Bangor police sought to root out slots parlors

DEPUTIES SEIZED CIGAR MACHINES, Dec. 2, 1907.

BOWEN AFTER THE GAMBLING ROOMS, Jan. 24, 1908.

Vice was serious business a century ago, and gambling was a serious vice as attested to by the two headlines printed above from the Bangor Daily News.

In the first, Sheriff Lindley Gilman’s deputies seized seven slot machines. They were called “cigar machines” because the bait was cigars. You put a nickel in the slot and you got a free cigar, if you were lucky.

Three machines were seized at Samuel B. Ross’ confectionary store at 267 Main St., two at Thomas J. Daley’s grocery store at 355 Main St. and two at Nathan Schiro’s at 189 Harlow. Notice these machines were not kept in barrooms or houses of ill repute. They were in full view in many grocery stores and other retail establishments. They seem to have been tolerated fairly well until someone complained.

Under the second headline, Bangor Police Chief John Bowen was out on the prowl for “gambling rooms,” places where men gathered to play cards, drink whiskey and smoke cigars. All Chief Bowen had to do was visit one such operation, and all the rest seemed to evaporate like fog on the Penobscot River when the sun comes up.

“I have been to but one place. This was several nights ago and I found it in full operation – men at the tables, chips and cards,” Bowen told a reporter for the Bangor Daily News. “Needless to add that this particular resort is not doing business now.

“I cannot say about the others – provided, of course, that there are any others,” he added with a grim smile. “It is possible that the proprietors may have agreed among themselves that it is better all ’round for them to take a vacation.”

Of course, it was impossible to stop the gambling operations in Bangor for long, just as it was impossible to close the illegal bars and houses of ill repute. Such operations popped up like mushrooms in the damp woods after a respectable amount of time following one of these well-timed raids. The stakes were too high and the penalties were too insignificant.

It can be surmised the police seldom acted until someone of importance – let’s say a church-going pillar of the community – complained. And they were always balancing those complaints against the other side of the equation – the equally influential church-going pillars of the community – such as building owners, political bosses and so on – who had a financial stake in such illegal operations.

One of the most influential complainants against vice was the Rev. Henry N. Pringle of the Christian Civic League, who roamed the state in search of gambling dens and liquor establishments. When he found them, he would go to the police and file a complaint.

MR. PRINGLE HERE; GOT BUSY AT ONCE, announced a Bangor Daily News headline on the morning of Aug. 7, 1908. All he and a detective managed to round up in Bangor, however, was one lone slot machine. That was because “The Wireless,” perhaps the best oiled piece of machinery in the Queen City, was on the job.

Right after Pringle’s arrival, “the proprietor of every place where a gambling machine could possibly exist was called up by telephone, the conversation going something like this: ‘Hello … your machine running? Better get it out of sight. He’s here, you know.'” Exactly who was making these calls – who was at the center of this marvelous Wireless system (which actually had wires) – was never explained in such newspaper stories. (The term was also used to refer to men and boys employed to stand outside barrooms and warn of approaching cops.)

That afternoon, however, Pringle hit pay dirt – “a two-horse load,” as it was described in the Bangor Daily Commercial. Whoever thought the keeper of the public’s morals would hop into a wagon and head up the road to the sleepy towns of Orono and Old Town? When it was all over, the city building in Old Town was piled high with gambling devices.

“There were high machines, low machines, short and tall machines, little ones and big, clumsy gambling devices, 12 in all, and five of them big Oregon money-playing machines, all boxed up with the cranks off the most of them, but, nevertheless, slot machines and contraband goods,” said the newspaper. It took a wagon hauled by two horses to carry it all to jail. Among the businesses raided were the Orono House, operated by Frank Gallant, and Thomas Gonyer’s place on Mill Street.

“There is no half way business with vice,” proclaimed the Bangor Daily News in an editorial on March 25, 1908. Slot machines, lotteries, gambling rooms all needed to be eradicated. That included lotteries to raise money for churches and “society women who play ‘bridge’ for money stakes on our passenger trains.”

About this time, the Rev. Pringle had taken on the various gambling operations at state fairs, which received public funds intended to support agriculture. Besides the Bangor Daily News, the crusade to end gambling at fairs also was supported by President William DeWitt Hyde of Bowdoin College.

“The most prevalent vice of the American people is the desire to get something for nothing. Maine has the disease as badly as Oklahoma or Nevada,” Hyde told an assembly of students in a talk reported in the Bangor Daily News on Oct. 26, 1908. A visit to the Topsham Fair had revealed 17 gambling operations including lottery wheels, nine-pin games and other types of “machines for obtaining money by unfair means.”

Imagine that! Today there are enough legal slot machines at Bangor’s new racino to outfit every hotel, grocery store and cigar shop that existed in the Queen City a century ago, with a few to spare – probably a few-hundred horse load if you could find a wagon big enough. What would the much-esteemed President Hyde have to say about that?

Wayne E. Reilly may be reached at wer@bangordailynews.net.