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Vegas
comes to Mayberry
Kevin
Horrigan
06/25/2001
FROM
U.S. Highway 61 north, the first exit
for La Grange, Mo., is Lewis County
Highway B, a two-lane road that
parallels the Mississippi, about 28
river miles north of where Huck Finn
launched his raft. The asphalt slices
through a narrow strip of bottomland
between the river and its bluffs,
through fields green with corn and
beans, gray and damp where the
flooding river swept the crops away.
You make a sweeping turn toward Bob
Richter's impeccably kept farm, its
red-roofed outbuildings immaculate in
the early summer sun, and then you
see the casino -- a great beached
white whale at the base of the bluffs
on the edge of town. Its faux
smokestacks and wheelhouse, just up
the road from the Bunge grain
elevator, look preposterous in this
setting. But this is the future of La
Grange, a high-stakes gamble that one
tiny Missouri town can lick the 21st
century by joining it.
Welcome to the Mark Twain Casino: 450
slot machines; more than a dozen
tables for blackjack and other games;
two restaurants; two bars: bright
brass railings and rich oak paneling;
parking for 600 cars. Vegas has come
to Mayberry.
Sometime in mid-July, the Missouri
Gaming Commission will issue its 10th
casino license since the state
legalized riverboat gambling in 1992.
The doors of the Mark Twain Casino
will fling open and, if the Gaming
Commission's estimates are correct,
the first of 12,000 people a week
will descend upon a town of 1,100
people. La Grange, which has one gas
station, one bank, one tavern and no
stoplights, will never be the same.
"Everywhere change! Remorseless
change where (the traveler) had
heedlessly dreamed that desolating
Time had stood still!"
That was Mark Twain in 1866, but
today's traveler finds it's still
true. Modern communications and
globalism have made the world
smaller. Remorseless change demands
that communities adapt or die. La
Grange has adapted, and then some.
The town library has computers wired
into the Internet. Grain sold at the
Bunge elevator is shipped downriver
to the Port of New Orleans and then
around the world.
Few small towns are self-contained
any more. They're part of a region, a
state, the world, trying to find a
way to stay alive.
Susan Dean, the head of the La Grange
Revitalization Organization, works in
Quincy, Ill. Ken Schuetz, executive
vice president of the Farmers and
Merchants Bank, lives in Palmyra. The
La Grange Foundry is the biggest
employer in Lewis County, with 225
people. Folks in La Grange drive to
work in Hannibal, or in Keokuk or
Fort Madison, Iowa. At the casino's
job fair in February, 900 people --
most of them from Illinois -- showed
up to apply for 300 jobs.
Ask Craig Serle, the casino's
marketing manager, how rural Missouri
can support a casino and he cites A.C.
Nielsen Co. designated market area
numbers for WGEM-TV in Quincy. Within
a 50-mile radius of the casino are
111,400 TV homes and more than
400,000 people. They're not all
waiting for the quilting bee.
It might be a regional casino, but La
Grange, as the "home dock"
community gets to keep all the local
money -- an estimated $1 million a
year in taxes, plus another $1
million to $2 million in
"boarding fees" at $1 a
head, plus $200,000 a year over five
years to double the size of the
five-officer police force. The city's
current budget is $400,000 a year.
Next year it will quadruple -- at
least.
"Oh, they're just sick about
this in Quincy and Marion
County," chortled Jenny
Murphy-Reid, now retired after 42
years, 3 months and 2 weeks at the
Farmers and Merchants Bank. On one of
those days eight years ago, a man
from a casino company dropped into
the bank and asked how folks might
feel about a casino moving to town.
Pretty good, it turned out,
especially after the Great Flood of
'93 wiped out all but four buildings
on Main Street. La Grange put the
casino proposal on the ballot in 1994
and it passed 4-to-1. Now they're
waiting for the payoff: paved streets
and sidewalks; lights; new sewers; a
plaza on Main Street; maybe even a
municipal pool. "We've got
nothing like that now, said Mr.
Schuetz. Let's face it, our kids
leave when they grow up. Maybe
this'll keep them here."
Is there a downside to this?
Traffic, maybe, Mrs. Murphy-Reid
said, or tourists running stop signs.
"They have no idea what's about
to hit them," said Kevin
Preston, the casino's general
manager. "You look at the
numbers and you look at the town, and
you wonder. It's a lot of
money."
========
Tuesday: Betting on the come.
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