Maine cracked down on slots a century ago

Back when Las Vegas was just a dot in the desert and Hollywood was still a good place to grow bananas, you could put a nickel in a slot machine in Bangor, Maine, and win 50 cigars. Storm clouds were gathering on the horizon, however, as the county attorney’s “campaign for purity” got under way. Like selling liquor, gambling was illegal, and the forces of virtue were on the march.

When Penobscot County’s new county attorney, Hervey H. Patten, was asked by a reporter on Jan. 1, 1905, whether his campaign included gambling, he replied, “Yes, slot machines, gambling houses and everything must go. I will clean them out. The county is alive with the slot machines into which many men and even boys dump their entire earnings while their families suffer for the necessities of life. It is a curse which has endured altogether too long.”

All over Maine, officials such as Patten were jumping aboard the purity bandwagon in response to the new Republican governor’s promise to clean up the state. “Slot machines and gambling devices are doomed in Hancock County,” predicted a Bangor Daily News correspondent. “Already measures have been taken in Ellsworth by the high sheriff to rid the place of the questionable devices, and there are now but one or two in the city.” The same was true for Tremont, Deer Isle and Sullivan, where deputies had ordered their removal. “Other places will follow … until for the first time in many years the county will be free from gambling machines of every description.”

A particularly thorny issue was what to do about slot machines that dispensed cigars instead of money. Were they gambling machines? A player would put a nickel in the slot and get at least one cigar back. He could win up to 50 depending on what “hand” came up on the cylinder that rotated on a shaft, each of its five sections showing a picture of a different playing card. The campaign for purity won a victory in February when the Maine supreme court ruled in a Skowhegan case that these cigar machines were gambling devices. The BDN declared the ruling “a death blow to slot machines.”

But the real “death blow” in the Queen City, at least temporarily, occurred on March 31, when state detective Dennis Tracey issued a statement declaring war on the gamblers. He told a reporter that the city was “full of slot machines and gambling of all kinds.” The notice was printed in the papers on April Fool’s Day, but it was no joke to the many owners of stores and taverns that kept slots on the premises.

The move apparently came in response to a new law passed just days earlier enabling law enforcement officers to arrest individuals for merely being in the presence of gambling equipment. Before that, the police could arrest only people who were actually gambling “and this was no easy thing to do when heavy doors had to be broken in to obtain entrance,” the BDN reported.

Back then, the police reporter was a bard as well as a scribe. The promise of police raids stimulated his creative juices, and he wrote poems to accompany his stories. On April 3, 1905, even the headline rhymed: “UPON THE SLOT THE LID IS DOWN, Thus Tracey Purifies the Town.”

The lead was this bit of doggerel, doubtlessly read to the tune of uproarious laughter in dozens of living rooms around the city, and a few barrooms as well:

Oh! Have you yet a nickel remaining in your jeans?

If so, go buy a hot dog or else a plate of beans.

For you cannot sink that nickel by the old time wicked means –

For Tracey’s put the slot machines in mourning.

Yes, he’s sounded the alarm and they’ve stowed the things away.

In the cellars and the attics, and he swears that there they’ll stay;

He says, ‘We’ll try the simple life – this town has been too gay.’

So they quit on April Fool’s day in the morning.

The reporter wrote, “It is said that when the proclamation was issued there were anywhere from 50 to 100 slot machines running in Bangor, but whatever the number, on Saturday night not a wheel was turning, not a slot yawned for nickels.”

But did they really need to eliminate the harmless cigar machines? “To order them out was nothing short of blue-law despotism, the last extremity of fanaticism, uncalled for and altogether unnecessary,” sputtered this Shakespearean reporter. It is unclear whether these were his views or those of the inebriated sources he encountered Saturday night.

Were he here today to observe the return of slot machines to Bangor – the merger of Hollywood, Las Vegas and the Queen City – I wonder what poetic reveries this old-time reporter would be pounding out on his blackened Royal, a cigar clenched between his teeth, as he struggled to control his laughter.

Wayne E. Reilly can be reached at wreilly@bangordailynews.net.