Word: jackpots
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...towels Mother filched from hotels. To escape, Baby June eloped when she was 13 with one of the chorus boys, aged 18, outran Mama in a breathless chase to the honeymoon train. Big Sister Gypsy was booked by Mama in a Kansas City burlesque house, soon struck a jackpot at Minsky's in Manhattan and put up Mama in velvety splendor in a flat above the honky-tonks of 42nd Street...
...Skill. But spooning has become a crude technique, with a relatively picayune payoff. The real returns (from $15 to $1,000) come in hitting the jackpot. When that happens in most Nevada gambling houses, only a few coins tumble down. A bell rings, the box lights up, and a sharp-eyed change girl arrives at the machine, sometimes with an assortment of mechanic types who check to see that there has been no ham-handed tampering. If the win looks legitimate, the change girl pays the big money...
...Drill. Some thieves use a tiny, battery-powered electric drill concealed in their sleeves, make a little hole in the machine (see cut), insert a wire into the works, and by careful manipulation "walk" the reels until they stop at the jackpot position. But since freshly drilled holes are too easily detected, other jackpotters have fashioned keys with which they can unlock machines and stop the reels by hand. A first-class crook can walk the reels, hit the jackpot in 30 seconds flat and, before the change girl appears, slip his small tools to an accomplice, who ambles away...
...every innovation by the bandit-beaters, the operators develop a safeguard. And for every safeguard, there is a new way to hit the jackpot. "Hell," says one disgusted slot-machine mechanic, "you could surround the thing with sheet metal, and they will find a way to beat it." Yet for all the troubles with the professional jackpotters, there are always enough honest, ordinary suckers around to make the one-armed bandit history's healthiest highwayman...
Ever since "quiz" became television's own four-letter word, networks have sought the fix-free format-a jackpot show that could convince audiences of its incorruptibility. The trick lay in finding contestants whose honesty could not be doubted. CBS decided to try the nation's scrub-faced youth, began a sprightly Sunday half-hour intellectual basketball game called College Bowl...