Word: riverboats
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...wall a hand-scrawled poster exhorts: CASINO LOBBYISTS TAKE A HIKE! The tables are strewn with literature on gambling addiction. The T shirts on sale sport the logo NO CASINO and a fiercely clawed Maryland blue crab. As for the evening's featured speaker, "We call him Riverboat Rambo," says Barbara Knickelbein, a grandmotherly church activist, with a mixture of affection and reverence...
...Thomas Grey, 55, an Illinois pastor, is the merry messiah who has built a once lonely battle against a Mississippi riverboat casino into a nationwide crusade against gambling. A Dartmouth graduate and an infantry captain who served in Vietnam, Grey spent 250 nights on the road last year, "networking the fighters--Gideon's army," as he calls it. Whether rattling around the Midwest in his battered Toyota, the Mamas and the Papas playing on his tape deck, or flying on frenetic forays through Maryland, Mississippi, Kansas and Louisiana, he carries everywhere a camouflage-covered Bible. Also in his pocket...
...flame that first lit Grey's fuse was a riverboat casino in Galena, Illinois, the quaint Mississippi River town where he lived quietly with his wife and served as the local Methodist pastor. In 1991, 81% of the townspeople voted against playing host to the boat, but the referendum was nonbinding, and local officials, thirsting for revenue, invited it to dock anyway. "I got mad," recalls Grey. Now, with this nationwide campaign, he adds, "I'm getting even." This hometown fight led to invitations to speak in Iowa, Indiana, Missouri and other states grappling with a riverboat onslaught. Grey...
...group had formed around Henri in Philadelphia. Henri's original family name was Cozad--he was a very distant relation of Mary Cassatt--but his father, a riverboat gambler and property shark, had shot a man in Nebraska and had moved East and changed his name to escape the judge and jury. Young Henri (pronounced Hen-rye) became an artist through study at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, which in the 1880s was still what its chief teacher, the great realist Thomas Eakins, had made it: the best place in America to learn direct, factual realist...
Maine voters rejected an anti-gay rights measure. Gambling fared badly in Washington, where Indian tribes failed to convince voters that they need 24-hour casinos. In Missouri, a riverboat-gambling proposal was sunk, as was an effort to win floating casinos for Indiana. And in the year's most colorful campaign, "gonzo" journalist Hunter Thompson persuaded voters in Aspen, Colorado, to unite against "the greed heads" and the "absentee-landlord scum" seeking to expand the town's airport to accommodate big jets...