Word: slots
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Every Sunday evening at 9 p.m., faithful Business School freshmen troupe to Morris Hall, C Entry, to slip six-page papers in EA General through a ten by one-half inch slot. But last night bedlam broke loose: the papers had been assigned for eight pages...
...hope of turning the flow inward and damming it into a reservoir to serve the public, Idaho legalized slot machines on a local-option basis in 1947. Heavy license fees were imposed. But the results were weird and astounding. Though the state legally controlled them, the slots acted, increasingly, like a virus in the body politic, dividing Idaho citizens against each other, changing the shape of towns, altering social life, wounding business and giving whole communities a surrealistic civic philosophy...
High Price. Not that the slots didn't put cash in public and private tills. Last year Idaho's 3,438 legal machines pumped $486,262 into the state treasury, and veritable floods of money into the coffers of smaller communities. Coeur d'Alene collected $66,000, used the money to resurface streets free of charge to residents. Sandpoint used slot money for a new sewage project. Kellogg spent $40,000 of slot funds for flood control. On the private side, Coeur d'Alene's Athletic Round Table built $100,000 clubrooms, donated thousands...
...Idaho had to pay a price for its new way of life. Almost from the beginning, businessmen began complaining that the slots were siphoning money away from legitimate channels of trade. Doctors & dentists began having trouble collecting their bills. Restaurant owners said that slotclubs were luring away their customers with 79? steaks, and luring away the customers' money afterward. As a result, in rapid and indignant succession, Idaho's bigger cities began banning slot machines...
Land-Office Business. This caused another phenomenon. Neon-lit slot-machine satellite towns began springing up just outside city limits-Garden City just outside Boise; Jerome, outside Twin Falls; State Line Village just over the boundary from Spokane, Wash. They did a land-office business. Meanwhile, other slot-machine towns assumed new, weird shapes: the village of Crouch, for instance, pushed its limits out in a strip one foot wide and 10 miles long, to make slot machines legal in a distant roadhouse...