WAGERING ISN'T EVIL, IT'S RECREATION.

Byline: Van Gordon Sauter

IT was an irresistible, lavish beacon of chance, a thoroughly illegal but deliciously accessible nightclub-casino owned by the Cleveland mob, perched on an unlikely hill in northern Kentucky.

The card players and crapshooters, rakish in their sharply tailored Hickey Freeman suits, pondered their hands and threw the dice with casual authority. Over in the nightclub, the dressed-to-the-nines lady friends patiently nursed their 7-7s and Chesterfields as they waited for the men to get back just in time to watch Ted Lewis bring down the house with ``Me and My Shadow.''

Uncle Sol, who ``owned'' the football and basketball pool concession in a nearby county, would occasionally take me along on his regular gaming excursions and sneak me into a service area just off the casino where I could observe the action. My mother and aunt, who never missed a visit by Lewis or Sophie Tucker, expressed mild disapproval at my exposure to such morally dubious activity. Thankfully, my uncle considered such knowledge critical to a young boy's education.

At that age, who could perceive any downside to gaming? You certainly couldn't identify a loser in that room. Never a gasp of shock or a look of horror at those tables. And in the parking lot, the spiffy Buick convertibles and Cadillac sedans hinted at gracious homes with swimming pools and maids. There were, of course hushed stories of ``foolish'' gamblers. Of river-bottom farms and thoroughbred stallions changing hands over crippling chits, of country club memberships being surrendered to the dismay of children denied access to swimming and tennis lessons. One even recalls hearing of a sobbing debtor taken down to the riverbank where his right hand was slammed in a car door as a lesson for other deadbeats.

But in the glitz of the great casino, in the midst of men who actually flew to Las Vegas once or twice a year, who claimed to have chatted with Virginia Hill or George Raft, such stories had little traction. Casino gambling was far too swell and sophisticated for that. It might happen to those haberdashers or plumbers who bet the shop in all-night poker games at the Elks, but not here, in the casino with this debonair crowd.

How times have changed.

I gamble - occasionally and ineptly, a sure embarrassment to Uncle Sol's memory - in a delightfully seedy casino deep in the Nevada desert, far from Vegas and Reno. The cowboys and gold miners, along with seasonal snowbirds from Idaho and Montana, spend hours wandering from the slots to the tables, watching their little stakes surge forward and pare back, but inevitably dwindle to the point where hope (just for that evening, of course) is lost.

Casino gambling and card rooms have surged out of Las Vegas and Atlantic City, beyond the rogue gambling dens in small cities with corrupt sheriffs. The contemporary casinos may have the panache of a stock-car track in Amarillo, but they seem to be everywhere, like convenience stores. Even those dreadful floating casinos, which convey the ambience of a Greyhound bus station with life jackets, seem to be clogging the nation's waterways. It's all flashier than bingo but with younger demographics and better ventilation.

Declasse or not, the citizenry loves those casinos.

Dangerous for society? Well, everyone knows that Bill Clinton would never have heard of Ken Starr if his sense of the word stud related to poker games.

It's too late for the moralists to fume and flinty clerics to threaten sulfur and brimstone over gambling in our society. No one pays any attention to those jeremiads. The real people get it. It's not gambling, it's recreation. More expensive than television, for sure, but certainly more interactive. And it's communal. Big room filled with people and cheerful sounds. If the do-gooders want some compelling missions, harangue the families running up the credit card debt at the mall. Or yuppies with no retirement programs. Or three-button suit types who leveraged the house to leverage the stock market, just before the big correction.

Leave the people in the casinos alone. They know the rules. They're not going to get their hands crushed in some car door by a beefy debt collector in a sweaty Hawaiian shirt. How then could they ever pull the levers on all those quarter slots?