Jim Bradshaw
Some folks with a bit of white in their hair may remember the uproar in the 1950s when State Police superintendent Francis Grevemberg began to crack down on gambling, particularly slot machines. The machines spread into stores, restaurants, and all sorts of other places after Huey Long looked the other way while they were brought into the state in the 1930s.
But the one-armed bandits were apparently widespread in at least part of Louisiana a full decade before Huey was even elected. A St. Landry Parish grand jury said they were so easily available that they not only were corrupting adults, but were taking candy money from children.
The St. Landry Clarion of March 11, 1916, reported that the parish grand jury urged every public servant and police officer in the parish and in every community to do everything possible “to suppress those dens that are sapping the manhood of our young men and (that) are cancers on the body social.”
In their report to Judge B. H. Pavy, the jurors said slot machines could be found “in the places where the children of the community are frequently assembled” and that it was “a common occurrence for children of tender age to risk and lose the small change given them by fond parents or entrusted to them for the purchase of some article for use of the household.”
The machines did enough harm to adults, the grand jury reported, but the children surely had to be protected.
“There are … too many pitfalls which lie in the path of men of mature years, calculated to bring about a condition of sorrow and sadness, in the home circle, to permit the open and public operation of the gambling devices designed to encourage in our children the spirit of the gambler,” the report continued,
In many instances, according to the jurors, people who allowed the machines in their business places had been duped and didn’t realize “that they have permitted themselves to be used as tools by others who own and have installed these machines, and weekly reap the benefits of their illegal earnings.”
The grand jurors instructed the district attorney “to take such action as is necessary to have these machines banished from our parish” and to prosecute anybody who tried to bring them back.
“It is our purpose,” the report concluded, “to have a thorough investigation and full inquiry made into this matter to the end that there may be no escape by those who are guilty.”
The court took the grand jury report under advisement and, presumably, passed it on to the district attorney, but there seemed to be no rush by police jurors, mayors, or any other public official to put new laws on the books to do anything else to close these gambling dens or remove the machines that made their profits, If there was a surge of citizen outrage, it didn’t make it into the newspapers that I could find
Adults could still risk the grocery money, and kids could still gamble away their candy money, hoping, just like modern lottery players, that one day they would win enough to buy a whole jarful of jawbreakers or a whole gob of those new Goo Goo Clusters that were just appearing on candy counters.
A collection of Jim Bradshaw’s columns, Cajuns and Other Characters, is now available from Pelican Publishing. You can contact him at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.