Cut the Deck and Deal : Leisure: Society and history have been flush with card players whose love of the game ranges from crazy eights to canasta.
Cheryl McDonald, a La Verne housewife and mother of two, was facing a family crisis. Her 9-year-old daughter, Julie, had turned into a Nintendo fiend.
“She’d eat liver and lima beans before ever giving up her joystick,” McDonald said.
But before running out to buy another software game that typically runs about $40, Cheryl spent $1.50 on a new deck of cards.
“I remember how much fun I had playing canasta and Crazy Eights as a girl,” she said. “I figured it was the technology and not the kids that were changing.”
After introducing her daughter to some simple card games each night after dinner, Julie’s conversion from video freak to card shark was faster than you can say “Go Fish.”
“It’s our new family pastime.” McDonald said.
Brad Johnson, a 34-year-old recruiter for an executive search firm in Calabasas, turned to cards for a different reason. A hot romance suddenly blew cold, and communication with members of the opposite sex seemed trivial and extraneous.
“Cards can talk to you in a way that people can’t,” said Johnson, who has since recovered, but still continues to play a friendly game of cards once a week.
Jockey Bill Shoemaker, whose sensational riding career will officially come to a close this February at Santa Anita in Arcadia, has been playing what is known as “Racetrack Rummy” for more than 40 years, usually between races.
“I may soon retire from racing,” Shoemaker said, “but I’ll never retire from playing cards.”
Another card fanatic is a high school teacher who preferred to remain nameless. “This could get me in trouble with some of the faculty here,” he said, “but I’ll take a deck of cards any day over Twain, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, who, by the way, were all expert card players.”
The teacher’s seeming disdain for literary genius may be viewed in a more charitable light when you consider there are 2,598,960 possible combinations for a five-card poker hand. In gin rummy, card experts say there are a possible 15,920,024,220 different hands. Even the most prolific author or playwright couldn’t claim such manifold meaning in his work.
“The cards are always different, and that’s what keeps me coming back to the table,” the teacher added.
That’s just aces with Ronald Rule, the 58-year-old chief executive officer of the United States Playing Card Co. in Cincinnati, which produces about 60 million decks of cards a year, or about 70% of all the cards made and sold in the United States.
Rule also noted that his company ships cards to 75 nations throughout the world. “Card playing has universal appeal,” Rule said, “with one card game or another suited to just about every type of person.”
Card playing seems to transcend more than continents. It reaches deep into the very roots of civilization, intermingling with much of the world’s history, literature, politics, science, finance, religion and superstition.
While the Chinese generally receive credit for the invention of playing cards in the 7th Century, a deck similar to the one in use today didn’t appear in Europe until the 14th Century, according to “Fireside Book of Cards” (edited by Oswald Jacoby and Albert Morehead; Simon & Schuster).
And literature provided by Margery Griffith, curator of the U.S. Playing Card Museum in Cincinnati, points out that the French, in the 15th Century, invented the 52-card deck, one card for each week of the year. The four 13-card suits represented both the four seasons and the 13 lunar months of the year, and the 365 spots or pips in a complete deck signified the days of the year.
But a deck of cards was more than just a pint-size almanac. Historians claim that the four suits represented the four classes of feudal society. Spades signified the military. Clubs symbolized agriculture. Diamonds represented the diamond-shaped tiles used by artisans. Hearts identified the clergy.
The French also chose the four kings of antiquity--David, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar and Charlemagne--to represent the King of Spades, Clubs, Diamonds and Hearts.
During the French Revolution, the court cards (kings, queens and jacks) were banished in the interest of egalitarianism. Ironically, with Napoleon’s downfall, the royal cards returned, and the little emperor spent his exile on St. Helena, where, it has been reported, he was an avid solitaire player.
Bill Severn in “Packs of Fun” (Van Rees Press, New York) explains that Columbus is credited with introducing cards to the New World, after which interest in the pasteboards spread like an open prairie fire. American Indians used cards of deerskin or sheepskin patterned after cards Spanish explorers left behind.
Colonists such as Benjamin Franklin not only played cards but also made them and sold them. He was among America’s first printers of playing cards and supplied them along with stationery right at the post office in Philadelphia where he was postmaster.
Of course, Americans still favored British imports until the notorious Stamp Act of 1765 almost doubled the price of a deck of cards. The dramatic protest in 1773 that led to the dumping of tea in Boston Harbor might have been dubbed the “Boston Card Party” had the valuable cargo on English ships that fateful night been cards instead of the Colonies’ favorite beverage.
The history of the United States is flush with powerful and charismatic card players. Among them, Thomas Jefferson is said to have turned to card playing at night to relax from the rigors of penning the Declaration of Independence. Union Gen. William Sherman reportedly defeated the defender of Atlanta, Gen. John Bell Hood, based on knowledge that the Confederate general was a daring bluffer in poker games at West Point. And finally, it’s been said that financier J. P. Morgan decided to buy stocks and support the market, thereby ending the Panic of 1907, after successfully concluding a game of Miss Mulligan, a two-deck version of solitaire.
War has perhaps provided the greatest opportunity to shuffle the cards. In 1942--again according to author Bill Severn--Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower called an impromptu bridge game with his top commanders upon learning that 800 Allied ships were fogbound off the coast of Africa, delaying the invasion of the continent.
As World War II went on, the U. S. Playing Card Co., at the request of the U.S. Government, began sending hundreds of decks of cards, with escape maps laminated inside, to American POWs in France and Germany.
Lloyd R. Shoemaker, one of a few surviving members of the top-secret Military Intelligence Service (MIS-X) project in World War II, recalled his initial contact with the company in a recent telephone interview from his home in Salem, Ore.: “I asked their president (Matthew A. Follman) to put maps inside the playing cards because the British were doing it, and they had the formula for the operation.
“We knew of at least 700 escapes from the camps, but we can’t be sure what percentage of those were due to our direct intervention,” Shoemaker said.
When the cards began arriving in the camps, specially designated POWs were advised via coded letters or BBC broadcasts to rip open all paper products to find the silk escape maps.
In his new book, “The Escape Factory,” scheduled for release in March, 1990, the former military intelligence agent notes that other attempts to smuggle escape aids, including those inside baseballs, table-tennis balls, cribbage boards and monopoly games, were less successful in countries with which the United States did not have mail service.
The U.S. Playing Card Co. was again pressed into service during the Vietnam War. In February, 1966, two lieutenants of Company C, 2nd Battalion, 35th Regiment, 25th Infantry Division, sent a letter requesting that the Cincinnati firm send 1,000 black aces of spades for their outfit to leave as “calling cards” following attacks on Viet Cong encampments.
They specifically requested the Bicycle brand because it also has a picture of a woman on it--often interpreted as a symbol of evil in the Far East. Appropriately, the lady depicted on the Bicycle black ace is the Statue of Freedom, illustrated to honor the same statue that can be seen on top of the U.S. Capitol in Washington.
“The ace was bad luck, and the woman was bad luck, and the two combined were double-trouble,” said Rule, who himself was a fighter pilot in the Korean War.
After contacting the U. S. Defense Department, and as soon as the decks were cleared, the U. S. Playing Card Co. shipped millions of the so-called “death cards” in special “tuck” cases labeled “Secret Weapon.”
History aside, cards are beckoning millions of Americans back to the table at a time when families don’t even sit down together to enjoy a simple meal anymore.
Wayne Wooden, a professor of sociology at California State University Polytechnic at Pomona, said it is the opportunity for human interaction that underscores the age-old fascination with cards.
“It encourages people to compete without direct confrontation,” said Wooden, a canasta and bridge player. “The competition is only important inasmuch as it provides the matrix for getting together.”
For the last 17 years, Vernon and Yvonne Dutt of Altadena, and Penny and George Crumpton of Pasadena, have built their friendship on a chummy card game each week. “That is until somebody gets bluffed out of their socks,” George Crumpton said.
Despite appearances of their “friendly” game, however, any number of irritating habits or annoying mannerisms can interrupt the pace or rhythm of play.
“I remember when Vern brought in a new player who constantly rattled his chips and bent the corners of his cards,” said Penny, a war bride who remembers playing whist in London bomb shelters during World War II.
In Pasadena, Bob Phillips’ Friday-night poker game is more akin to a bachelor party. “I wouldn’t go that far, but we do chug a few beers, munch down peanut butter pretzels, put on our grimiest T-shirts, tell some jokes and swap the same stories we’ve been laughing at for a hundred years,” Phillips said.
Every card player is not a homebody, however. Some prefer going to a professional card room or casino. There are six such clubs in the Los Angeles area.
At the Bicycle Club in Bell Gardens, visitors can practice any poker game for free under the tutelage of Eva Walder, who deals Wednesdays through Sundays from 2 to 10 p.m.
“I won’t send anybody out on the floor until I feel they’re absolutely ready,” said Walder, a native Hungarian who spent 1939 through 1945 in a German concentration camp.
Year after year, contract bridge ranks among the most popular of games among card players. The American Contract Bridge League includes more than 180,000 members, many of whom play at affiliated clubs throughout Southern California.
One such club is the Arcadia Bridge Center at 333 N. Santa Anita Ave., Arcadia. The 600 members range in skill from novice to life master, in age from 9 to 90.
“Every game is challenging, no matter what level of play,” said Art Gulbrandsen, 42, who has run the center for 18 years after getting hooked on the game in college. “It keeps you mentally sharp and involves basic skills of judgment.”
It’s also a humbling game.
“Some people catch on faster than others,” he said. “Amazingly, it’s not necessarily the smartest person.”
For details about other bridge clubs, interested players may contact the American Contract Bridge League, 2200 Democrat Road, Memphis, Tenn. 38116; telephone (901) 332-5586, or look in the Yellow Pages under Bridge Clubs.
Regardless of your taste in cards, remember that nearly all card games belong to one of three broad groups: those that call for putting cards together in sets and sequences; games in which high cards take tricks; and those in which the object is to get rid of cards held in the hand. Sometimes two or more are combined in a single game.
For the time being, Ronald Ashbrook, a patient at Huntington Memorial Hospital’s Rehabilitation Center, has become an enthusiastic player of “Kings in a Corner.” A popular version of solitaire, the game is used to help victims of stroke, head trauma and other neurological disorders rebuild their cognitive and number-sequencing skills.
“You may not always like the hand you’re dealt,” Ashbrook said, “but it’s important to play with what you’ve got.”