For Amusement Only!

Here are a couple of one-armed bandits from the old days. With the top one you put in a penny and if you got three of a kind on the reels you got free smokes.

 With the second one, you put in a nickel, but if you didn't win free smokes you got a gumball as consolation.

Not quite related but I found it on the same day, so here's your beer-related memorabilia for the day:

It's an old National Beer crate from Baltimore, featuring an early version of Mister National Bohemian, better known as Mr. Natty Bo!

TOMORROW: The Triumphant Return of Troy Cutcross!!!

A Bygone Pleasure Palace

 Near Rockford, Illinois (home of Jane, the world's most complete juvenile Tyrannosaurus skeleton!) stands this weatherbeaten sign, advertising what must once have been a splendid place to wine and dine and––I'm guessing––gamble.

Was gambling legal in Illinois back then, and was the name of the club a nod and a wink to the discriminating seeker of frolicsome entertainment? I don't know, but I wish it was still there. 

The Silver Dollar in Ghent, Minnesota

Last night I read with the amazingly talented Kyle Minor at the Marshall Festival at Southwest Minnesota State University in Marshall, Minnesota, and after the reading the festival's organizer, my good pal Anthony Neil Smith, took Kyle and me and a grad student in creative writing (Dan Vierck, remember that name) over to the nearby town of Ghent to the Silver Dollar, the first bar in Minnesota--not the oldest, but somehow the first. The distinction apparently has to do with a long-ago change in the liquor laws of the state, but no one could quite explain the exact nature of the claim.

In any case, they have one of the best old bar signs I've ever seen. Here's Kyle, standing before it like a badass.