When poker was a big crime in Brookings

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If you played poker for real money in Brookings in the 1920s, you might end up in jail if you didn’t keep your flappin’ mouth shut during your leisurely afternoon stroll through downtown watering holes and barber shops.

Big brother may have been listening.

With not much else to enforce in a quiet burg where liquor was illegal and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union wasn’t, police looking for excitement here might decide to prowl the neighborhoods at night peeking under kitchen window blinds in homes suspected of hosting games of chance that might be under way on flowered oilcloth-covered tables surrounded by the town’s chain smoking ne’er-do-wells.

The 1920s were the times when saints assumed gambling would most surely send sinners to rack, ruin and possibly damnation, unlike today when gambling is state sponsored and encouraged.

In mid-February 1927, an innocuous, friendly little game of dime poker was almost a major crime in town, ranking right up there with stealing coal chunks from the railroad or spitting on the sidewalk.

The same week in 1927 that the poker raid in south Brookings took place, the really big news in town was the successful trip to Pierre by the county commissioners to convince state bureaucrats to gravel 16 miles of road between Brookings and White.

Those commissioners didn’t get home in time for the Boy Scout Court of Honor that was celebrating Boy Scout Week.

And down there at the dark end of Sixth Avenue South, some fellow who had never been a Boy Scout and didn’t even own a car to drive on new gravel to the Palace Café in White was hosting a friendly poker soiree in his drafty little house.

A stool pigeon spilled the beans, however, and the town’s law enforcement kicked into high gear.

Police Chief John Crosser and compatriots Otis Ridout and Jim Brooks, accompanied by City Attorney Herbert Cheever, along because this was such a big case, waited for darkness and then headed south.

There on the south end of Sixth Avenue, the home’s window shades were drawn down tight. Shadows on the kitchen shade from the other side indicated some kind of card game in progress. Crosser high-stepped over a snow bank and tried the back door. He turned the cold door handle slowly and quietly.

It was locked.

He knocked gently. Someone from inside asked who was there.

Crosser responded with the simple word “IN.” He’d been told that was the game’s prearranged password. A chair scraped in reverse and in a second, the door lock clicked smartly.

Brookings city law went into action.

The Register described it all: “Crosser, closely followed by the others, rushed in, but they had not counted on three steps that lead from the tiny vestibule to the room where the game was in progress.

“Crosser stumbled over the steps momentarily. Both he and Ridout saw money on the table. Before they reached the table, however, the money had disappeared.

On the advice of Attorney Cheever, they confiscated some of the cards that were still on the table and arrested 12 men.

The card sharks were Orza Goodroad, Olaf Nelson, Orville Ward, Carl Lakeman, Ben Cleveland, Elmer Hanson, Wesley Morris, Raymond Gill, Ruben Kukuk, K. Kukuk, Harley McCord and Bud Pittenger.    

In court the next day, the men pleaded not guilty and were placed under $25 bond.

The following day, with Justice Sam Kabrud presiding, the men insisted they had not been playing poker. But each paid a small fine.

Despite all this crime, the state that summer graveled the road near White, and the Boy Scouts went on a camping trip at Lake Campbell. All was well in Brookings.

But I have a suspicion that the clandestine poker games continued, although probably not at that little house at the dark south end of Sixth Avenue.

If you’d like to comment, email the author at cfcecil@swiftel.net.