![]() ![]() “I thought, ‘I don’t know anyone here, but I know how to gamble,’” she says. So she sought solace in the casino near the dental lab where she worked as a ceramist making teeth. When he headed out to sea, she found herself alone in places where she did not know anyone. Louis Park, married a navy man who was transferred to Virginia, Washington, and South Dakota. “There was a lot of action, but I didn’t have to associate with anyone.” When her boyfriend died unexpectedly in 1996, the casino provided comfort for her grief and also relief from the stress of working two jobs to make ends meet. The casino started as a place to go playing the slots gave her something to do. “You don’t think it will happen to you,” she says. She’s certainly not what you’d expect of a gambling addict. These days, dressed in a robin’s egg sweatshirt and jeans, her blue-rimmed glasses pushed back on top of her brown hair, Larson, 56, looks like any number of middle-aged Minnesota women you see sipping coffee at Caribou or shopping at Target. “It was enough to buy food for me and my daughter,” she recalls. She ended up staying all night but left with only a modest profit. The single mother had gone in with $10 and fed quarters into a slot machine, which continued to issue small jackpots that kept her playing for hours. ![]() ![]() Not long after Mystic Lake Casino opened in 1992, Barb Larson* had a bad night with the slots. ![]()
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