From the Archive: Confessions of a Croupier

—“I Was a Gambling-House Dealer” by Trina Mascott, from the May 13, 1950, issue of The Saturday Evening Post

Professional gambling is grueling, cruel, and completely mechanical. It requires a type of woman who has the stamina and personality to stand before an ironing board and iron the same piece of clothing over and over again for eight hours a day, six days a week … and enjoy it. It also requires the type of woman who can picnic complacently on a cliff edge while people around her are leaping to their destruction.

The gambling bug [is an occupational hazard]. I remember a talk with a hardened pit boss who was explaining to me the keno game, a form of lottery. He called it a “sucker’s game,” a complete waste of money. But he interrupted his explanation to listen to the winning keno numbers on the casino’s P.A. system. He’d bet and lost his night’s wages on his “lucky numbers.”

The second, even more serious problem is that the dealer eventually becomes callous. Gambling hardens all who come in contact with it. After a year or so of work in the casino, the dealer is no longer moved by the spectacle of men and women gambling away the money that should be used to support themselves and their families.

The dealer becomes hard-boiled. She loses her tenderness, her compassion, her heart. I quit before I reached that stage.

This article is featured in the May/June 2025 issue of The Saturday Evening Post. Subscribe to the magazine for more art, inspiring stories, fiction, humor, and features from our archives.