In Las Vegas: Hibbing on a Hot Streak

By RICHARD CONNIFF

In the waiting room of the airport in Hibbing, Minn., Jim Shaw drops a quarter into a newspaper machine and gets back 30 cents. "I'm on a roll," he declares, and begins planning how to parlay his luck into a gambling empire over the next four days.

Never mind that he gets no newspaper. It would tell him only what he already knows: slow times in the iron-mining business have pushed local unemployment up to around 15%, and a factory owner who is pulling out says Hibbing has gone Communist, by which he means that real estate taxes are too high. As to the weather, Hibbing natives need only gauge the speed with which their nostrils freeze to calculate that the temperature is 19 degrees below zero. There is snow on the ground but nothing too serious. "Just walk where they've plowed," says Travel Agent Sue Klobuchar, "and it'll only be up to your ankles." It is good weather for ice fishing or Las Vegas; take your pick.

On this midwinter Thursday morning, 164 people--a fair chunk of Hibbing's 20,000 citizens--have prudently chosen the latter course. Almost nobody entertains the idea that a gambling trip will pay the Christmas bills. They haven't budgeted for winning, but for how much they can afford to lose: from $30 to $2,000. (At least those are the figures they'll admit to.) Many of them say they are going to Vegas mainly to get warm. This is no doubt the reason why Mickey Koehler lugs $40 worth of quarters and $20 in dimes onto the plane--for the exercise. Still, the notion that just one of those dimes in the right slot machine could mean a bright red vintage MG isn't entirely incidental.

Later that afternoon, while he is waiting for his room at the Flamingo Hilton, Donald Persson deposits three quarters into a slot machine, one of the largest bets of his life, and pulls the lever. The wheels fall into place, and the coins start firing rat-a-tat into the metal change bucket. Persson takes a seat, drops three more quarters and contemplates just what he has been missing for the past 57 years. By the time his wife Myrna disconnects him from the machine and persuades him to visit a cashier, he is up $153. He hardly needs an elevator to reach his room on the tenth floor.

The Perssons have joined the Hibbing-Las Vegas charter as guests of their son and daughter-in-law, who've also brought along her parents, Bob and Jeanne Johnson. The elder Perssons have previously "swung up into Canada a couple of times" and driven as far as Tennessee, but this is the trip of a lifetime for them. Like other first timers in Las Vegas, they are dazzled, even by breakfast. The $1.99 buffet at a casino called Circus Circus stretches, at least in the recounting, "from here to that telephone pole" across the parking lot. "You had to walk a block," says Bob Johnson.

"But, oh," Myrna Persson adds, "it was beautiful."

Unbelievable is the other word on every first-timer's lips. They do not necessarily mean Al Capone's 16-cylinder bulletproof Cadillac (with gunports and authenticating documents) on display at the Imperial Palace. Nor are they referring to eclectic concoctions like the Stardust casino, which features show girls "direct from Paris," orangutans redolent of Borneo, a Moby Dick restaurant and a Polynesian statue out by the sidewalk. No, it is enough that front doors all along the strip are wide open in January, with just a little breeze (and a lot of money) coming across the threshold. Also that midnight is more brightly lit than midday back home, and that there is green grass, even if only in patches. "We have to wait nine months for green grass," says Jack Verbonich, who lives 30 miles outside Hibbing, in Makinen, Minn.

Not that anyone has much time for foliage. Verbonich and his wife Linda spend most of the weekend contemplating fruit: the cherries, oranges, plums and lemons, plus elusive sevens, spinning behind the windows of their slot machines. Linda's hands work absently at the change bucket. She feeds the machine, lifts herself off the stool a bit to grasp the handle, and settles back with her weight on it, like a factory worker heaving open a start-up lever of a large turbine engine. Then, with the lights reflecting in her eyeglasses, she bounces up and down, patting the side of the machine and saying, "Come on! Big one, big one! Here it comes!" Her friend Janet Salo, by contrast, tends to snap the lever down; it is all in the elbow and in her whispered incantation: "Seven-seven-seven-se ven." Both of them admit that they will squeal for any jackpot from 50 cents up. At one point, when they have pooled their money with a third friend to play the dollar machines, all three squeal together and draw a crowd five deep. "How much did they win?" people ask. "$100," comes the reply. "Oh, shoot," says a hardened gambler. His contempt delights them more than their jackpot, which they duly pump back into the machine.

"What's that other game," Salo asks at one point, "that spinning one Karen said I should play?"

"Roulette," her husband replies. These are the sort of people who can break a hardened gambler's heart.

"It's a whole different world out here," says Charlie Francis, whose travel agency has organized the charter. "People come here and forget everything," he says. "They forget where they're from."

The place they are forgetting isn't all that different from Las Vegas, at least in certain superficial regards. Like Las Vegas, Hibbing sits out in the middle of nowhere, some 60 miles northwest of Duluth. It too is a city of straight streets and flat terrain. It has an MGM lounge (rather more subdued than its Nevada namesake) and a men's store with top hat, gloves and cane outlined in a neon sign (which is, however, seldom lit). Las Vegas may have Wayne Newton and the Golden Nugget, but Hibbing produced Bob Dylan, and it boasts that it has the world's largest open-pit iron mine.

Still, on this particular weekend, Hibbing proves easy to forget. Jamie Engel is rather timid about gambling, but a friend pushes her up to a $2 blackjack table and advises her to double down on 10 or 11. Engel is still there 14 hours later, having forgotten not just Hibbing but also lunch, dinner, the show and everything else that doesn't add up to 21. Jeanne Johnson works the nickel slots until 7 one morning, then starts in again at 8. Nancy Francis, Charlie's wife, stays at the craps table so long that she gets blisters on her toes.

By moral effort and pure self-discipline, several other members of the Hibbing group pull themselves away from gambling long enough to catch the show. The chorus girls glide out on ice, wearing turbans and huge feathered headgear. "Never saw 'em skate like that in Hibbing," Jim Shaw says --doubtless referring to their ankle work and not to the fact that they are topless. Donald Persson speculates afterward that the casino must be short of funds, as the costumes tend to be incomplete. "Other than that," says Myrna Persson, "it's a beautiful show."

When the airport bus arrives on Sunday afternoon, Engel is logging her 30th hour at blackjack and simultaneously missing the Super Bowl. She cashes in, up an amount somewhat less than the minimum wage. Everyone is giddy with hunger, lack of sleep, gambling fever and the prospect of financial ruin. A secretary is bringing back $2,500 from the slots. Jim Shaw looks as if he is lucky to be bringing home the 30 cents he got from the newspaper machine. As the plane climbs, Jamie Engel is dealing blackjack to her seatmates. Across the aisle, someone is looking out into the dark for the sights she neglected to see on the ground. "Is that the Hoover Dam?" she asks. "Is that the big lake?"

"That's the wing," Charlie Francis explains.

The temperature in Hibbing is sinking to 28 degrees below zero, and the snow is 5.8 in. deeper. When the cars have been shoveled free and jump started, Janet Salo bustles out into the maw of winter. In her purse is one last dollar , token, which she has withheld from the slot machines. "This one," she says, "is for the next time."