VIRGINIA KELLY, Clinton's mother (1923-1994) - Hot Springs was so different. We had wide-open gambling, for one thing, and it was so wide open that it never occurred to me that it was illegal - it really didn't - until it came to a vote about whether we were going to legalize gambling or not. I never was so shocked.
There's an effort to clean it up later in the mid 1960s after Owney Madden dies, but in many respects it only goes underground. So for most of the time that Bill Clinton is a little boy, growing up in Hot Springs, Arkansas, this is an organized crime capital, in America. Really unlike any other in, in quality, in content. And, the striking thing about all of this is that he is not divorced from it. That his own family is quite intimately involved in it. His mother as we know from her own memoirs, frequented the track at Oaklawn, which was one of the centers of activity for the mob and was an almost nightly visitor to the clubs of Hot Springs. The Vapors being her favorite. And all of these clubs were fronts, you passed through a wonderful curtain discreetly put up, between the restaurant or whatever was out front, and into a gambling parlor that was befitting Hot Springs at its height and looked like Las Vegas or Reno or, the casinos of Europe, with roulette, with blackjack, with slot machines and all the rest. She frequented all of those with her husband, then Bill Clinton's stepfather, and Roger Clinton. He's very much a product of all of that.
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So Virginia is the parent. She's the dominant adult force and she's a very mixed bag indeed. She's something of a tart around Hot Springs. As I said earlier, she's always there at the nightclubs, she's frequenting the race track, she's rather addictive, a race track gambler, not a high roller but always there at the two dollar window.
Lol I feel like an idiot after that display of fascinating info. Thank you!