Heads or Tails

1,780,000,000,000.

That's not dollars. That's not illegals. That's the number of pennies gambled in penny slot machines last year in Nevada. It produced a win for the house of $1.8 BILLION !!

When we moved here ten years ago there were less than 500 penny slots in town. They were still operated by hand fed coins and jingling payoffs.

One time I was passing the penny slot area on my way to the book at the Plaza downtown. Every machine was taking juice. There was a mounting jackpot of $1700 that had been growing from $500 and the gamblers were pressing.

An old lady player had to take a whiz. She placed a large TAKEN sign on her slot machine and raced to the can. When she returned, a Sooner had played on her machine and hit the $1700 jewel.

Many a slip twixt the cup and the lip.

I had a big twixt in my life's jack pole.

The Denver Post printed on its business page that an Wyoming Life Insurance Co was buying out Uni-Wall Interlock, I was a big insider and I would have rcvd over a million $ in life insurance stock at 1966 values and I had a major position in a linked company, Mountain Modular Mfg., a public company with tangible assets at Eagle, Co.

In the last minute as we were ready to close the deal, the key man who held the patents for Uni-Wall, GM, asked for some more dough up front.

The ranchers of the life insurance sensed "taint" as in taint no deal.

Like the lady at the Plaza, there's many a slip twixt the cup and the lip.