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10 category 4 mini-casino licenses are expected to generate up to $100 million plus additional tax revenue. Sean Heisey, York Daily Record

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How are you going to keep them down on the farm after they've seen the bright lights of Yoe?(Photo: Mike Argento, York Daily Record)Buy Photo

At one time, Las Vegas wasn't Las Vegas. 

It was a crossroads in the middle of the desert, a small town that served as a kind of trading post and stopover for the hearty souls working their way across the continent to get to California, or trying to get to California before being trapped in a blizzard in the mountains and having to subsist by eating Cousin Larry.

There wasn't much there. And then, the Hoover Dam was built, and the people building it needed someplace to go to lose all of their hard-earned money and the mob moved in and voila, Vegas became Vegas. (One of the weird ironies of Vegas is that it is a city built on vice that was financed, in large part, by Mormons, people who, I remind you, sometimes don't even drink Coke.) 

Which brings us to Yoe. 

Yoe, in case you've never been there, or driven through, or even know that it exists, is a small town in the southeastern part of York County, a kind of crossroads that people from Dallastown pass through on their way to the Sheetz on Cape Horn Road. The entire borough covers .2 square miles and has a population just north of 1,000. 

There isn't lot in Yoe, businesswise. The House of Windsor Cigar factory is just outside of town. In town, there's an auto parts store, a barber shop, a car lot and not a whole lot more. It's mostly residential with small houses on narrow streets. The most prominent building in town is the fire hall. 

So it came as kind of a surprise that when the state announced it had decided to grant a permit for a mini-casino, it had selected Yoe, kind of. That was the initial report. It turned out that Yoe was the center of the area that could get the casino, an area that includes much of York County.

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Besides, Yoe opted out of the casino business, the borough apparently not interested in becoming the Las Vegas of southern York County, which is too bad, because Yoe Vegas has a pretty nice ring to it. 

It would be pretty cool to have a replica of the Eiffel Tower in Yoe just like the one in Vegas. And it would certainly liven things up in town. It would be good for business. Pawn shops and payday loan joints would spring up. That place where you can sell your plasma would open a branch across the street. The place would have some class. They could get Frank Sinatra Jr. to do shows once a month, you know, if he weren't dead.  

It would have put Yoe on the map. Well, I mean, Yoe is technically on the map – you can look it up on Google maps and everything – but what I mean is that Yoe would throw off the shackles of small-town life and turn into the sort of paradise that was, say, Atlantic City before our current president ran every casino he put his fingers on into bankruptcy. (I ask, once more, just how do you go bankrupt running a casino?) 

Yoe would have kicked some serious booty.  

That wasn't quite lost on some of the people I spoke to in Yoe. (Yoeians, I guess?) 

I stopped in at the barber shop, and the barber didn't have much to say about it. That's not quite fair. He didn't want to talk about it, probably too upset at the missed opportunity to turn Yoe into a miniature Sin City. 

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With the news that York County was approved for a mini-casino - and with much of southern York County legally open to the idea - what do residents of the area think? Anthony J. Machcinski, York Daily Record

 

So I went around the corner to the auto parts store – Yoe Parts – and talked to a guy who works there, John Shull. He said his wife heard the news and assumed that Yoe was getting a casino and mentioned it to him. His response? "They don't have anywhere to put it." 

And that's kind of true. Yoe doesn't have a lot of wide open spaces. It has a couple of parks and a ballfield, but the town wasn't going to give up its parks. It could have annexed House of Windsor and put the casino in the factory. They wouldn't even have to change the sign. House of Windsor would be a pretty good name for casino. Classy. 

Dave Landis, co-owner of the store, said the first thing he thought when he heard the news was that the casino people could "buy us out." They could renovate the building, or tear it down, or do whatever they wanted, he said, "if the price was right." 

Now, that's the spirit. 

He knew, though, it was too good to be true. "Most people don't even know where Yoe is," he said.  

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And how Yoe was singled out as the center of the area that could possibly get a casino is a mystery. Did someone in Harrisburg look at a map, see Yoe and think it would be kind of amusing in a "Rocky" kind of way to get people to talk about Yoe? 

Anyway, as I talked to people, I got the idea that people in Yoe weren't too upset about not partaking in the casino bonanza. It's a nice quiet town. Nothing very terrible ever seems to happen there. You don't have to worry about your dad walking over to the casino and blowing his Social Security check at the blackjack tables. 

Who knows where Penn National is going to put it. And who knows whether the company will even build one. The company sued the state over the mini-casinos, asserting that that law creating them was unconstitutional and worried that they would cannibalize business at their Hollywood Casino up above Harrisburg. And now, the same company won the right to build a mini-casino. 

 Kind of weird. But hey, what do I know about the casino business? 

All I do know is that Yoe Vegas does have a nice ring to it. What happens in Yoe, stays in Yoe. 

Reach Mike Argento at 717-771-2046 or at  This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . 

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