It shold be noted that this article was originally printed in 1996. Despite time that has passed the article is relevant and well worth the read.
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 Thursday, August 29 1996; Page M01
 
 
 Naomi Smith's wedding night was a bit bizarre. When she and her husband married in 1959, they checked into the Heidelberg Motel in Charles County, and then he checked out. She sent him out for a hamburger, and he didn't return until morning. Instead of celebrating their nuptials, he was gambling across the street.
 
 "He ain't never won nothing but me," she recalled, still married to him decades later.
 
 The gambling frenzy that gripped her husband typified a time and place when slot achines were pervasive and legal in Southern Maryland -- the only place other than Nevada where that was so -- and Route 301 in Charles County was a gaudy strip of neon-lighted casinos and nightclubs unofficially known as "Little Nevada."
 
 And slots weren't only in nightclubs but also in barbershops, liquor stores, dry cleaners and hardware stores and in every little grocery store and filling station you could find. So widespread and numerous were the slots that a fifth of the Charles County budget was derived from licensing them. Slots eclipsed tobacco as the region's economic linchpin.
 
 Their presence generated jobs -- and controversy. There were allegations of political corruption and organized crime, stories of family disarray, prostitution and juvenile delinquency. The allegations and aura of that time linger today in the passions and politics that surround any discussion of bringing back the slots, in whatever form or place.
 
 When they aren't under attack as sinful or worse, slot machines are touted as the answer to all economic problems, from financing education in Baltimore to supporting horse racing throughout the state. The recent introduction of slots at Delaware tracks has led to bigger prizes, which has Maryland track interests worried and lobbying hard for their own slot machines.
 
 Maryland Gov. Parris N. Glendening (D), exhibiting both the ambivalence and the strong emotions that surround slot machines, first seemed to open the door to slots at the state's racetracks; then earlier this month, he slammed it shut.
 
 But where gambling is concerned in Maryland, it's always best to hedge your bets.
 
 Slot machines are legal on the Eastern Shore in fraternal lodges and veterans posts. Commercial bingo is legal in Anne Arundel and Calvert counties. Western Marylanders engage in "tip jar" gambling, similar to the state's instant lottery. There's also state-sponsored Keno and, oh yes, four off-track betting parlors. And in Prince George's County, regulated charity casinos are a $28 million-a-year business.
 
 But none of that compares, old-timers say, to the tawdry, electric, exciting slot machine era in Southern Maryland. The machines had been a tradition there, winked at by authorities. The legalization that came in the 1940s was an effort to derive some revenue for the public till, and it also brought the big casinos into play.
 
 At their peak, the slot machines in Southern Maryland were said to gross $26 million a year, without adjusting for inflation. In Charles, the commissioners used revenue from the slots to make the county's real estate taxes the state's lowest -- and still produce a budget surplus.
 
 When the era of legal slots ended on June 30, 1968, the local economy plummeted. It revived only after years of growth turned the county into a booming suburb with miles of malls, new stores and subdivisions. Its population today of 111,000 is more than triple what it was at the height of the slots.
 
 Anne Arundel, St. Mary's, Calvert and Charles all had the machines, a total of 5,279 in about 900 establishments -- more than twice as many machines as in Nevada at the time. But Charles County had more slots than the rest combined and drew most of the crowds and publicity. Some places were said to have had as many as 300 machines clicking at once.
 
 From Benedict on the Patuxent to Pope's Creek on the Potomac, Charles County was one raucous, round-the-clock casino. They even gambled on the Potomac, on piers extending from Colonial Beach, Va., into Charles County waters.
 
 Interstate travelers especially stopped to gamble along Route 301, the county's main drag and then a major north-south route for traffic heading to and from New York and Florida and in between.
 
 Today, the old motels and roadhouses from Waldorf to the Potomac River bridge are relics of the era, minus the slots. Some, like the Desert Inn, the 301 Ranch and the Spring Lake Motel, are completely gone. Earl's Truck Stop is an empty, gutted shell. Aqua-Land is a marina and campground. The Stardust restaurant is closed, its motel units converted to efficiency apartments renting for $405 a month.
 
 The Waldorf Motel, where Naomi Smith works as a bookkeeper, is still in business, renting rooms to transients and serving food just across the Prince George's line.
 
 The Wigwam, the most intact of the old casino buildings, is what its owners call "the world's most unusual bakery"; it also sells Native American and Southwestern clothes, pottery, prints, jewelry and trinkets. Owners George and Christa Walls live in a house behind it and do their slot machine gambling at Delaware racetracks.
 
 In the slot days, he delivered The Washington Post up and down the strip, except to the Wigwam, which he said objected to the newspaper's anti-slot editorials. Compared with slots, he said, "this is a little harder dollar, but it's an honest dollar."
 
 Among some who lived through the slot era, there's a lingering nostalgia.
 
 "I'll take the slot days anytime," said William "Whitey" Roberts, 63, a former slot machine mechanic still associated with the Waldorf Motel. "We didn't have the crime we have now. Back then, if you heard a siren, it was because someone was speeding."
 
 Recalled Susan Odle, whose husband, Roscoe, also worked on the machines:
 
 "It was a fantastic time. People would come from all over to stay at the hotels all weekend and go to restaurants and play machines. It used to be you couldn't hardly decide where am I going to eat tonight, there were so many places to choose from. Now, there's nothing left . . . All there is now are gas stations, banks, McDonald's and Roy Rogers."
 
 Casinos attracted crowds with cheap food, liquor and bright neon signs that lighted up the night. In 1955, Man's Conquest magazine described Route 301 in Charles County as a 20-mile "wide open sin strip" and "felony row," a breeding ground for all forms of immoral and illegal activity.
 
 Where others saw prosperity, the Rev. Andrew L. Gunn, a Methodist minister then newly arrived in Indian Head, saw moral decay and worse: "I was really upset to see how much control the slot machines had over Southern Maryland. They controlled the politics, the economics, the social life. Nobody was watching the kids. Kids were stealing money from their parents to gamble. I had a couple of marriages break up over gambling."
 
 Gunn and others saw the shadow of organized crime descending on the county, although specific connections were murky. There were published accounts of unlicensed, and therefore untaxed, machines and unwanted national notoriety.
 
 Virginia politicians also joined in the opposition. They were outraged that their shores had become access points for "Free State" river gambling.
 
 In 1958, the Maryland General Assembly ended gambling from Virginia's Potomac piers. Five years later, under mounting pressure from the Charles County ministers, editorialists and others, the Maryland lawmakers voted to outlaw slots entirely, effective July 1, 1968.
 
 To soften the economic blow, the state agreed to build the Patuxent River bridge that now connects Calvert and St. Mary's, and the Tri-County Council sprang up to promote regional interests and the regional economy without the one-armed bandits.
 
 "At the time they were taken out, it was a hardship on the owners and operators and also on those working for them," said John T. Parran Jr., a former state senator from Charles County. "But I do believe over a period of time it has been proven we can get along without them, and I don't think we need them anymore, racetracks included."
 
 
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