Small-Town-America                       

St. Louis Post Dispatch June 27, 2001

How you gonna keep 'em down on the farm?
By Kevin Horrigan

06/27/2001 06:05 AM

  OUTSIDE Wilma's Specialty Coffee and Buffet Pizza Shoppe in downtown La Grange, Mo., three women are taking a cigarette break from class in the school room next door: Gambling 101. Dealing, counting, customer courtesy, how to spot someone who's been overserved. The times, they are achanging.

"Most folks around here probably never played blackjack before," said Craig Serle, the casino's marketing manager. "Now they're going to deal it."

They certainly are. In the jargon of the Missouri Department of Economic Development, La Grange is a "transitional community," one of many rural towns trying to move from a farm-based economy into a something else - sometimes anything else. A prison, a hog factory, anything that will supply a steady of source of jobs and income.

"It's hard to generalize about rural Missouri," said Joe Driskill, the department director. "In most places it's pretty good, but there are places where it leaves a lot to be desired."

The toughest challenges are places that have been heavily dependent on agricultural income. Small farmers find it hard to compete with corporate agriculture. To avoid selling off the farm, they need second, or even third, jobs. Small Missouri towns have hired economic development firms to look for business opportunities, and they're good at their work. Harrisonville and St. James have new Wal-Mart distribution centers. Poplar Bluff has a new Nordyne furnace factory. Lowe Boats in Lebanon has a revitalized aluminum boat industry. Bonne Terre, Charleston and Licking are getting new prisons.

A few years back, the tiny Mississippi River town of La Grange, pop. 1,100, tried to get a prison, too. But the new Northeast Missouri Correctional Center went instead to Bowling Green. Much to the amusement of bigger communities, La Grange decided to go after a riverboat casino. The gambling industry was new to the state and working on putting big casinos in big cities. La Grange bet that sooner or later, the high rollers would get around to small towns, too.

That bet is about to pay off. The 18,000-square-foot Mark Twain Casino is scheduled to open in mid-July. Though less than one-sixth the size of the state's biggest casino, Harrah's in Maryland Heights, the La Grange casino - which will draw most of its customers from the Hannibal and Quincy, Ill., area - is expected to gross $25 million a year. The Mark Twain is roughly the same size as the Frontier Casino, which last year grossed $21.4 million and paid $2 million in boarding fees and taxes to the city of St. Joseph.

Both the La Grange and St. Joseph operations were developed by William M. Grace, a former Phoenix real estate developer who has discovered gold in small town gambling operations in Missouri, Iowa and Kansas. Mr. Grace realized that rural economies are changing. Small towns are part of larger market areas, and people who live in those areas are used to driving long distances. Many of them are looking for something to do, a taste of big-city sin. The era of the church social and barn dance is over.

What's more, some of them are looking for work. There's a ready supply of cheap labor in rural America, farmers looking for second jobs, farm wives looking for part-time work to supplement the family income. Unemployment in northeast Missouri is only slightly higher than statewide. But personal income is only about 75 percent of the statewide average. When the casino held two job fairs earlier this year, more than 1,500 persons applied for 300 jobs. Most of those jobs pay between $7 and $8 an hour, but dealers and cocktail servers will make $12 to $15 an hour, including tips. The jobs include health care benefits - hard to come by on the farm - and better working conditions than factory or assembly work.

A hundred and fifty years ago, in La Grange's heyday, the river brought steamboats and the steamboats brought prosperity. On some of those steamboats were roulette wheels and card tables, faro games and high-low dice, sharp-eyed gamblers and fancy ladies. This is the mythology of riverboat gambling, a mythology that's far different from today's slickly marketed, boat-in-a-moat reality. Prosperity was fleeting the first time around, and it may be fleeting this time, too. Only the river remains the same.



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