During the mid-twentieth century, Southern Maryland boasted flashy casinos, leggy showgirls, and three times as many slot machines as Nevada. How did the gaming industry ever get so big in Maryland? And what lessons can we learn from its demise?
The October 1958 cover of Man’s Conquest magazine, a pulp monthly that during its 1950s prime existed as an adrenalized alternative to Playboy, features a rugged, straight-jawed man battling a peeved-looking black bear with nothing more than a knife, plaid shirt, and gritted teeth. In the uppermost corner, a sleek cover line touts a tawdry article within: “Route 301! The eyewitness story of the wide-open Sin Strip.”
Inside, the writer, one B.W. Von Block, reports: “Charles County seems to offer everything—women, dope, and gambling. To me, it looked drunken, dirty, and debauched.” Claiming to have been “hustled” by nine prostitutes during his stay at a motel in Waldorf, Block sums up the 301 stretch called “Felony Row” as “one of the most tawdry, squalid, and sordid stretches of the autobahn I’ve ever seen.”
Block’s story offers a glimpse—albeit a sensationalized one—of the history of Southern Maryland between 1949 and 1968, when nearly 5,000 legal slot machines operated around the clock in Anne Arundel, Calvert, Charles, and St. Mary’s counties. Back then, Route 301 buzzed with nightlife, roadside glitz, and rural glamour, so much so that it was known as “Little Vegas.”
It’s a scene that seems unimaginable cruising down 301 through Waldorf today. KFC, Hardee’s, McDonald’s, a shopping plaza, and then, a few more miles down the road, another KFC, McDonald’s, and a shopping plaza. Apparently, Sin Strip has morphed into strip malls.
There is little along Route 301 to remind visitors of Southern Maryland’s slots heyday. The worn-down Cadillac Motel’s once glittering Las Vegas-like sign now towers dejectedly above the roadway, just north of Waldorf. And the Bel Alton Motel south of La Plata, still harbors guests, albeit fewer big spenders than it once did. The Wigwam, more recently Walls Bakery, known for its foot-long éclairs, once sported dancing girls, fine food, and performances by Doris Day and Brenda Lee.
There’s also the Waldorf Motel, smack-dab in the middle of an eight-lane bend in the road, right where it has stood for more than fifty years. Like its neighboring artifacts, it doesn’t look unkempt, just out of place—like an outdated tuxedo in the midst of Friday casual.
The Waldorf appears to be a transient rest stop now, not a destination resort. Visitors are not allowed in the lobby; a side-door entrance leads into a booth covered with thick glass. Communication is garbled through a scratchy squawk box. The motel itself looks empty, with hardly a car parked in front of the horseshoe-shaped split-level buildings that surround the restaurant, now called Annapolis Seafood.
No one on the current staff worked at the Waldorf during the slots era, but if you proceed a few miles down the road, and past a tiny but well-kept cemetery and small brick church, you’ll find seventy-four-year-old William “Whitey” Roberts.
Roberts not only ran the motel and restaurant during its prime in the 1960s, but also fixed and maintained the slot machines. Now retired, he is a classic old-timer, dressed neatly in plaid shirt and suspenders and sporting a healthy head of white hair and a resigned, I’ve-seen-it-all smile.
Roberts’ home is a practical storehouse of both social history and technical information on slot machines and gambling in Southern Maryland. The centerpiece is the collection of antique machines and other gaming devices he accumulated during his tenure at the Waldorf. In short order, he produces Lottery Luck, a Boggle-meets-poker dice game that paid out on a five-card roll; a Jackpot! Bingo board, which looks like a cross between a paper Keno game and an Advent calendar; and the ancient innards of a Callie machine, a mechanical penny roulette wheel that Roberts claims was the progenitor of the slot machine.
Needless to say, Roberts has a more positive take on gambling in Maryland than Man’s Conquest. “It was a nice, honest, family-owned business,” he recalls. “Great cheap food, live entertainment, plus the old slots machines were random—you could win three jackpots in a row if you knew how to work them. Bright lights, lot of celebrities like Guy Lombardo, Paul Newman, Conway Twitty, Dolly Parton. They all performed on the Strip. I met them, just regular people enjoying themselves.”
Legalized slots come up often these days, given former Republican Gov. Robert Ehrlich’s efforts and now Maryland Senate President Thomas V. “Mike” Miller’s desire to bring slot-machine proceeds to bear on the state’s financial ills, but few people on the pro-slots side ever mention Maryland’s history with the devices. Perhaps that’s because in 1963, despite filling up the coffers of Southern Maryland counties to the tune of $1.6 million a year and bringing an economic boom to an undeveloped rural section of the state, then-Gov. J. Millard Tawes introduced legislation to abolish them. This was mostly in response to pressure from citizens groups and local politicians, including an Anne Arundel County citizens committee that claimed slots were “destroying the fabric of family and economic life in our county.” And despite charges of bribery and intimidation—what former gubernatorial press secretary Frank DeFilippo described in a Jan. 21, 2003, Sun editorial as “slots barons skulking the hallways and glaring down from galleries” of the statehouse—Tawes prevailed, signing a law on the last day of the 1963 legislative session that phased out slots over a five-year period. Thus, on July 1, 1968, the last slot machines were hauled out of the bars, taverns, and roadhouses of Southern Maryland, piled onto trucks, and hauled away to be destroyed.
Slot machines reportedly made their first appearance in the Old Line State on amusement piers on the Potomac River in Southern Maryland—and, according to some accounts, on the river itself. According to historian Susan Hickey Shaffer’s 1983 thesis “Slot Machines in Charles County, Maryland 1910-1968,” former state Sen. Paul J. Bailey (St. Mary’s County) recalled seeing slot machines on a boat called the Macalister, which cruised the Potomac around 1921. The machines were advertised as being “for amusement only,” much like the poker machines found in many Bay-area drinking establishments today.
In 1935, state Del. Phillip J. Wallace of Baltimore introduced an amendment to the Maryland constitution calling for a statewide referendum to repeal the legislature’s previous ban on legal lotteries. In 1936, reflecting on the realities of then-rampant illegal gambling, prominent state Sen. J. Allan Coad, a Democrat from St. Mary’s County, added his voice to the debate in the Nov. 10 edition of the News-Post: “I don’t suppose there is a county in the state where the slot machine is not illegal, and yet everywhere you go you find these slot machines operating.” And despite promises from legislators that the proceeds would be used to lower taxes and fund public works, the referendum was soundly defeated on Nov. 8, 1938, by a margin of 123,365 to 90,805.
Yet the legalization of slots in the Southern Maryland counties was planted in the seeds of Coad’s failure. The state lottery referendum bill also allowed for the licensing of “coin play” machines that paid “merchandise premiums” instead of cash to help counties suffering from the dual affliction of the Great Depression and a sagging market for tobacco to raise money—namely, Southern Maryland. As the machines spread, formal legalization of cash-pay slot machines was accomplished through a parochial Maryland legislative tradition know as “local option,” which allowed county delegations to propose and approve legislation that affected their districts only. Thus, special “local option” bills were introduced in the Maryland legislature to legalize slot machines over a period of roughly six years: Anne Arundel County in 1943, Calvert County in 1948, St. Mary’s County in 1947, and finally Charles County, the home of the Sin Strip, in 1949.
What followed, former Maryland Attorney General J. Joseph Curran, Jr. recalls, was the type of free-for-all that typified the state’s past experiments with gambling.
“I remember driving down 301 to Richmond with my family in the Fifties,” says Curran, seventy-six. “I pulled into a gas station and saw people lined up out the door. But they weren’t waiting to buy gas or a soda—they were in line to play a slot machine.”
State Sen. Roy P. Dyson, fifty-nine, who grew up in Great Mills in St. Mary’s County and now represents an area that includes parts of St. Mary’s, Charles, and Calvert counties, recalls a similar sort of saturation: “The only place I never saw them was in churches—otherwise they were pretty much everywhere else.”
George E. Snyder, a former House delegate, state senator, and state Senate Democratic majority leader from 1971 to ’74 from Hagerstown, concurs. “Slots were everywhere, in gas stations, barbershops, in restaurants,” he says. “That’s how Southern Maryland earned the nickname Little Vegas.
Ironically, Maryland wasn’t so little in relation to Las Vegas, according to a Sun feature that ran on Feb. 24, 1963. Titled “Gold in the Spinning Wheels,” Maryland had three times as many federally licensed gambling devices as Nevada. In addition, according to the report of the state Slot Machine Committee, a special investigation of gambling completed that year, the four counties’ total take was $24 million in 1963 alone. In comparison, the highest-grossing casino in Nevada, the Harrah’s Club in Lake Tahoe, garnered a total take of $20 million in 1961, according to Gambler’s Money: The New Force in American Life, a 1965 book by Wallace Turner. But Harrah’s had at its disposal higher stakes games such as blackjack and craps, thus Southern Maryland and its slots were keeping pace, albeit a nickel at a time.
“I grew up with slots,” remembers current Maryland House Speaker Michael E. Busch, the primary political opponent to slots legislation in the State House. “When I was nine, my grandfather would take me to the corner grocery store and give me a couple nickels to play the one-armed bandits. Anne Arundel County was wall-to-wall slot machines,” he says. “Slot machines were like the Wal-Mart of entertainment—once they moved into town, they took over everything.”
Yet as the slots spread, so did the growing specter of outside influence and power, as Busch remembers. Once slots were established, the powerful slot-machine distributors, a consortium of eleven state-licensed manufacturers who built and sold the machines in Maryland, and the multitude of small-business owners who had slots on their premises, all had reason to make sure that the business stayed healthy and unopposed.
“The slots people ran the county governments,” Busch says. “They used to fill up A&P bags with $20 bills and hand out ‘walking around money’ during election time, so the slots people were firmly in control.”
Local opposition to the ubiquity and ostensible corrupting influence of slots found an outlet in 1960, when a special grand jury in Anne Arundel County convened to investigate slot machines and organized crime. It rendered a clear verdict, calling the state of gambling in Anne Arundel “sordid and disgraceful.” Heightening the controversy was a special Anne Arundel citizens committee that reported that slots “have a stranglehold on the basic economic life of Anne Arundel County” and charged, among other things, that a combination of “organized crime” and “youth gambling” had “tragic consequences for the people of our county—upsetting healthy patterns of family life.”
Curran recalls two key factors that drove the anti-slots issue even further in 1963: the gubernatorial candidacy of little-known Del. David Hume in 1962 and the growing consensus among Southern Maryland residents that slots were not worth the cost and the trouble. “The people from the areas where slots were most pervasive felt that slots were hurting the locals, from homemakers to regular wage earners,” Curran says. “Lots of people were losing money for the profit of a few.”
In the 1962 Democratic primary race for governor, Hume ran a single-issue anti-slots campaign and garnered a healthy 101,319 votes vs. incumbent Gov. Tawes. Hume’s position forced the governor to announce in Sept-ember 1962, just prior to the general election, which Tawes won, that slots were “no longer a local issue,” and thus “should be abolished.” On Feb. 18, 1963, Tawes introduced legislation to abolish all legal slots, stating his intention to “preserve and promote the fine reputation of Maryland.”
For three months during the 1963 legislative session, a battle raged between gambling lobbyists and anti-slots legislators. Charges of intimidation and bribery were rampant, including an accusation by the legendary Clarence M. Mitchell III, then a young state delegate representing Baltimore City, that “a man wearing dark glasses” accosted him in the lobby of the state capitol and offered him $300 not to vote on the issue. When the anti-slots bill failed to pass the House in its first vote, accusations of “slots barons” tampering with politicians became so fevered that a special Anne Arundel County grand jury was convened to take testimony from Mitchell. The investigation ended without any indictments, but The Sun commented in an editorial that the controversy “almost ripped the House of Delegates asunder.”
Finally, on March 29, 1963, the second to last day of the session, Tawes got his way. Curran was one of twenty-five senators to vote through the final version of the bill, mandating a freeze on all new slots licenses and a phase-out of the machines by July 1, 1968.
“I trusted the judgment of the people from Southern Maryland,” Curran says now. “They believed slots were draining the economy of Southern Maryland, that it was destroying families. Gambling was not a good thing to them.”
But George Howard Post, a retired schoolteacher from Charles County, whose family owned a restaurant with slot machines in Benedict, Md., remembers it differently. Although the larger casinos on the 301 strip may have had problems, he says most of the smaller mom-‘n’-pop operations were wholesome places. “I thought it was positive for our family,” says Post, whose parents enjoyed a fifty-fifty split in revenue with slot machine supplier Southern Maryland Novelty. “I never saw anything shady in the slightest. People were very businesslike and professional. It was a draw to get people from Washington down there. They would have something to eat. Maybe go for a swim and play a few slots. It wasn’t like people continuously pumping nickels mindlessly into the machines.”
But Post does recall the mayhem among locals the day slots were outlawed. “We were at the southern end of the county, and I remember Southern Maryland Novelty coming down and turning off the machines at each place and a crowd of people were one step ahead of them trying to get in one last game.”
As to the argument that gambling hurt the people of Charles County, Whitey Roberts contends, “All the talk about people losing their shirts was untrue. We used mostly nickel machines, because dimes were made of silver then, too thin and jammed the machine. And believe me, in the Fifties a nickel wasn’t much.”
Organized crime, Roberts says, was “nonexistent.” In fact, he pins the downfall of slots on a different sort of organization. “There are two mobs now—the Democrats and Republicans,” he says. “They got rid of slots here in ’68 so they could clear the way for their own racket—the numbers racket, the state lottery.”
The state legislature authorized the creation of a state lottery in 1972, and it began business under the auspices of the Maryland State Lottery Agency in 1973. “They take [gambling] away from the little guy, then get the money for the state,” he says. “That’s a real racket.”
Roberts’ perspective on gambling is not a matter of pro and con; for him, gambling is just a part of life, and the only issue is who controls it. “Back in the Sixties, the church and the state said gambling was bad and took it away,” he says wryly. “So my wife is out supporting the church today, playing bingo.”
Still, if you can’t wait for a slots bill to pass and want to find a little action right here in Maryland, then simply visit one of the many “Instant Bingo” machines popping up in Anne Arundel County as well as in Southern Maryland.
At Chesapeake Beach’s classic Rod ’n’ Reel, there’s a small room next to the bar with about a dozen machines that look an awful lot like slot machines. Insert your money, push play, and if you’re lucky, you get a pull-tab that shows the winning combination, redeemable at the bar fora cash pay out.
Why “Instant Bingo” is legal and standard slot machines are not is a result of some cagey legal work and interesting interpretation of the rules of bingo. Technically, the machines follow the rules of bingo, simply spitting out the winning combinations in seconds instead of playing them over time. Thus, the innards of the machine allows anyone with a license for legal bingo games to have pull-tab machines as well.
Between the duplex Keno screens, the organized bingo game, and the so-called “Instant Bingo” machines, the Rod ’n’ Reel offers a nice variety of gaming options. Add flat-screen televisions, live music, and the hotel spa across the street and it’s a mini-casino, and it all begs the question: What’s all the fuss about slots if we’ve already got them?
Perhaps the Rod ’n’ Reel is just a reprise of the way slots made their way into Maryland’s law books some sixty years ago—on the sly, with a little nod and a wink. At the very least, one of the bar’s young tenders, who refused to give her name, is fully supportive. “I went to Jamaica and lost all my money on slots,” she says with a sly smile. “Now I’m addicted.”
A version of this story appeared in Baltimore’s City Paper. Stephen Janis is a senior investigative reporter for the Baltimore Examiner. Additional reporting by Joe Sugarman.
Masthead Photo by