Indian Casinos Hit Jackpot With the Elderly
It's barely noon, and 78-year-old Rose Kario is already $300 in the hole. With each puff of her cigarette and each losing spin, she grows more agitated.
"Come on, sweetie pie," she whispers to a clanging slot machine she has been feeding for more than an hour at Casino Pauma in northern San Diego County. "Come to Mama."
A few minutes later, Kario's patience is gone. She swears as another spin comes up empty.
Two seats over, 80-year-old Clara Stern isn't having much luck either. But as she watches the last of her $200 in credits spin away, Stern says she is getting her money's worth.
Cost what it may -- and gambling has cost her plenty -- the casino visit is a welcome respite from what for her is the monotony of old age.
"I have no limit," Stern says in a voice husky from years of chain-smoking. "I don't know if I'm going to wake up tomorrow."
Kario and Stern are among thousands of senior citizens in California who have become regular customers of the state's growing number of Indian casinos, which now look to the elderly for half their business, experts say. Casinos actively encourage the trend by dispatching fleets of buses to retirement communities and senior centers and by offering incentives such as buffet vouchers.
The trend reflects a national pattern: A study by the federal National Gambling Impact Study Commission in 1999 found that the fraction of U.S. seniors who gambled jumped from 20% in 1974 to 50% in 1998, a surge unmatched by any other age group during a period when casinos proliferated across the country.
It's still unclear, however, what easy access to casino gambling means for senior citizens in California, where Native American tribes have opened 54 casinos jammed with as many as 60,000 slot machines.
Although some experts worry about gambling addictions, many retirees say casinos have improved the quality of their lives by providing a change of pace and intellectual stimulation.
"We're not interested in sitting home and watching TV every day," said Phyllis Zalomek, 82, who arrived at Casino Pauma on a chartered bus from Leisure World in Laguna Woods along with Kario, Stern and about 50 others. "It's a place to go, a place to occupy your mind."
Experts on gambling and aging agree with many senior gamblers that casinos do offer a change of scene that is attractive -- even, perhaps, beneficial.
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