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For 21 years, slot machines ruled in St. Mary’s
Wednesday, July 26, 2006
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Photo Courtesy of Southern Maryland Studies Center, College of Southern Maryland
As shown in this advertisement in The Enterprise during the 1962 campaign, J. Frank Raley Jr. put together a new leadership ticket to bring fresh faces into local government, including John Hanson Briscoe, who was elected as a delegate. Briscoe would later become speaker of the House of Delegates and a circuit judge.
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The revenue they made was the crutch the county operated on, but along with the gambling came social and structural problems.
St. Mary’s County used to be one of the poorest counties in the state before the Navy base moved in and before the modern economy took hold in the late 1960s.
When Patuxent River Naval Air Station opened on April 1, 1943, it brought better-paying jobs to the county and finally reversed the population losses and fluctuations that the county had been experiencing since the first U.S. Census in 1790.
Just a few years after the base opened and Jarboesville was renamed Lexington Park, St. Mary’s became the second county in Southern Maryland to legalize slot machines, which had already been here for decades before.
The year 1947 was marked by the slot-machine battle in the county, and despite a governor’s veto, the county commissioners maneuvered to tax — and therefore legalize — slot machines.
Before 1943, ‘‘This was one of the poorest counties in the state,” said former state senator J. Frank Raley in an interview. ‘‘Near last in investment in education.”
The Dec. 1, 1950, edition of The Beacon explained the local economy of then and before. ‘‘St. Mary’s County being on a cash basis budgets for expenses, rather than the old times custom of paying bills with script, then levying to collect taxes to repay the loans.”
‘‘The script system was [where] you operated without money,” Raley said.
In January 1947 a community meeting was held, and The Enterprise reported, ‘‘It was stated that a checking up of bars, garages, stores and barber shops in the county shows 250 bars and 400 slot machines in operation here in the above places of business.”
Later that month, a bill was prepared to legalize slots in St. Mary’s. Anne Arundel County had already legalized theirs in 1943.
But locally, a man wrote in The Enterprise, ‘‘I cannot force myself to believe that the majority of the people living in this county want this done. Wake up people of St. Mary’s before it is too late.”
Judge William M. Loker had tasked a grand jury to investigate the slot machine issue.
Edward Waring, then mayor of Leonardtown, was foreman of the 1947 grand jury. Its March report stated, ‘‘Twenty or more years ago, a seedling was planted and from that planting a huge tree has grown. Courts, state’s attorneys and sheriffs have paid little heed to this public form of gambling and in consequence of which an important issue is at stake.
‘‘Recently an order came down from state police headquarters to clean up the county of slot machines, but this was blocked and [the] order cancelled.”
The report added that the matter of gambling should be handled by the courts, sheriff or state’s attorney, and Loker was disappointed the grand jury did not report more on the matter as directed.
At the end of the 1947 session of the Maryland General Assembly, Gov. William Preston Lane refused to sign 10 bills that would have authorized gambling in six counties, including St. Mary’s. Lane said, ‘‘I believe that the total of these proposals proves that it is unwise for the state to permit such matters to be handled on a county level entirely.”
However, the St. Mary’s County commissioners — J. Frank Raley Sr., Frank Bailey and Matthew R. Bailey — voted to pass a 5 percent amusement tax on coin and pinball devices as part of another bill. With 1,100 slot machines in the county, the commissioners expected an annual revenue of $50,000.
In June, Loker took the grand jury into a room for two hours to scold them over their ‘‘amazing” and ‘‘preposterous” refusal to report on the illegal operations of slot machines.
The grand jury reconvened and came back to report, ‘‘There should not be any more confusion in the minds of some that slot machines can be classified as amusements and taxed for a revenue for St. Mary’s County. An explanation of the law was certainly very carefully explained and defined, that slot machines are illegal. Upon that basis, this grand jury has acted,” and 24 indictments were handed down.
Foreman Waring added, ‘‘Also our governor declined to sign one measure making slot machines legal and we quote the governor’s reason. He said: ‘If county by county legalizes slot machines, soon the state of Maryland will be a paradise for gamblers.’ We fully concur with the governor in his views and believe small things will lead to larger ones, and our shores will be available by sharks of the deep-sea kind.
‘‘Then too what an example for St. Mary’s, the mother county of the state, to set for her 22 children. This grand jury requests that the sheriff seize and impound all slot machines, games, devices and contrivances, by law that shall be found remaining in St. Mary’s County,” Waring reported.
By September, another grand jury was convened to either pursue the gambling indictments or to investigate public officials or any violation of law.
That jury, with George Quirk as foreman, reported quite simply, ‘‘We the body of the grand jury would like the county to be put on a cash basis,” by keeping slot machines.
Following local pressure from the likes of Paul Bailey and Philip H. Dorsey, Lane signed a law in November 1947 to allow a voter referendum in St. Mary’s over the slot machine issue.
The county commissioners sent out a letter to the general public that said the county would take in $100,000 a year, double of what was originally expected.
Their letter read, ‘‘The bill does not legalize coin-operated machines, but does empower the county commissioners to legalize them and we will state it frankly it will be our purpose if the bill is approved by the voters at the forthcoming election to do so.
‘‘Probably no county in the state is faced with more serious financial conditions than ours. Due to the great increase in population, each week new demands are made upon us necessitating additional appropriations,” they wrote.
The county’s population doubled from 1940 to 1950, from 14,626 people to 29,111.
Despite last-minute pleas from the St. Mary’s County Civic Association, voters chose slot machines in the December referendum with approximately 2,245 votes for and 1,254 against.
After that, slot machines proliferated. They were everywhere except churches, said John Hanson Briscoe, retired circuit judge and former speaker of the Maryland House of Delegates.
With gambling everywhere, ‘‘St. Mary’s County was really in the dumps. It was known for slots. Everything else was suffering. All of the great assets were sitting there stagnating,” he said in a recent interview.
With the prevalence of slots in so many businesses, burglaries of the machines were commonly reported. But more than that, the slots were funding political machines and draining the incomes of the Navy base’s sailors.
When J. Frank Raley Jr. ran for state senate in 1962, he brought along an entire slate of candidates to take on the Dorsey machine and was successful.
By 1962 there were enough grumblings in the Southern Maryland communities that gambling had once again become an issue.
An editorial of the Feb. 14, 1963, edition of The Enterprise stated, ‘‘If more than 3,000 counties in the United States can operate their local governments and businesses without slot machine revenue, the four counties of Southern Maryland can do so too.”
In his recollection with the Maryland Archives, Raley said, ‘‘In that year, Governor Millard Tawes, under statewide prodding, submitted legislation to abolish this gambling. In those days especially in Charles, Calvert and St. Mary’s, the economies were weak and the counties poor. Gambling was touted as the mainstay of those economies and had a strong electoral following, well financed. I had won election to the Senate based on the reform of the economy in St. Mary’s and Southern Maryland. I did not take a position to abolish gambling. I don’t think I would have been elected if I did. I staked out a position of higher taxation and controls on gambling.
‘‘The events of the gubernatorial campaign overtook me, when a nobody ran up a huge amount of votes as a one-issue candidate,” he said. The candidate was Del. David Hume on a campaign to eradicate slot machines.
‘‘Governor Tawes was forced to adopt a protective position of eliminating gambling in Southern Maryland. I was in support of getting rid of gambling as it was a serious economic drag on the Southern Maryland economy, but I had the campaign promise around my neck,” Raley said. He turned to a program of economic development, which became successful in the absence of slots, but lost in the 1966 primary to Walter B. Dorsey, who in turn lost to Republican Paul Bailey in the general election.
In a public hearing at the General Assembly, Arthur ‘‘Buck” Briscoe, also known then as ‘‘Mr. St. Mary’s County,” said that slot machines ‘‘have not been the big bad wolf the papers would have you believe.”
It was in April 1963 that Tawes signed a bill to freeze all new slot machine licenses and to begin a phase-out. Raley was one of three state senators to have voted against the bill. But earlier in the session, Raley had introduced a bill to rid the county of slots, if passed by voter referendum.
The phase-out began in earnest in 1965. By July 1, 1968, all slots were removed —at least out from the public eye.
But in 1973, legalized gambling returned to St. Mary’s, and all of Maryland, in the form of the Maryland Lottery.
E-mail Jason Babcock at jbabcock@somdnews.com.
