This past weekend I went to southern Oklahoma (Temple, Walters and Lawton) for some business-related and family stuff.
One thing that hit me bigger than I thought it would was — wow, I went to Basic Training at Ft Sill, which is in Lawton — get this — *seventeen years* ago.. That’s almost 20 years by my calculations! I’ve been to Temple a few times for visiting family but not to Lawton since 1990 - and I felt pretty old. I keep imagining myself saying the phrase “twenty years ago” and it just seems so…. old. I was in the “1st and 31st” but I went online and it doesn’t seem as though that platoon or division is still there.
The 77th Armored Division Band put up with me for a few months for my training after Basic (I was in the Army Band as my contribution to our military). I really loved doing music as a living. And a military band knows it’s stuff, lemme tell you. It’s not just marches or classics - you play everything in the Army band - contemporary, rock, jazz, Big Band, blues, pop, you name it. My fellow soldier band members just loved music and loved playing. Sprinkle in a deep love and devotion to your country, sautee in a thick broth of discipline and you have a tight music-playing unit who can deliver heart-tuggingly good pieces.
While we were driving back to Temple from Lawton, I noticed a huge casino. I didn’t know that Oklahoma had gambling, and I loves me some casino action now and again. I asked, and it turned out there were several in the area. I went to one in Walters but was disappointed that it was just slot machines. And all the slot machines were really bingo machines with slot machine front ends - I’m guessing it’s something to do with the law.
I went further down the street (ok, figuratively - I actually went half an hour down the freeway) to a place that actually had table games. I had me a blast, but there were two things “different” about this casino than normal casinos.
The first one was that it cost a dollar to gamble. Yes, an extra dollar - EVERY TIME YOU BET. So for example, if you sat down at blackjack to bet $5 or $10 or whatever, you also had to put $1 on the side as an entry fee for playing the game. And this was for EVERY HAND, not just to sit down.
That gets old really fast.
So I went over to craps, because you only had to pay $1 every time the shooter set a point, which made the entry fee last a lot longer. Had me a lot of fun there.
And that leads me to the second thing - I’m guessing there’s some law against dice. Well, how do you have a craps game without dice?
WITH CARDS.
Yes, the craps table had no dice, but they had a deck of special cards, where each possible roll of the die was represented by a different card. The “shooter” would cut the deck and the dealer would turn over the next card and that’s the roll.
Very weird if you haven’t seen it before.
