Outside the Ambassador Hotel
With my parents, grandparents, cousins or friends, I played endless games of bingo on that real-life boardwalk. Though underage, I slipped into the casinos with my parents and put my share of nickels into the slot machines when no one was looking.
I recall, as if it were yesterday, the night my mom’s slot machine started dispensing nickels at an astonishing rate, filling her purse and pockets at a clip that had us both laughing and rushing to try to collect the bounty before someone noticed that the machine was on some sort of wild and mechanically flawed tear.
I also recall the hot summer night in 1963 that Reno, no longer a casino, but still a bone of contention with the Baptist minister in particular, burned. In the morning there were reports that the minister stood on the boardwalk as the flames rose in the sky and declared it was “the hand of God” that finally took it away. Maybe, but it was a very real human who was charged with arson.
Clowning around by the pier
So while there were plenty of detractors in town who disapproved of the casinos and gambling, my family liked to gamble. We always did it with a healthy respect for its dangers. My mother had a twenty dollar limit, whether in a casino or at one of the racetracks we frequented from time to time. My limit remains twenty dollars when I go to one of the Miami casinos, though it’s climbed a bit when I go to the races. I think I know more about the thoroughbreds than I used to. I don’t.
Whenever my dad’s older sister, younger brother and his wife and my cousin came to visit at the beach, we played poker for pennies. I still have an old cigar humidor that remains filled with my dad’s winnings.
So, while I do know that the casinos that created the lively atmosphere of my youth in Colonial Beach had their dark side, my experiences were entirely different, as were those of Sandra Conner Scroggs, whose family brought casinos and much of that boardwalk entertainment to town. Here’s how she remembers those days, when Colonial Beach gained a national reputation as Las Vegas on the Potomac, thanks to its appearance in an article in the Saturday Evening Post. I doubt we’re the only ones who remember it this way.
GAMBLING ON A DREAM:
Sandra Conner Scroggs
Colonial Beach residents had a love-hate relationship with the town’s gambling era in the 1950s. The minister at the town’s largest church preached against it. Businesses thrived because of it. Some complained that gambling destroyed families. Others made their livelihoods in the casinos along the boardwalk. And at the center of it all were the Conner brothers.
It was Delbert Conner who saw the possibilities when gambling was legalized in Maryland in 1949. He knew if he built casinos beyond the high-water mark in the Potomac River, they would sit in Maryland, making the slot machines legal under Maryland law. Some saw that as visionary. Others viewed it as trouble.
Sandy Conner and date, prom 1967
And even with the distance of time and fading memories of gambling’s brief heyday in Colonial Beach, there are still those who argue its merits then or debate the possibility of the return of that era in the future as casinos are once again being legalized in Maryland in certain off-track betting locations. Riverboat, built where the Reno and Monte Carlo casinos once stood before being burned, has one of those off-track betting licenses.
No one in town today, perhaps, is closer to the story of that time than Sandra Conner Scroggs, whose father, Paul, along with his brothers, Delbert and Dennis Conner, were at the heart of the town’s transformation into what the Saturday Evening Post described in one issue as “Las Vegas on the Potomac.”
The year-round population in town grew during that era to 2,400 or so. On weekends in summer, it swelled to quadruple that number—or even more by one estimate that put the number of gamblers, families and visitors on any given weekend at twenty thousand—cramming the town’s eleven small hotels, five motels, cottages, rooming houses and apartments with tourists who filled the restaurants, patronized businesses and jammed the boardwalk and the beaches to capacity.
Easter egg hunt at the Colonial Beach Hotel
“Uncle Delbert didn’t have children, but he loved little kids. He wanted things for them to do,” Sandra recalls. “He dressed up as Santa at Christmas and gave presents to the kids. He held an Easter egg hunt with lots of prize eggs to be found. The Conner kids were not allowed to participate. They did get to color hundreds of eggs for the event, but Uncle Delbert always colored the golden egg and hid that one himself.”
He created an amusement park with rides along the boardwalk and built the town pool. Along with Frances and James Karn, he worked with the Chamber of Commerce and organized the Potomac River Festival. They did baskets of food with turkeys for Thanksgiving and Christmas for any families in need.
“I thought my dad and my uncles were heroes,” Sandra says. And yet she adds, “There were people in town who wouldn’t let their kids play with me because of the gambling.” That resistance faded sometimes in summer, when she had free tickets for the rides and the pool to share with her friends.
For all the negative talk about the type of people drawn to town in that era, she remembers it very differently. “I grew up in the casinos [her family owned three of the six at the time]. I never felt in jeopardy. I went on the boardwalk and never felt threatened. Everyone looked out for you. They felt like family. The summer kids were wonderful. Getting to know them was like traveling the East Coast without leaving town.”
She hates that some
