by David Lillard

It’s a stunning autumn morning on the interstate. Blazing strands of orange cotton stretch across the skies above the Allegheny Front, moving eastward as the car blazes west toward Wheeling and a maiden voyage to Wheeling Island Casino.

License plates on big pickups zoom past my slowpoke four cylinders in a parade of the states. Maybe because I’m on my way to a racetrack, the plates and the dreaminess of a road trip drift me back some 30 years. One Delaware plate, Maryland, Maryland, Jersey . . . I’m counting cars — more precisely, I’m counting license plates at Delaware Park racetrack, a few miles from home. It’s spring of my senior year in high school. I was 18, old enough for wagering on the thoroughbreds.

Two Tcherzees, three De La War, Maryland, Pa Pa. It gets monotonous. You play word games. Pa Pa Pow, New Tcherzee. Delo wurt. Jersey girl, Della Where? Maryland. Maryland. There’s no good wordplay on Maryland. It drags out the morning. The idea is to start counting the rows farthest from the entrance gate, and quickly count your way to the employee entrance and a wad of cash in time for the fourth race.

It was primitive, low-cost market research. Two guys walking the lot counting cars and making notes on the number of luxury cars. The Track, alternately known as the Park, had started something new, and wanted to see how it was affecting their out-of-state draw. Simulcast racing, “simulcasting,” was hot.

Racing had fallen hard since its heyday in the middle 20th century when horses had been sports heroes. Everyone knew the names of the great ones, just as everyone knew the names of the prize fighters and ballplayers. Back then, horseracing, boxing, and baseball were America’s only major sports. The NBA didn’t get started until after World War II, and into the 1960s the NFL was so smalltime that players had off-season jobs. When racing was big, throughout the day trains delivered fans to the Delaware Park gate from East Baltimore to South Philly.

In the 1970s the Track was struggling. In a controversial bid to keep the horses running, ownership got permission to run a few simulcast races each day. Much like today’s Powerball drawings, wagers at tracks from several states were pooled on a single race. Then you’d watch the horses run on televisions at the track. By televisions, I don’t mean the giant jumbo-trons that hang above footballs stadiums today. I mean little 19-inch numbers at pari-mutuel stations. The gaming was as low-tech as the market research in the parking lot.

The gambit worked. Bigger purses from the simulcasts meant more wagers on the other races. It was almost quaint the way the televisions transformed the Park into dozens of cozy living rooms — like in the 1940s, an entire neighborhood gathering around the one 7-inch Crosley on the block to watch Truman pitch the Marshall Plan.

The simulcast idea had its detractors. The Catholic churches, in particular, were concerned about competition. It might cut their take from weekly 50-50 drawings, bingo games, and casino nights. But like all Catholic boys I understood that extra-curricular gaming was purely recreational, whereas tithing at parish gambling events would remain a necessary step toward eternal salvation.

Wheeling is a four-hour haul from Jefferson County, but with a table game referendum on December’s ballot, it seemed a fitting time to see what’s causing such a stir here.

In our 20s, we’d occasionally roadtrip to Atlantic City on work nights and be back in time for Second City Television at midnight. It was cheap entertainment, safer than bars, an evening with the guys when the Phillies were out of town.

You could see the down side of unbridled commercialized gaming in A.C. An entire oceanfront metropolis had been offered up to the cause of filling state coffers with out-of-state money. There were the pawn shops and rescue missions. Those pictures, though, are not the whole story.

According to the Census Bureau, the poverty rate of the five-city Atlantic City metropolitan area is about 10 percent. That’s fairly low among metropolitan areas of 250,000. Atlantic City’s downtown poverty rate is higher, roughly that of Martinsburg’s, but not nearly as high as the rate in Washington, D.C. With a poverty rate in the mid 20 percent range, D.C. is among America’s poorest cities, but you don’t hear people blaming the city’s largest employer, Uncle Sam, for poverty there. Overall New Jersey’s poverty rate is 48th in the nation; West Virginia ranks 5th.

As for crime, the Sperling index — a mathematical calculus for various quality of life measures — gives Atlantic City and Charleston, W.Va., the same score for property and violent crime; Martinsburg ranks slightly lower than Atlantic City on per capita violent crime, but the same on property crime.

Some people are concerned that eastern Jefferson County would be one day lined with casinos like Atlantic City, and that downtown Charles Town would be lined with pawn shops. But West Virginia’s gaming is more akin to Delaware’s and the new Maryland casinos: the number and locations of gaming establishments are specified by state law. There can’t be a Vegas-style strip along Route 340 because all the gaming would take place at Charles Town Races and Slots.

Sure, a Charles Town casino would make Penn National an even bigger player in the local economy; like the biggest company in any town, it might throw its considerable muscle around. As far as state legislators are concerned, that’s the tradeoff for the vast sums of gaming revenue that fund state social services and the government of all 55 West Virginia counties.

To enumerate the chunk of change the state gets and distributes from lotteries is enough to make your eyes glaze over: Over the last five years it’s meant over $200 million for senior services, $50 million for libraries, $42 million for natural resource programs, $25 million for culture and history, $90 million for school buildings — nearly $900 million in all. Suffice it to say that every local government in the state depends on gaming and coal royalties to deliver services.

The irony is that many of the voters who oppose gaming are the same ones who advocate expanded social services. In a poor state like West Virginia, there are only so many sources to fund these programs. I also wonder how many Jefferson County residents, when turning on the light switch, think about the destruction caused by mountaintop removal — how many streams are filled with coal waste to fund their local services. Do we think about how we’ve sacrificed coal communities to electrify our 3,500-square-foot homes? Yet we bristle that gambling here funds state programs.

On I-68, a light sprinkle develops into a steady downpour. The next 40 miles are dreary. Then the sky opens up. Again, it must be gaming on my mind, but I think of the honeymoon my wife and I spent in Nova Scotia. We arrived for the rainy season — who knew Nova Scotia had one? After several soggy days in sheets of rain, honeymoon or not, we were getting irritable.

We looked at the weather map, and drove toward the sunshine icons. Late in the afternoon, we pulled into a dead industrial town with absolutely nothing to recommend it save a decent weather forecast. At the town’s welcome center, the brochures pitched attractions on the other side of the province, the places  we’d just fled. We were marooned. It would be like spending your honeymoon in Bowie, Maryland — or Dundalk.

Our innkeeper did have a suggestion for something fun. “It’s church night at the racetrack,” she said. “At the Downs. Harness racing? Fifty cent hotdogs, too.” It was a brilliant idea for the Downs and the churches. Once a month, all the pastors promoted church night to their parishioners. Winners were expected to give their draw — or a sizable portion thereof — to their church. There was a sense of competition to see which congregation’s faithful could donate the most winnings to their church.

The track’s sorry little grandstand was packed full of Gamblers for God. Little boys and girls cheered on their favorites, dads glowed as they handed fistfuls of cash to their wives for presentation to their clergy; smiling priests and ministers paid no heed to the mustard and relish caking to their collars. It was glorious.

I think my new bride was inspired by the cause, too, as she had to be restrained on the size of her bets. Clearly she, I thought, was betting for the Lord. Also Catholic by upbringing, she — at least in my nostalgic recollections she did — donate a portion of her winnings, too. A lovely gesture that moved me as much as the evening’s blessing of the jockeys and horses performed ecumenically en masse by all the present clergy. That rainy week of driving had tested our young marriage, but Church Night at the Racetrack banished any doubts about our match.

En route to Wheeling, you can stop at the Kirby, Pennsylvania rest stop. Out front is a monument to John Lewis, a longtime president of the United Mine Workers. Inside are exhibits, some might call it a shrine, on coal miners. Even though this is in Pennsylvania, the message on table gaming comes through. Like it or not, West Virginia relies on a few industries to diminish the effects of poverty. Coal royalties fund the state. Miners are heroes not just for their hard work, but because their work funds every local government in West Virginia. Politicians are not brilliant; they’re not imaginative. But in a state with typography as challenging as Afghanistan, they’ve figured out how to find the money voters ask them to spend.

Under this lens table games are a godsend. It doesn’t cause black lung. Men don’t die dealing cards or spinning a wheel. Gambling doesn’t destroy watersheds, it doesn’t foul drinking water, or bring on lawsuits by the E.P.A. All it does is create jobs and bring in massive amounts of cash.

By the time you get to Wheeling, you have already driven by small cities facing wrenching challenges. For its part, Wheeling bustled with more than 61,000 residents in 1940. After a trickling decline in the next decade, the population went into a 50-year freefall — between 1980 and 1990 it dropped nearly 20 percent.

You think the real estate market here has been bad. In Wheeling you could pay off a 30-year note and find your house is worth less than the day you bought it. By every measure, Nail City’s wealth drain was as bad as any Rust Belt city’s. Today its population is about 28,000.

Unlike hundreds of small cities that are finally, after decades of downturn, experiencing population growth by transforming city centers into dining and shopping destinations, Wheeling would require more. People didn’t just move to the burbs; they bolted. Surrounding Ohio County’s population today is only 47,000, the same as Wheeling’s in 1970.

In his book Far From Home, Pulitzer Prize winner Ron Powers details the psychology of towns in turmoil. There are dreamers who believe the town could be an international tourist destination, the downand- out commercial property owners looking for federal bailouts, the nay-sayers who block every attempt to try anything new. Finally, someone figures out how, as a character in Powers’ book says, to find the “natural assets” of the place, and slowly build upon them.

Two of Wheeling’s assets were its proximity to Pittsburgh and its greyhound racing. Dog racing, like its equine counterpart, has experienced its own hard times, even steeper declines in audience and revenue than horseracing.

What’s more, greyhound racing doesn’t support a secondary economy of stables, pastures, and fields supplying hay and wheat straw. Table games proponents tend to overstate the economic significance of this secondary economy (and it’s silly to call this agriculture), but it’s real money nonetheless. In reality, economic value is gauged by the investment people are willing to make in a given activity. There are no data to suggest anyone is borrowing money to buy up farmland just to supply hay and straw to the racetrack. But the open space value is significant, and the contribution to rural character undeniable.

Greyhound racing has none of that, and little of the romance of horseracing. Since the opening of Wheeling Island Casino, the purses, according to track owners, are the highest of any dog track in America. Walk into the casino on any Saturday afternoon, and you’ll see what’s funding those purses.

From the outside, Wheeling Island Casino looks like any decent-sized hotel. The people wandering in from the parking lot could be the same folks who wander German Street in Shepherdstown. Inside the casino, you’re greeted by a towering waterfall plunging over faux granite cliffs. Ah, you think, it’s evoking the Allegheny Mountains. Then you see the palm trees and grasses, and you realize it’s an “island theme.”

Upstairs in the lobby, septuagenarians have lined up to play some sort of slot machine competition. As far as I can tell, it involves slapping the machine as fast as you can. Lindsey, a casino staffer as cheerful as Doris Day with the patience of Job, moves through the crowd talking into a cordless microphone. She smiles as she raises her voice to men who refuse to turn on their hearing aids. Mesmerized by the cheerfulness of the whole thing, I trip over a woman’s walker, nearly knocking her to the floor. She laughs it off.

Walking into the gaming area, “the pit,” I’m struck by the age range of the players, from young 20 somethings up to super-seniors, people who a generation ago would have been confined to rocking chairs. In an era of age-segregated suburbs, you rarely see intergenerational crowds on such a scale. At a craps table, two young guys in Steelers jerseys face guys in Ravens jerseys. The man rolling the dice might be older than all of them together. Whoops and hollers go up; high fives are slapped. You don’t have to spend a dime to watch the spectacle.

I wander, circumnavigating the casino, past the penny and nickel slots, in and out of the table games. I find a nickel machine, and feed a fin into the slot. I’m lucky enough to make five bucks last half an hour, then wander some more.

Whenever I can engage a staffer for a moment, I ask them about working at the casino. Almost to a person, there’s a story about how the job has made it possible to stay in the area where they grew up, or how they’d moved away but were able to return.

The more I wander, the cozier the place feels. Granted, it’s a Saturday afternoon. It’s that kind of crowd. Looking around, the western Pennsylvania Catholic influence is easy to see. Crucifixes hang between breasts like gold chains on a rapper. There are men in Knights of Columbus jackets. I mention this to one worker, who said there’s a minor exodus around 4:30 on Saturday afternoons of people heading to Saturday evening mass. Funny, I haven’t really been Catholic for several years, and my gaming has dropped off considerably.

People who don’t like legalized gambling often say it’s a way of taxing the poor people who play the games. That might be true for people who buy lottery tickets at the corner store, but table games are, in effect, a tax on the middleclass people who can afford to play blackjack at 15 dollars a hand — and up. They’ll riot if you raise their income taxes, but they’ll gladly drop two hundred bucks playing games. Income taxes aren’t fun to pay; games are fun to play.

The Big Six wheel is the most relaxed place in the pit. You put your chips down on one of six pictures, with each one paying out different odds. Then the “dealer” spins the wheel and you all watch it and cheer it on. There might be ten players plopping down chips on multiple odds, but somehow the dealer, in our case a genial guy named Wayne, keeps it all straight while maintaining a warm atmosphere and training the new players on the routine.

After about an hour, I realized I had stack of chips much larger than I started with; I decided to declare victory and cash out. A guy in his 40s stopped in and bought $10 in chips, and placed them on 10. He was on his way out, he announced, adding, “My last three visits here I’ve put $10 on 10-to-1 as I walked out the door, and I’ve hit it three times straight.” In an instant and without a word every player at the table was putting chips on 10. Around and around the wheel went, and for one long dramatic moment, that little rubber flipper hung on ten like a cartoon character levitating above a canyon. Shouts went up around the table. Then, it slipped onto the 1. We all moaned. Then, as Wayne moved chips in my directions it dawned on me: I’d also played a sawbuck on 1. From the jaws of defeat, a ten dollar winner!

I couldn’t help thinking about a trip when I was in college. It was harness racing at Ocean Downs. I had called the winner in five straight races — including a couple of trifectas. Just before the tenth race, as my horse sauntered to the gait, it keeled over and couldn’t get up. A dignified little ambulance gathered him up, and as he was ushered away, the horse lifted his head to acknowledge the applause, like an injured football player on a golf cart. I ran to the window to change my bet to an old codger running at 60 to 1. My substitute wager won the race, and it wasn’t even close.

Outside Shepherdstown one recent Saturday night, eight middle-aged guys played Texas Hold ‘Em. In terms of our day jobs, I guess we were the crowd you might expect to see in the pit at Charles Town: a school teacher, an accountant, a banker, a mechanic, a guy who does home remodeling, a guy who works at a trade association, and a fellow they called The Doctor — I wasn’t sure if he was actually a physician, but I hope he doesn’t work on patients with the same abandon he showed going “all in” with such a mediocre hand.

Now and then the talk turned to the table games referendum. Largely, any concerns that were raised echoed similar ones I’ve heard in coffee shops, watering holes, and on the street. It goes something like this: “We’re letting our politicians off the hook too easily. Changing the fortunes of West Virginia will take more than gambling, more than coal, more than federal jobs.” I think we can all agree on that.

As for the debate about whether we should allow table games in Jefferson County, both sides run fairly loose with their data. Upon closer examination, conventional wisdom on any topic often reveals positions that are based on emotion, anecdotal evidence, and self interest.

As for my self interest, I like to play. It’s fun. I feel bad for people who blow their money on things they can’t afford, but we haven’t made home mortgages illegal because people got in over their heads — or credit cards. Or shoe shopping.

Another thing: I think Jefferson County can be known for its cultural heritage and natural beauty, while mixing in some other things. Besides, gambling is part of our heritage. There’s been horseracing in Charles Town since 1933.

I admit I’m suspicious of big companies, just like I’m suspicious of government. But this is really about me. I just want to have fun. I like to gamble. You might even say it was once part of my religion.