The Casino that Lutes Built

Where the game is DOMINOES Text by Sam Negri Photographs by Edward McCain

A stone's throw from the Colorado River in Yuma, four men sit at a small table in a barn-size restaurant. A blue thread of smoke rises from Blackie Landry's cigar and collects in the green lampshade above the table. Blackie tips his cream-colored Stetson back on his head, reaches for a domino, and tosses it to the middle of the table. Red Logan throws down another. Dave Fitzpatrick plucks his cigarette from his mouth, rolls his thick fingers into a fist, and knocks on the table twice, his way of saying, "I pass."

It is 10:00 A.M. in Lutes Casino, an old haunt that Yuma locals have frequented since the 1920s, and which tourists have recently discovered.

On weekdays, the dominoes players arrive about midmorning. They buy a cup of coffee and slowly wander over to the two tables closest to the door. During the ensuing hours, few words are exchanged. Their attention remains focused on the domino tiles slapping the table one by one.

Blackie, Red, Sarge, Mr. San Luis, Ollie the tree trimmer, Swede, and Zig - they know they're part of a vanishing breed of serious dominoes players: a cliquish and somewhat superstitious collection of middle-aged and older men. Red Logan, who is 79, remembers one man who stopped playing because so many of the other players had died within a three-month period.

"He just got scared," Red says.

That didn't stop the others, though, for as Agatha Christie observed in The ABC Murders, playing dominoes is addictive: "People go mad about it," she wrote. "They'll play for hours."

Which is precisely what they do in Lutes Casino, the only place in Arizona where you can still get into a serious game on a regular basis.

Although Lutes is called a casino, there hasn't been any gambling there in decades, not since it was an unregulated activity. Lutes is basically a beer and hamburger joint where some patrons shoot pool and some play dominoes, but many Yumans will tell you it is far more than that.

"It's the melting pot of Old Yuma," says owner Bob Lutes. "All the school reunions are held here. This is where all the old-timers are."

In recent years, it also has become the repository for the objects old-timers could not keep at home or possessions that their wives would not allow in the house.

When a local insurance man came home from a hunting trip with a huge elk, he had the head mounted and hoped to put it on a wall in his home. His wife objected, and it ended up at Lutes, his home away from home. A javelina trophy met a similar fate. A Yuma lawyer brought it to Bob Lutes, who put it wearing a Lutes Casino baseball cap on a wall. A 300-pound sea bass, considered offensive on a living-room wall, now has a home suspended above a pool table in Lutes, where it is largely ignored.

Even widows have acknowledged the special place that Lutes, and especially the dominoes tables, have had in their lives. Jimmy Ray was a regular at Lutes until his death a couple of years ago. After his funeral, his wife sent a black satin wreath "In Memory of Jimmy Ray" to the casino. Lutes mounted it on the wall behind one of the ta-bles where the dominoes players spend their time.

He owns Lutes Casino with his Bbrother, Bill, and sister, Nancy. Their father had owned it before they took it over in 1960.

At the turn of the century, the two-story building was known as the New York Store. The first floor was a general store; the second, was the Central Hotel. W.E. (Pop) McGraw bought the building in 1920 and changed the store's name to Casino Billiard Parlor. Among other things, he brought in pool tables and slot machines. Walter Weatherford bought the place in 1945 and a year later sold it to a gambler named Clark (Cocky) Powers. When Powers decided to buy the place, he was a little short of cash, so he went to

R.H. Lutes, Bob Lutes' father, and asked for a loan. The elder Lutes was the justice of the peace in Yuma, but he also had a finger in several other pies around town. He loaned Cocky Powers the $10,000 he needed to close the deal, but later Powers fell on hard times and offered to turn the business over to Lutes as repayment on his debt. Voila! Lutes Casino was born.

It was the elder Lutes who introduced the dominoes games as well as the hamburgers and beer. He kept the pool tables, too, but when gambling became an issue of state regulation, the slot machines vanished. Not the dominoes, however. The locals will tell you they can take or leave a Lutes hamburger, but there is no duplicating Lutes' fame as the state's only unchallenged dominoes parlor.

Bob Lutes has a tolerant atti-tude toward the men at the dominoes tables. In fact, he deliberately set aside tables just inside the entrance for the characters who brood over their "rocks" (domino tiles) for hours at a time. Because the players generate very little in the way of cash, Lutes' tolerance may appear unwise from a business standpoint. But Lutes likes his dominoes players.

"They add color to the place," he says, though a glance around the interior indicates that if anything is lacking, it certainly is not atmosphere. A sign hanging in the middle of the room declares: "It may look like a dump, but everybody's friendly."

Lutes Casino has been evolving for nearly 50 years, and a quickstudy of the pressed-tin ceiling and cluttered walls reveals that evolution can go in many different directions.

Protruding from the ceiling, for example, is a wooden leg with a boot on it. It is decorative, in a strange sort of way, but functional, too, as Lutes explains: "There was a hole in the ceiling, see? Well, in 1975, we had our first 'Leave it at Lutes Festival,' in which various artists around town came and left something here. This one guy left a wooden leg. I put a boot on it and put it in the hole in the ceiling. Oh, yeah, did I tell you I make my own tacos and hot sauce?"

That's the way Bob Lutes talks. It's also the way he decorates. Look at his walls. Years ago, when he was a student at the University of Arizona, he collected all kinds of posters. Now they're displayed in Lutes Casino: George Washington is there with George Bernard Shaw, Marilyn Monroe, and Humphrey Bogart; Geronimo's mug is not far from that of Carl Sandburg, who is not far from Laurel and Hardy.

Bob Lutes has a weakness for anything old and unusual. That's why a pretzel-shaped operating-room lamp was rescued from a county hospital that was being demolished. The lamp now hangs over a pool table.

There's also a huge and very old Signal Gas sign as well as an old Yuma fire-alarm box, not to mention a couple of old telephone poles, their wires strung across the room between ceramic insulators.

In a way, Lutes considers his dominoes players a part of the decor, too.

"Most of them are old guys, and it's like this is the last stopping place for them," he says. "They're all characters. Dominoes is their whole social life. They're here from the time I open to the time I close. They're pretty cantankerous. They're all real good friends, but, when they're playing, they cuss each other out and are real rude to each other.

"It's true that they don't spend much money. They'll just buy coffee once in a while. It's also true that you could build an ashtray around them, and they'd still use the floor, but I don't mind them. They're nice men, and people enjoy watching them play."

Do you want to join the game at Lutes? Do your homework first. The owner says there's more skill to playing dominoes than would seem obvious, but new talent is not unwelcome.

"If somebody new came in, and he was a good player, the old guys would know right away," Bob Lutes says. "They wouldn't mind."

Dave Fitzpatrick says he started playing when he went through a period of unemployment in 1991. He stood around the tables and watched.

"It took me a couple of months to figure out what they were doing," he says. "They don't communicate much, and they don't want to tell anything."

Which is not to say they are always reticent. Arguments do occur, but it's hard to predict what the trigger will be. A few years ago, one of the old-timers at the dominoes table tells me, there was an ongoing dispute over one of the posters.

"That one up there we have arguments about that one sometimes. Nobody knows whether that's Marlene Dietrich or what's the other one? Greta Garbo."

If that sticky question comes up the next time you're in Yuma, play it safe: shrug.

Tucson-based Sam Negri has been visiting Yuma and Lutes Casino for 20 years, but he admits he's never had the courage to try his luck at the dominoes tables.

This was Edward McCain's first visit to Lutes, and he had a great time. However, he still can't play dominoes the way the regulars do.