left, Uncle Harry to my right, and I rolled the dice for over one hour and twenty minutes. I know how long because the dealers switched positions as I took the dice. They rotated every twenty minutes and took a twenty-minute break. When the “stick man” returned to the table after moving through all three work stations on the table, and his twenty-minute break, he asked, “Is he still rolling?” I was.
I rolled and everyone at the table won. Thousands of dollars found new owners (the players). Between rolls I’d look over my shoulder at my dad. His pile of chips was growing too. After each roll, as the players got paid, I’d tell Uncle Harry to “Pick up your chips.”
“These are mine?”, he asked. They were.
When I finally “sevened out”, everyone cheered. Some had won thousands, others a few hundred. If you didn’t win it was your own fault for not betting. Uncle Harry won about $1,000. I won $1,500 and, high rollin, Jim pocketed over $2,000. We went over to get my dad, who had won over $500 himself, and we all cashed out.
It was the luckiest hour and twenty-minutes in Vegas I ever had and I got to share it with three men I loved.