Mississippi Town Bets Its Future on New Riverboat Gambling Casinos : Economy: Tunica County is first in state to take advantage of new law. Residents hope for benefits in employment, business.

TUNICA, Miss. — This is not exactly the kind of place thought of as a destination resort. No, for the last 40 years, Tunica has been the kind of dead-in-the-water town that people want to get away from rather than journey to.

There is one stoplight, one motel with 12 rooms and one cabdriver. There is one doctor and one sit-down restaurant. There are, however, plenty of funeral homes. People come home, if not to live, at least to die in Tunica.

But life in one of the poorest counties in the nation is about to turn upside down. Legalized gambling is coming to Tunica, and whether craps and blackjack will ruin or save this little piece of forgotten Mississippi is as unknowable as the next card in the dealer’s deck.

Arrival of the casinos offers a glimpse of the frustration felt by much of rural America, which is watching its small communities dry up and blow away for lack of jobs. Tunica is hungry for salvation.

“The gamblers will change our little town, that’s for certain,” said Paul Battle, head of the county Board of Supervisors and a cotton farmer and catfish grower. “I don’t think it’s good, but we’re just too damn small and too damn poor to get what we need without them.”

From the air, in high summer, Tunica County is almost all cotton or soybeans, forest or swamp and, of course, Mississippi River. Besides work at the catfish-processing plant or the pillow-making factory, there are a few jobs on farms and in town and not much else.

It is sleepy and mostly peaceful here, and cheap to live. It is the kind of place where families feel interconnected, not for a few years, but through generations. It is a land where the blues came from, as did sharecropping.

“It’s a strange place,” William Russell, a local author, said of his hometown. “It’s never had any industry, never wanted any industry because it would compete with the farms for labor.”

Mississippi, like other states desperate for cash, voted in 1990 to allow casinos to operate along the Gulf Coast and the Mississippi, so long as the card dealing and crapshooting were done in casinos that float.

Tunica is the first county on the Mississippi to take advantage of the law, and a paddle-wheel casino, the Tunica Splash, is scheduled to open Sept. 1. A larger, $30-million riverboat gambling and resort operation, the Mississippi Grand, is to start in Tunica County next year, and two more boat operators are seeking licenses.

With the arrival of gambling boats, people here said they expect to see new shops, service stations, pawnshops, restaurants, bars and motels.

Before the casino people began to set up storefront offices and card-dealing schools downtown, residents said, it was unusual to see more than two or three strangers a day. After the casinos open for business, about 1.3 million strangers are expected annually.

“After all these years of scheming and waiting and plotting, finally there’s going to be money in Tunica,” Russell said. “That’s what people think. Even the Baptists have kept quiet about the gambling.”

Down by the river, lifelong resident Bard Selden looked down at the slip being dug for the Tunica Splash. A high levee and raised roads are planned to deal with annual spring floods when the Mississippi crawls out of its banks and reaches halfway up the cypress trees alongside. Now the site is mud and brown, funky water. But in about a month, a three-story paddle-wheel boat will arrive from Mobile, Ala., to tower above the trees.

“I don’t see a real downside to it,” Selden said. “It’s not like it’s a hazardous-waste incinerator, which is something else they were talking about bringing to Tunica. It doesn’t take land away from agriculture. It doesn’t pollute. It offers jobs. Tunica is my home. But I don’t see a downside.”

His wife, Wendlandt, expressed concern about an invasion of “sleazy strangers in gold chains.”

Bard Selden said, sure, gambling will change the county and the town. “But it’s been profoundly changed already by the mechanization of agriculture,” he said. “This will be the second great change this century.”

On Selden’s family farm, for example, almost 400 people lived and worked for his father in 1935. By the 1960s, four men could do all of the work.

Meanwhile, Tunica’s population has decreased from 22,000 to about 8,000 and continues to shrink.

“There are a small number of very wealthy people and lot of very poor people,” said John E. Carr of Fisher-Phillips-Arnold Inc., the Memphis firm that recently completed Tunica’s master plan. “The county is three-fourths black, and most of the people are very old or very young. Everybody else has moved away.”

Increased taxes and a cut of the winnings and admission fees could bring $7 million a year to the Tunica County government, whose annual budget is $2.8 million.

Casino officials promise to hire Tunica residents. But Paul Stevens, a dice pit manager for the Tunica Splash, said he is surprised how few of the students in his dealer’s school are from Tunica. In blackjack class, for instance, about one-sixth of the students were from Tunica. Most are from neighboring counties or nearby Memphis, and most of the student dealers are white.

In Tunica’s labor force are about 3,000 people, about 500 of whom are unemployed. Stevens said many of the unemployed probably will not meet the requirements for jobs as dealers--a high school diploma, drug testing and no felony convictions.

The jobs pay the $4.25 hourly minimum wage plus tips, which can be $3 to $10 an hour. This makes dealing cards far more lucrative than working in the catfish-processing plant or as a day laborer.