Column: Red carpet for seniors at tribal casinos

Monday, September 28, 2009  

"You can still smoke in parts of the Agua Caliente Casino in Rancho Mirage, a place where time travels in reverse, sin is celebrated and inhibition does not exist. You can light one cigarette after another while you gamble away your Social Security check and miss payments on the oxygen tank, and it's nobody's business but your own.

I found myself suppressing a cough as I strolled the Marlboro-scented casino floor looking for somebody to talk to. The economy is still on the mat, California gaming revenue dropped in 2008 for the first time in more than a decade and yet the cars still roll into the lots at Agua Caliente, Morongo and Pechanga, among other gambling halls.

So who are these die-hards?

I saw a couple at the slots and made small talk. The woman said she was an administrator at Cal State Long Beach, and this was a furlough day.

The governor takes away a day of pay and she goes to a casino?

It wasn't like that, she said. She might drop a coin or two in a slot, but she and her companion, a campus cop on his day off, visit the desert every once in a while just to kill a day, catch a show, go to dinner.

"We're not really gamblers," she said."

Get the Story:
Steve Lopez: At the slots, life isn't always a line of 7s (The Los Angeles Times 9/27)