Saying goodbye to a dear friend and happy-go-lucky casino player

5 September 2024

By Royal Flushes

CINDY: We’ve known Gloria since we were little girls. She was like an aunt to us although we were not related.

ABBY: She recently died, over 90, and until a quick illness took her, she was as healthy as could be.

CINDY: And she smoked too. I don’t know how many cigarettes in a day, I never counted, but it certainly was near a pack or so.

ABBY: She was also a happy-go-lucky casino player, a slot maven if you will, who went down to Atlantic City every week, maybe not during Covid but you get the picture. You couldn’t keep her away from the “houses of luck” as she called the casinos.

CINDY: Was she lucky? On rare occasions she’d hit some jackpot or other. But no, she was a long-term loser.

ABBY: And unlike the typical slot player she did not just play one type of machine. She let her tastes in games be almost universal.

CINDY: Unlike her cigarette smoking. She’d constantly be changing brands in order to find the one she liked. “I haven’t liked any of them in the last 30 years! I don’t know why they changed so many of them.”

ABBY: When she was younger she would drive to Atlantic City but after she hit 70 or so, that was just too much, so she took the bus. These were buses that catered to the casinos. You paid a small fee or no fee and got a video tape too. “The video tapes were boring,” she’d say. “They don’t exactly show you how to win.”

CINDY: Of course not, I’d tell her, the casinos don’t want you to know how they program the machines. “Well, sooner or later I will find out and then look out for me!”

ABBY: Sadly no, that was not in the RNG for her.

CINDY: Over the years she had some friends she’d go to the casinos with but they all died before she did. She’d go alone, although she was friendly to everyone but she never really was able to substitute new friends for her old ones.

ABBY: But she also had fun stories to tell us about her adventures in the casinos. She also happened to be a guest who helped a casino capture some pick-pockets. Way back when! “You’ve got to say alert of the bad guys will get you.”

CINDY: She had been a pretty woman and outlived two husbands, one of which she loved. Th other one? “He is best not spoken about,” she’d say in a warning tone. “He is better off burning where he is right now.”

ABBY: We just came back from her funeral and burial. It was a sad day as there were not too many people there. There were some people out age for whom she seemed to be like an aunt too. But that was it.

CINDY: She used to jokingly say “Gloria to God for keeping me alive!”

ABBY: The man in heaven certainly did that for 90 long years. May she be blessed.