TUNICA, Miss., February 19 (UPI) -- If you call for an appointment with the mayor of Tunica, the gal on the phone is likely to say, "Just come on by the store. Bobby'll be here all morning."

"The store" would be Williams Furniture, a narrow century- old building in what the mayor calls "the prettiest little downtown in the whole Mississippi Delta." You'll probably find a head-in parking place directly out front because Main Street--the business part of it anyway--is only two blocks long. Then if you make your way past the souvenir display and angle around a few couches, easy chairs and what my mama called "dresser drawers," you'll find a little wood-paneled office overflowing with photos, certificates and memorabilia and a desk plate announcing "Bobby Williams, Mayor." Mayor Bobby will probably be on the phone, either ordering a dinette set or settling a sewage disposal problem.

Welcome to the most prosperous town in Mississippi.

Though you wouldn't know it if you were plopped down here by helicopter, you're at the very heart of the third most popular gambling destination in America, after Las Vegas and Atlantic City. Last year 12 million tourists made their way to Tunica County, and the vast majority of them gambled and partied at 10 huge casinos splayed out over the Mississippi River flood plain, then went home without ever realizing that there's an actual town called Tunica. After ten years of legalized gaming, the town is still just 1200 souls, more or less the same size it was in 1992, and there are still just 20 rooms at the Tunica Motel, and the Blue & White Restaurant on Highway 61 is still the favorite place in town to eat.

But now Tunica has a new city hall, a new fire station, new street signs, a new farmer's market building, three new schools, the largest indoor arena in Mississippi, and an 11-man police force that the mayor doesn't quite know what to do with. Just to the east the county is expanding the general-aviation airport so that three years from now 727's will be able to land there. And even though the real political power belongs to the county administrator, who oversees the millions in gaming taxes paid by ten casinos, the town of Tunica--the only incorporated town in the flat marshy county--has carved out 10 per cent of that money for its own needs. Nobody here pays property taxes, water bills max out at $5 a month, and everything else is free.

"Last fall we had a $7.4 million budget," says the mayor, an affable bear of a man who opened his store in 1959 and has run the town since 1993. "We can't expand because nobody wants to sell land around here. The haves have it and pretty much wanna keep what they got. Annexation doesn't make sense because, let's be realistic, who would wanna live here anyway? You can go up the road 30 miles to Memphis and have whatever you want."

When I ask the mayor if the town was known for anything before gambling was legalized, he says, "Why, sure we were. Don't you know we were famous as the poorest county in the nation?"

He says it good-naturedly, but in fact it's the first thing most Tunica County boosters tell you when they describe themselves. When the Tunica County Convention and Visitors Bureau announced its eight-month "Ten Years of Gaming" celebration for 2002, the third paragraph of the news release noted that they were once the poorest county in the nation. This dubious statistic is in virtually every brochure, even to the point of listing statistics about the 26 per cent unemployment rate in 1992 (compared to 5 per cent today), the hundreds of people who were on welfare, and especially the description of the county in 1985 as "America's Ethiopia."

It was Jesse Jackson who coined that phrase, and when you ask the mayor what he thinks of it, he says, "Oh well, I like Jesse Jackson okay. It's not what he's trying to do. It's the way he does things." The way he did it in this case was to get the attention of "60 Minutes," which sent a crew to Tunica and zeroed in on a neighborhood of shacks, shanties and shotgun houses called "Sugar Ditch." Then as now, Tunica was 70 per cent black, most of them employed as cotton pickers. When the cotton industry became mechanized in the sixties and seventies, all those people had been thrown out of work, and the families huddled together in substandard structures on the west side of town.

"Where is Sugar Ditch?" I ask the mayor.

"Right out here behind my store," he announces, motioning toward the land directly beyond where we're sitting. "It's not there anymore. It's a concrete culvert. The good thing about '60 Minutes' coming to town is that the government came in and built two housing projects. But it was right here along behind Main Street. Every Mississippi town had its Sugar Ditch. Ours just got singled out."

Everything changed for Tunica--which is pronounced "Toonika," by the way--when the Mississippi Legislature legalized gambling in 1990. Everyone expected the balmy Gulf Coast cities of Biloxi and Gulfport to be the main beneficiaries, but one of the first riverboat casinos to open its doors was a boat called Splash that tied up at the now legendary Mhoon Landing. Located on a bend of the Mississippi just five miles west of Tunica, Mhoon Landing is reached by winding along a two-lane road that runs past old cemeteries and vast flat treeless cotton fields.

From the first day Splash opened for business, in October of 1992, the road running through Tunica was crammed with traffic, most of it from Memphis, creating three-and-a-half-hour waits to get into the tiny casino. An industry was born. Within the year a second casino opened, the Lady Luck, and soon there were four riverboats docked at Mhoon Landing, all doing such a landslide business that the market drew the attention of the big Las Vegas gambling companies.

"When those boats went in out there," says the mayor, "this town was as busy as could be. People would come into the store and say 'I want that living room suit I saw in the window' and pay cash for it and leave. It was amazing. I didn't think I would have much business as a result of casinos being here, but I did."

For better or worse, the town of Tunica became a victim of its own success. With the casinos charging entrance fees, with road access primitive at best, and with 15 miles of riverfront land located closer to Memphis, it was inevitable that large operators would build away from Mhoon Landing. The big growth in the casino industry occurred in the mid-nineties, but it was all ten miles or more from the town of Tunica. One by one the little riverboats closed their doors. The last to go was Splash in 1995. Now you only need about 30 minutes to drive from Memphis on shiny new four-lane highways that go right up to the porte-cocheres of Vegas-style casinos that actually sit on barges but are so artfully disguised you will probably never even see the Mississippi River.

And today most visitors to Tunica have never heard of Mhoon Landing. When it's talked about at all, it's with nostalgia and a bit of a snicker. You get the impression that it was beloved partly because it was so tacky. The original Splash had only 20,000 feet of gaming space, which means it could be placed inside the atrium lobby of Sam's Town, which opened a few miles to the north in 1994 and is not even the largest of Tunica's ten casinos.

"Believe it or not, there are two guys looking to open again out at Mhoon Landing," says the mayor. "They have the old 'Jubilee' boat from Greenville out there now, and they've been piddlin' around with it for six months. They say they're gonna call it Splashback. Also there's a man from Memphis who says he's got investors for a Mhoon Landing casino called Solid Gold. So we'll see if it happens."

With luxury high rise hotels all over the northern part of the county--instead of the 20 rooms it had in 1992, the county now has 6,500--it's not very likely that Mhoon Landing will make a comeback, but the town wouldn't object if it did. "Back when we had all the traffic through town," says the mayor, "they named me Four-Way Williams because I put up all these four-way stop signs. We had to do it to slow people down when they came through town. Then, once the casinos went away, you couldn't take 'em out. We took a few of 'em down and folks were runnin' over each other. They said, 'Well, I expected that four-way to be there.' It was terrible. So we put 'em back up."

Mayor Williams also ended up with an 11-man police force, up from only four cops in 1992, and he was so reluctant to fire anybody that he decided to just expand their duties. "We have a lot of elderly people here," says the mayor, "so if they need a light bulb changed, we'll send a policeman over there to do it. When people go out of town, we'll pick up your newspapers for you. If it snows, we'll go to the post office for people who can't get out, do your shopping for you. I mean, we don't do it all day long."

Meanwhile, the town still does get a few tourists who get tired of gambling and make the ten-mile drive to shop in Tunica's antiques stores or sample its down-home cafes. "But small-town stores like mine," says the mayor, "are becoming a thing of the past. I had a good business for a long time--better than now. But now the people that live here can afford better vehicles. They used to be limited to trading at home. Now they can shop anywhere. I'm 62 years old, and a lot of us who were here in the sixties and seventies are getting ready to retire. But there's really no one to take our place. None of my children wanna take my business. They see how I work six days a week, and they want something easier."

Mayor Williams thinks it's definitely possible that Mhoon Landing could get cranked up again--"as long as they let people win." (Tunica is already famous for its slots wars, with at least three casinos advertising 98 per cent payback on slot machines.) "In Mississippi a lot of folks like to go to a small casino where they feel comfortable. We're not looking to get all the damn business. We would be more like the little casino to the south of us in Lula, which is all Arkansas business. People drive over the bridge down there and that's the only place they play. It's a different atmosphere--a middle class crowd. A lot of these big casinos cater too much to people. A lot of these people from Memphis just come down here to sit in the bar and get free beer, booze it up, hit on the women. A lotta people don't need to be there. They don't do that on the Gulf coast. A lot of the problems we have is caused by the riffraff."

Of course, it's better to have riffraff in the casinos than to have it on the streets of the now squeaky-clean Tunica.

I ask the mayor if Jesse Jackson ever came back after Sugar Ditch was cleaned up.

"Yes he did, as a matter of fact. He came back around '96 or '97. He had these two big buses he travels in, but there were only about six people on each bus. And I walked him down the alley, showed him what we had. He looked around at what we'd done and he told me 'It looks like you got it goin' on.' So I figure if Jesse Jackson said that to me, I can take it to the bank. If Jesse Jackson tells you you got it goin' on, you know he'd tell you if you didn't. So I guess I've got it goin' on."

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