There Are Some Bets You Just Don’t Make

I watch and listen to a lot of political talk shows, and I heard a gentleman say the other day, “You just don’t bet on the election” in regards to the 2020 election. This statement sparked a memory about both of my parents and in particular, the 1980 election.
My parents were children of the Great Depression, both born in 1928, a year before the great stock market crash. My mother and her family, although they owned a bakery, still had it rough, but nothing in comparison to my father and his family. My father truly did live a hand to mouth existence as a young child well into his late teenage years.
Growing up as a child, he walked by an apple orchard on the way to school every day. One particular day, he overcome by hunger, he decided to climb the fence that barricaded the farm, went up an apple tree and ate apples until my father heard apple pickers approaching him and he jumped down from the tree, hightailed it out of the orchard and ran home. The problem was he got back much earlier than school was out and his mother asked him why he had come home early. He did not lie to her. He told her exactly what he had done, and to her credit, my grandmother did not punish or reprimand him. She sighed and said, “Well, I guess that’s a good thing because at least you will have eaten today.”
Because of the given circumstances to which he was born, my father became a hustler. He learned to play pool from his two older brothers and how to find a “mark” in any given pool hall to get what he would call WAM (walking around money). He also learned to play poker, and according to everyone I ever meet, was one of the best.
I remember waiting at home with my mother some nights and the phone would ring. It was my father. Mom and I would drive down to the Elks Lodge or the American Legion to pick him up. Mother, dressed in her nightgown and housecoat, would drive us to these establishments that always seemed to have some sort of secrecy about them. Mom would wait in the car as I would walk up to the door, ring the bell, and a voice from within the building would come on over an intercom. “Yeah, who is it?” and I would say, “It’s Billy Bob’s son” and a buzzer would sound and I would walk through the door to find my dad sitting at a dark panel wood bar. He would smell of Candian Club and cigarette smoke laughing out loud with all the people at the bar and I we would then walk outside to the car with mom waiting to take us home.
The moment we would get inside our house, mom would ask dad, “So, how’d you do?” and laughing like he did back at the bar he would empty the contents of his two front pockets, which would be full of change and wadded up dollar bills onto the kitchen table. Dad would go off to his room and go to get ready for bed while mom would sit and count the winnings from the night.
Many years later I asked my mother once, “Do you think dad has a gambling problem?” and she said, “Your father wins more than he loses, those who don’t are the ones with the problem.”
Other than gambling, my father had another past time: politics. Not running for office, but helping local politicians with their campaigns. He even had me at the tender age of 8 or 9 putting flyers on cars in grocery parking lots for a local mayoral election. Our yard would be decorated each and every election season with the names of potential Democratic candidates. Dad was a union organizer, and therefore, a headstrong democrat. In this time period down in Southern Illinois, that meant mom was too.
Mom had her gifts too, and her best one was that she knew how to make a dollar stretch. But you can only make what comes in stretch so far, and in the late 70’s her gifts were put to task, and this is why for the first time in her life, she decided she was going to vote differently than dad in the 1980 election and vote for the popular, charming, great communicator: Ronald Reagan.
Thus began the greatest poker game my father had ever played.
Dad would ante, “Reagan will be the death of labor.”
Mom would counter, “I see your death of labor and raise you Carter’s inflation.”
Dad had to up the bet, “But what about the unions?”
Mom would push in, “Are the unions going to pay our daughter’s tuition?”
Dad decided to call her what he thought was her bluff, “As your husband, I forbid you to vote for Reagan.”
Mom laid down her cards, “Once I close that voter booth curtain, I’ll vote however I want.” She then went outside and took all the election signs off the yard and threw them in the trash can.
Full house. Mom wins that hand, and my father is slowly losing his mind.
I remember thinking that this must be important to mom. I had never seen her stand up to dad like this before. Later, when dad asked me to pass out flyers for Carter, I asked if I could do the same for Reagan so that I did not have to pick sides between mom and dad. I thought his head was going to explode after such a request. And my father, who for years had read people like a book in games of chance, had no idea how to play his next hand against mom.

As my dad would say, she had his nuts in a vice.

As the election day grew closer and closer, dad got more and more desperate to convince mom to vote for Carter. Looking back, I guess dad did not want mom to “betray” him, and he did the unthinkable: he made what he would later admit to being a “sucker bet.” Dad bet $500 on Jimmy Carter to win the presidency and told mom that she had better not vote against the interest of the family.
It was at this moment I learned what the phrase, “deafening silence” meant.
My father, totally and completely misread my mother at that moment.
Mom, after the shock of such a declaration had faded, turned to my father and said, “Billy Bob, you’re a moron. You just don’t bet on an election.” At the time neither my father nor I knew what had just happened, but we both later realized that dad had turned my mother, who was a lifelong democrat up into that point, into a republican for the rest of her remaining years.
Mom died twenty years ago this past July. My father soon followed her 18 months later. And despite their differences in politics, they truly loved each other.
When I look back at this memory, I realize that I learned a valuable lesson from both of my parents: in life as well as in politics, there is no such thing as a sure bet.