Silvio Petricciani - University of Nevada, Reno

Background, Early Life and Education
15
course you’d go to a drive-in after the dance
and have a hamburger and a milkshake or
whatever. It was a lot of fun, really was. We
enjoyed it and were all good kids.
We had our ups and downs, but nothing
as to what children enjoy today and not
one twentieth as costly as a kid goes out
today and a twenty dollar bill doesn’t last
the evening. And really there were no such
things as pot parties and different parties at
different children’s homes because the home
was more or less of a place where the family
stayed together. And kids didn’t wait for the
parents to leave town or something, so they
could throw a big party in their house and
all that kind of stuff. Who would dare? Well,
in the first place our parents would never
leave us home, either we went with them or
we stayed with somebody else. I believe that
today parents are not as strict as they should
be because children like to be told what to
do, what they can do and what they can’t do.
And when they’re given a free rein, I think it
rubs them the wrong way because they feel
ignored. And I sincerely believe this from the
fact that we grew up the way we did. And we
married and had our families, and we had a
family life. And so many children today don’t
have that. They grow up, they live with each
other, and to me that still rubs me the wrong
way. I don’t think that’s the way the good
Lord intended us to live our lives. I mean the
sanctity of marriage still holds something to
me that it possibly doesn’t to other people,
but that’s the way it was meant to be. And
you can change it as much as you want, but
I think you see now an influx of children
or the whole community going back to the
religious side of life. I find it so. Of course, I
happen to be Catholic, but if you’ll go to your
churches I think you’ll find an influx of people
that have gone back to religion. They’ve seen
the other side of it, and someplace along the
line—of course I’m expounding on something
here that has nothing to do with what we’re
talking about—but they’ve seen the other side
of life and someplace along the line, they’ve
lost their self-respect. And so when you lose
your self-respect you are not a whole human
being any more; then you must turn back
to— either turn back or seek something that
is going to help you. And the older people
turn to their religion, and the younger people
probably turn to religion to find a new way
of life. Psychologically I think it’s having its
impact. don’t know whether you’ve noticed
it or not, if you’ve given it any thought at all.
Anyway, and again I say as far as the
gaming business is concerned, it took me a
long time to understand why if you went out of
the state or anything—and I was always proud
of being in the gaming business because it’s
the only life I knew, and it was a good business.
And like I say, my dad conducted it on the
square, and the only gaming that I knew was
gaming on the square, so consequently I was
proud of it. But if you left the state and went
someplace and told somebody you were in
the gaining business, they kind of shunned
you, you know. They looked at you like you
were a hoodlum or a character or something,
and it took me a long time to accept this from
people who outwardly tried to show you that
they were holier than thou; and yet if the
truth were known, chances are people like my
dad and the people that were in the gaming
business were probably much better people
than people that shunned them. Because who
are they to judge, really, another person and
their way of life or what they did for a living as
long as they didn’t steal from somebody, you
know, or cheat somebody out of something?
Then from there I went to work in my
dad’s slot machine shop which was in Lincoln
Alley over in the old Golden Hotel building.
And I started to learn the slot machine