Hawaiian Gardens shift manager Nancy Grout says it was the long ago phone call from a girlfriend that changed everything, taking her across the country and into a new life.
She was back home in Pittsburgh on a break from studies at a Miami fashion school on a day in the mid- 1970s when she got a call from the friend whose family had moved to Las Vegas.
"Her father had been a policeman in Pittsburgh," Nancy says, "and he went out to Las Vegas to be a security guard at the MGM which was then the new big place in town."
"I asked her what she's doing and she says she's dancing with Chubby Checker over here at Dirty Sally's."
"Doesn't that sound like fun?" the friend asks. And I go, 'Oh absolutely,' because she and I were both disco queens, you know, practicing our routines together and everything. She tells me what I should do is get on a plane and come on to Las Vegas."
Las Vegas ... that place where the parties seemed to go on forever.
No one had to twist Grout's arm. She got on the plane to Las Vegas, never looked back and poker had absolutely nothing to do with anything.
Not then, anyway.
"My parents used to play cards but their preference was canasta, stuff like that. Making the move was easy for me. I was an only child. My mother had died the year before and my father had remarried."
So she and her girlfriend hooked up, began sharing an apartment and doing the town with youthful enthusiasm.
"My friend was a keno runner at the Sands and knew everybody. She was friends with Wayne Newton," her tone suggesting that having the chance to stop by Wayne's dressing room for a little pre- or post-show chitchat helped open doors to a full social life.
"Las Vegas was a lot smaller then and everybody knew everybody ... You went in a restaurant, you could count on the maitre'd to take good care of you."
So one night she and her friend are walking through the Flamingo, passing the poker room and there's Johnny Moss, the legend-in-his-owntime poker pro who ran the room. He's sitting there during a slow moment, watching these two pretty woman passing him by.
The way Grout remembers it, "Johnny calls over to us, he says, 'So what are you two girls doing?' We stop to talk and upshot of it all was that Johnny says I should come to work at his place."
Which is what she did.
Her first position was as a shill. It was a job offering a close-up view of the ups and downs of the legendary Moss' legendary personality and the high end of the poker business as it was in the 1970s.
"When Johnny was winning he was a prince, but when he wasn't winning he had the temper of the devil, but all in all he was a great guy to work for. He took good care of us and after a while I became the cashier on the graveyard."
All the great names of poker were regulars at the Flamingo's tables then: "Doyle Brunson, Chip Reese, Eric Drache, Sid Wyman, they were all there.
"They'd do things like send me out on runs to McDonald's and other places for food, give me waaaay too much money and tell me to keep the change. I was feeling for a while like a girl who fell into a gold mine."
Her climb through the ranks took a big step forward on one of those nights when Moss was not getting dealt any winners and his mood was souring by the minute.
"Johnny had this, uh, thing," choosing her words carefully, "where he'd ask the dealers to, well, leave the room for a few days when they weren't dealing him any winners."
When the room had, figuratively speaking, reached the bottom of the barrel in terms of available dealers, someone looks around and wonders, "Okay, so whose gonna deal now?"
Moss looks in Grout's direction at the cashier's desk and says, "We'll let the little girl deal."
So they pull her out from behind the desk, put her in the box and, step by step, taught her how to deal poker to some of the best known names in the world of poker."
Pick up the cards this way, hold the deck this way, pitch the cards this way. Grout listened carefully and, one day at a time, one hand at a time became a poker dealer.
"That's how I learned, right then and there. I kept practicing at home."
Moss gave the matter some thought over time-this woman, his cashier suddenly becoming a poker dealer on a night when nothing was going right - and he said, "I don't think you should be dealing here because this crowd can be tough."
He said he'd find a place for her and he did, sending her over to the Stardust where she spent the next seven years, 1977 to 1984, when the time was suddenly right for another change in her life.
"At the Stardust they put me on a fifteen and thirty razz game and I discovered that could be a rough crowd, but I happened to know a lot of the guys there and that helped."
But other changes were to come.
As soon as she discovered that some of the dealers handling the small stud games at the front of the room were making "way more money" than she was, she set about finding herself a spot there and spent her last five years at the same Stardust poker table at the front of the room.
Grout left in 1984 as the Boyd Gaming Group was in the process of taking over after the previous owners of the casino lost their license. Boyd execs invited her to remain, but she decided to cast her fortune with the new Bicycle Club in Southern California.
A case of California dreaming or something like that, she thinks.
Grout moved to Hawaiian Gardens when it opened in 1997 and has been there since, not regretting a moment of the last 10-plus years.
"I think we had six tables and I was back to dealing when we opened in that small trailer on Dec. 17, 1997. I expect that this is the place I'll be retiring from." What makes the Gardens unique among the crowd of mostly bigger clubs?
"I think it is the casual, friendly easiness of the place," she says, giving the question some careful thought. "A lot of our customers, you might say, have grown up with us ... We really work hard at stressing the importance of customer service because it does make a difference.
"People have come to know that they can trust the staff and the management to protect their interests." And the big money giveaways also certainly help to keep the joint jumping, events like the $75,000 free-roll tournaments during January.
She has watched the poker business evolve in directions that seemed incomprehensible not so many years ago.
For instance: "The world is full of young players who spend a lot of time on the Internet, quickly developing skills that enable them to compete with the best and make a lot of easy money.
I'm not certain I like that." Why?
"They get the idea that life is too easy ... There are a lot of responsibilities that go with having money, and I don't think this is the sort of thing they learn over the Internet. Some of them have made so much so quickly ... I would like to see more emphasis on staying in school, working hard and doing all the things that encourage a healthy perspective."
Grout and her husband Michael-she met him when he was also a dealer at the Stardust-have two sons, ages 20 and 17.
Grout does not consider herself a serious player. Her focus is on the other side of the table. "I enjoy getting out for some of the women's tournaments but I'm not otherwise much of a player. Just never interested me like the business side of things."
