CULTURE
The Bus to Horseshoe Heaven
The bus is parked on the sidewalk next to the Holstein Park field house. It’s early morning, but that’s no problem. The sign on the back of the bus announces the Horseshoe Casino Express runs 24 hours a day. And it’s a good thing since the ladies of the Bucktown Seniors Club are lined up at 8 AM ready to go.
The occasion today is Dorothy Majewski’s 82nd birthday. When the club saw the date approaching on the calendar, they gave her a choice: a luncheon at a nice restaurant or a gambling trip to the Horseshoe Casino in Hammond. It didn’t take Dorothy but a split second to decide, and inside of two hours 25 other ladies had signed up to accompany her.
Gambling junkets are one of the favorite activities of The Bucktown Seniors Club. With free bus service from the Horseshoe Casino, they go down four times a year as a group. In smaller numbers, they go as frequently as once a week.
“I go almost every Sunday,” says Florence Sokolowski. “I know the bus driver for the Trump Casino and, if I call him, he’ll come by and pick me up right at my house. I stand by the curb and my neighbors think I’m waiting for the church bus. What do they know? But I might as well be going to church. People do more praying in a casino than they do in church, that’s for sure.”
Most of the women on the Horseshoe Casino bus carry with them their own Members Circle cards. The cards are free and, when you insert them into the slot machines, you can run up points for free merchandise (and the casino can track your gambling pattern.) The best thing about having a card, the seniors say, is that it allows you to enjoy discounted breakfast and lunch buffets. With the card, the all-you-can-eat breakfast is only $3.18 “and the Horseshoe has the best food of all the casinos,” Dorothy claims.
On
the way down to Indiana, I asked the seniors what games they like to play.
All are slot machine players. Not a one likes to play the gaming tables. “I’m
not a card player, “ Mickey Kolasa said. “I went to the craps
table once. That’s the one with the 7 and 11, or whatever they holler
out. But I’m always afraid of the other players because I think I’m
holding up the game for them. So I just play the slots.”
The Bucktown Seniors break down into three kinds of slot players: dollar, quarter and nickel. “The trick is to lose money as slow as you can, “ says Francis Stone. “I’d love to play the $1 slots, but if you put in your $50 and don’t win, all your money’s gone in 15 minutes and you’re sitting around for an hour and a half with nothing to do.”
Not everyone on the bus comes away a loser. Francis rode down to the Horseshoe next to Eleanor Turay, whom everyone calls “The Nickel Queen.” Last time they all came, Eleanor went off at the last minute to play the nickel slots and came away with an $800 jackpot.
“It was really only $700. The first $100 was what you might call my investment,” Eleanor told me. “But if you win big, these girls never let you forget.”
The Horseshoe Casino is just over the Indiana state line. The bus turns off at the first exit after The Skyway, loops around a huge Horseshoe Casino sign as big as any in Las Vegas, and falls in behind another Horseshoe Casino bus – holding another club of octogenarians – to a VIP reception area only steps from the casino.
“This is where we come to deposit our grandchildren’s inheritance,” Eleanor jokes as she climbs off. But no one laughs. They are all gauging how much each plans to wager and/or is willing to lose.
In Indiana, and indeed most of the Midwest, gambling is only allowed on riverboats. It is a quaint conceit, based on the notion that riverboat gambling along The Mississippi River took place on paddle boats that were part of our heritage, and thus a tourist attraction.
Although
the gambling halls of the Horseshoe Casino are, indeed, located in a boat
that sits on water, they are about one-half of an inch away from land. Three
hallway entrances seamlessly connect the gambling machines to the bars, restaurants,
hotels and parking structures that make up the bulk of the enterprise. Were
any of these boats ever to leave port, it would be like an earthquake through
the center of San Francisco.
Which is to say, the Horseshoe Casino is one seamless gambling experience and, once the seniors step on board, they disperse themselves among the four floors of slot machines available for their use and pleasure.
I’m baffled by the array of new games available, and the many ways the casino has turned a nickel or quarter machine – at the press of a button – into a $2 or $5 wager. Fortunately, Josephine Dziminski, 85, comes to my rescue. Josephine is not only an old hand at the Horseshoe, one of her sons is a pit boss at the Bellagio in Las Vegas. Another is a lawyer with the Horseshoe organization. Josephine has gambled in casinos from Oneida, Wisconsin, to Bettancourt, Iowa, and she has one piece of advice. “Find a machine that works for you, then stay with it.”
The Bucktown Seniors like to end their gambling junket around 1 PM so everyone can get home in time for their afternoon nap. They start gathering in the reception hall around 12:45 waiting for their bus to go home. As we wait, I notice bus after bus of new seniors still arriving.
For all the glamour associated with Las Vegas, gambling in Indiana appears to be a senior citizens sport. The ratio of 80-year-olds to 21-year-olds on the floor this Friday morning appears to be about 7 to 1.
When we climb back on the bus headed to Bucktown, Alice Bender, the senior coordinator, takes a head count to make sure everyone is on board.
“Now don’t anybody fall asleep on the way back,” she says. “One time, I left one of my members sleeping in the back of the bus. Everyone else got off at Holstein Park. But she slept her way right back to the casino.”