Chapter 2 from “The Spotted Ball”, a true story by Larry Cohen c 2025
My knowledge of gambling at this point, as any reader can tell, was quite limited. I do remember a neighbor of ours, an older woman, a Mrs. Brennan, who went out at night once a week to play Bingo. I never associated her late-night Bingo ventures with gambling, however. I just figured that Mrs. Brennan was playing the same game that we kids were playing in school. Bingo was Bingo, right? Wrong. The Bingo that Mrs. Brennan played involved winning and losing money. When we kids played Bingo in grade school, for me it was just another board game just as “Chutes and Ladders” or checkers were board games.
When I was made aware that Mrs. Brennan was playing for money (after she accused her husband of many years, Mr. Brennan, of taking her Bingo money, money she claimed she kept in a White Owl cigar box), it was a bit unsettling. How could winning money just to keep in an old cigar box outshine Mr. Howard’s spotted ball? Obviously, she was ill-informed.
In order to gamble, one needs an opportunity to do so. Throughout my high school years and until my first or second year in college, gambling was pretty much left to the professionals. Frankly, I always thought, though never told outright, that gambling was illegal. We did have local “bookies”, guys who dressed in dark-colored dress shirts with even darker-colored neckties that either took bets or collected bets for other bookies. While I knew who some of these wrong-side-of-the-tracks people were, I disliked the idea of betting on things that involved people as these. And, besides, I was told they only took bets on horses and games involving people. My thinking was that sports people could be manipulated to affect the outcome. After all, it had been done in the past and, in my view, could be done in the future. Thus, sports betting was out for me.
As to horse racing, we did have horse racing during the Summer months in my area but I disliked the idea of forcing horses to run for money. Thinking it was a cruel and unusual punishment for the horse, I disliked that form of gambling from the get go.
In my mind, pure numbers was the most ideal way to go if there were a way to go. Games of chance that involved the outcome of numbers. After all, in college we read the works of Balzac and Dostoevsky, both of whom I learned were inveterate gamblers. Neither of these famed and notable writers, I could surmise, ever bet on baseball, football, or basketball games. So, in that respect, I figured I was in good company.
By the time I left college, New York State had, in fact, introduced some form of legal numbers betting. At first, there was only betting on the outcome of three numbers, and then rapidly the state introduced betting on 4 numbers. A friend of mine, Don Jacksina, now of Saranac Lake, NY, is the only person that I know who has beaten the three number game. He bet only one time, fifty cents when the game first arrived. He won, and never played again. This is generally unheard of in gambling circles.
Even Mr. Las Vegas himself, Steve Wynn, (whose father coincidentally ran the same Bingo Games that Mrs. Brennan loved so much) was asked in a “60 Minutes” interview if he had ever seen anyone go home with their winnings to which Mr. Wynn without any hesitation answered “No” Apparently Mr. Wynn never heard of my friend Don Jacksina.
To be continued