Hard To Find A Positive Spin

Bells are jingling. Coins are jangling. Lights are twinkling.

From a festive standpoint, it’s sort of Christmas all year ‘round inside a dashing-flashing casino.

Yet with the actual holiday mere days away, the mood among the 50 employees at Chewelah’s Double Eagle is not exactly holly, let alone jolly.

On Monday, the staff held its annual holiday potluck. Despite the glazed ham, chilled shrimp and stiff upper lips, the gathering had touches of being more of a wake.

Workers at all Spokane and Colville tribal casinos are living in a netherworld of uncertainty as courts decide the fate of slot machines.

The issue is complex and intensely political, but it boils down to this: Five’ll get you 10 that if the slots go, so do the jobs.

Spokane gamblers won’t drive an hour north to play cards in Chewelah when they can get a gaming fix at any number of establishments back home.

Slot machines have turned such out-of-the-way places as Chewelah and Two Rivers Casino north of Davenport into lucrative destinations.

It’s hard to understand the fuss about slots. Washington state adamantly refuses to arrange a compact allowing tribal casinos to have slot machines. Hence, the court wars.

But it doesn’t make sense. Why is it all right for someone like me to win or lose at pulltabs or lottery tickets or blackjack tables and not slot machines?

Monday at the Double Eagle, by the way, I put $20 in a nickel machine and walked away with $40.

As long as the game is regulated and fair, gambling is gambling.

Even yammering ninnies - who attack gambling like Billy Sunday taking an ax to a keg of booze - must concede that casinos provide real jobs and real help for the area’s base economy.

“I’m a single mother. I’m the sole provider for my son,” says Betsy Lester, 24. “Basically if I lose this job, I’ll lose my house that I bought last year and my property.

“They are messing with our lives.”

Casino workers have experienced more ups and downs of late than a tester in a yo-yo factory. On Dec. 10, U.S. District Judge Fred Van Sickle ruled the tribes must 86 their one-armed bandits. For a time it appeared tribal casino workers would get pink slips in their Christmas stockings.

Then last Friday, the tribes were granted a Dec. 30 hearing. That gave the workers a stay of execution, which could extend into weeks or more should the issue be kicked up to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Bet on it.

“It’s like having a hammer hanging over your head,” says Double Eagle pit boss, Jim Crawford, 55. “There’s always the question of ‘are we going to have a job next week?”’

Crawford moved his family to the outskirts of Chewelah six years ago from the San Francisco Bay area. He had never given Eastern Washington a thought, he says, until he read about it in an organic gardening magazine.

Sick of hearing gunshots every night, Crawford says, he moved his family north. He found that idyllic lifestyle, but the steamfitter of 22 years struggled to get work.

Four years ago he saw a help-wanted ad for the Double Eagle. He had never dealt cards, but decided to give it a shuffle.

Today, Crawford and his co-workers describe their duties as the best jobs they have ever had. Much of the credit, they say, goes to casino owners Buzz Gutierrez and his daughter, Monica. The Gutierrez family, they say, has created a clean, well-run business that is sensitive to employee needs.

“The atmosphere is fantastic,” says Craig Lester, 40, no relation to Betsy.

The 40-year-old security guard describes the prospect of losing his job as a “devastation.” With “three teenagers, a wife and two dogs,” he adds, a layoff will mean some lean times.

“The dogs will sure miss the dinner scraps,” adds Lester, cracking a joke at his expense. “And they eat pretty good on prime rib nights.”