Bus Makes Rollickin’ Run for the Border : Tours: With Ann Williams as your hostess, the ride to Stateline is at least half the fun. One passenger hasn’t missed a trip since 1979.

Earl and Margie Nelson own the business. But Ann Williams owns the bus.

“Check it out,” yells Ann as the Wednesday morning bus rolls toward the freeway. Music plays and she shakes her bootie in the narrow aisle.

“Check it out!” She turns her back to the riders, wiggles in her tight purple pants and yells it again: “CHECK IT OUT!”

Frankly, the riders don’t have a choice.

Ann is the hostess for today’s Maple Leaf Tours bus to Nevada. She’s a bartender by profession, but on Mondays and Wednesdays she keeps a busload of people in stitches with her act in the aisle.

“Would you like a piece of steak?” she asks sweetly. “It’s prime rib.” She is holding a plastic bag full of homemade peanut butter crackers. And she howls at her joke.

This bus is bound for casinos, but not the ones in Las Vegas or Laughlin. This one goes no farther than the California-Nevada state line.

“It’s just too hard getting in and out of Vegas,” says Earl Nelson, 58, a retired RTD driver whose 12-year-old bus company caters to the state-line turnaround crowd. “They’re set up for us better at Stateline.” Once a month, though, he makes the trek all the way to Sin City.

“Everybody wants to get on this bus because she is such a live wire,” says Margie Nelson as she watches Ann dance. It’s true. Considering the sun has been up for less than 30 minutes, the crowd is indecently jovial.

There’s L.C. Burklui, 78, who leaves his troubles in Los Angeles once a week. Jumping up to dance with Ann, he swivels his hips, flicking his upper dentures in and out of his mouth as he shimmies.

There’s Eva Robinson, 79, who rode the very first Maple Leaf Bus in 1979 and hasn’t missed a week yet.

There’s Ruby Davis, who used to ride the bus three times a week but now is down to three times a month. Ruby will never gamble the rent, she says, although she just might postpone the electric bill a little while.

There are two off-duty Maple Leaf bus drivers, Margie’s son, Gregory Smith, and her brother, Billy Cyiark.

There’s even a pastor among the 28 passengers--but he wouldn’t be photographed and wouldn’t be interviewed.

“There are no strangers on my bus,” says Margie, 58, who fell in love with Earl after going to work for him on his first bus. (Now she’s the company vice president.) “We’re all family here. Everyone makes friends. We’ve had marriages, birthday parties, baby showers, even a divorce. We are a family.”

Maple Leaf customers pay either $7 or $12 (weekend) per trip, although some, such as Eva Robinson, have been riding for so long they’ve qualified for free lifetime trips. For two weeks every December, the Nelsons don’t charge fares at all.

Some regulars are so enthusiastic, says Margie, that they take the Friday evening bus to Stateline, which returns at 11 a.m. Saturday, and are back on the bus seven hours later for the very next trip.

The state-line casinos straddle Interstate 15 in two spots, about 250 miles or four hours by bus from Los Angeles. Just over the border are Whiskey Pete’s and the Primadonna, joined by a light rail that arcs over the freeway. About 12 miles closer to Las Vegas, in Jean, the oversized signs of the Gold Strike and Nevada Landing pop out of the barren landscape.

These casinos don’t require the bus riders to play for any set length of time the way some Las Vegas houses do. They don’t have to. Unless you enjoy strolling in the desert, there’s nowhere else to go.

Lonnie Herron is at the wheel of the Maple Leaf bus today. He’s a smooth-talking bachelor who keeps Ann Williams revved up with soulful cassettes of Luther Vandross and Patti La Belle. He has souped up the recordings with his own silky voice, purring sweet nothings Barry White-style over the music: “Yes, baby. Oooh, you know you do, baby.”

Herron delivers a gentle lecture just before he pulls up to the Gold Strike casino:

“Let me just say if any of you nice people win, please don’t give it back. So often you win $500 or $1,000 and you give it all back. And that is soooo dumb.”

At the casino, the riders disperse. Two hours later, Margie and her crew meet for lunch. The casino, normally ajangle with the clatter of money dropping from slot machines, is eerily quiet.

“Listen,” someone says. “Nothing going on.”

“They must have tightened up the machines.”

This will be the operating theory on the way home too, because for some awful reason, the gods of gambling were hoarding all offerings. Today, everybody goes home lighter.

It’s not always that way. Margie hit $4,000 on the dollar slots before she’d even played $20 last month. And a couple of weeks ago, she hit another $1,200. But today, she just shakes her head and says: “Don’t ask.”

A 16-hour turnaround is a more manageable trip than the 24-hour variety. Since the buses leave at 7 a.m. and return at 11 p.m. on the same day, fatigue is not part of the equation.

And as many players attest, you can lose just as much money in eight hours as you can in 12.

Trust them. They know.