By Cathy Douglass-Wren

  “Put down the $10!”  The frenzied friend, having realized that the blackjack deck at Harold’s Reno casino was “hot,” whispered frantically into Glenn Markoe’s ear.  The future curator at the Cincinnati Art Museum of both Classical and Near Eastern Art and also Art of Africa and the Americas, then a Ph.D student at UC Berkeley, was bewildered.  As a believer in the Socratic method, the frenzied friend knew that only by Glenn laying down the bet and experiencing success would he really appreciate the beauty of the blackjack system.

“Glenn, bet the $10!”  Still bewildered, Glenn reached over and laid down the cash on an empty rectangle on the blackjack table.  

Glenn was new to the tables and didn’t wait for both cards to be dealt before peeking.   An Ace.  The dealer gave him his second card.  A Jack.  Glenn Markoe had been dealt a blackjack!  The dealer paid him $15 for his $10 bet.  That was to be his one and only bet on that 1971 trip of the University of California Jazz Ensembles to the Reno Jazz Festival.  In any case, Glenn Markoe was now a believer. 

The no-longer-frenzied friend, Les Golden, a trumpet player and jazz vocalist, had been one of the founders of the University of California Jazz Ensembles as a graduate student at Berkeley in astronomy.  Markoe was a French horn player in the group. 

Growing up in Oak Park, Illinois, a suburb west of Chicago, Golden, his twin brother, and their friends had played low stakes poker games in the Golden family home recreation room.  It wasn’t until decades later that Golden, preparing for that first trip to Reno and the jazz festival, discovered Edward Thorp’s best-selling book on blackjack strategy, Beat the Dealer, at legendary Moe’s Bookstore on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley.  He mastered the techniques, secure that he was not a gambler but a businessman who had learned “card counting,” a sure-fire system for beating the casinos at blackjack.

During his remaining time at Berkeley, Golden made monthly trips to Reno to supplement the stipend he received as a research assistant in the astronomy department and the earnings he made both from his jazz quintet playing for parties and weddings and as a stand-up comic in San Francisco clubs. 

Ph.D in hand, he embarked on an academic career, writing papers on the structure of the universe, the nature of the subsurface soil of the planet Mercury, and giving lectures on the possible shapes of extraterrestrials to children and adult audiences, professional meetings, and as a cruise ship lecturer.  His first position, at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, enabled him to continue his business trips to Las Vegas, but when he received a professor position at the University of Illinois at Chicago those trips became increasingly infrequent.

A few decades later, Golden, having retired as a professor, now pondered his future.  He had acquired a second career, as an actor, and had had sufficient success to have earned a pension from his work in TV, radio, film, stage, and commercials.  He had no yearning to continue.  He had also become a fervent environmentalist and animal welfare advocate, but that didn’t pay the bills.

The columnist

Remembering those trips to Reno and Las Vegas, and knowing that riverboat gambling had become a large industry in Illinois, Golden queried newspapers in towns in Illinois that were home to riverboat casinos to become a gambling columnist.  He was referred to Lyceum Publishing in London, which was embarking on a new glossy print magazine, Gambling.com.  Golden was accepted as a columnist, and would end up writing for five different gambling magazines, writing columns and developing his own systems for roulette and blackjack, as well as writing columns on craps.  The main focus was blackjack.  One of the magazines created a graphic to accompany his columns, “Count on Les.”

Edward Thorp, the author of Beat the Dealer, had by now become a hero to Golden.  Thorp had grown up in Chicago, only two miles from Golden’s family home in Oak Park.  He had been a professor at MIT, where Golden’s twin brother had gone to college.  The more knowledgeable Golden became about the history of blackjack and the card counting systems, the more he discovered that other blackjack writers were taking credit for techniques that Thorp had discussed in Beat the Dealer, a work which had ended up revolutionizing the casino industry.

“Although I had never met Thorp,” Golden recalls, “I for some reason became upset at this scholarly injustice and was determined to help set the record straight as best as I could.”

Golden, the actor and student of the legendary improvisation instructor Del Close at Chicago’s Second City nightclub, wrote a screenplay based on Thorp’s life.  He hoped to raise the $15 to $25 million needed to produce the movie.

He didn’t.  “I was told that tens of thousands of screenplays were written every year and that you had as much chance as getting one produced as winning a billion dollars in the lottery,” Golden noted.  “I was also told by a film director friend that the more effective mode would be to write a novel and hope that a production house would find it appealing.

“The only problem,” Golden remembered, “was that I had never written a novel.  I contacted various writers of renown and asked them if they wanted to reverse adapt my screenplay, but they had their own projects.”

Cornell to the rescue

With some despair, but still believing in his project, Golden contacted his former professor at Cornell University, the distinguished Goldwin Smith Professor of English Literature Emeritus James McConkey.  “We had stayed in contact long after my being graduated, to the extent of my having dinner at his congenial country home when I returned one year for reunion,” Golden said.  Although he denies most of the frequent requests for critiques of their work from former students, usually those that became writers, Professor McConkey agreed to help Golden along. 

The result was the recently published Never Split Tens! (Springer), a biographical novel based on the life of Edward Thorp. 

Both Professor McConkey and Golden were pleased with the result.  “I was drawn in by the protagonist Thorp, and was eager to see him succeed in his venture,” said Professor McConkey from his home in Trumansburg, New York.

“I was overjoyed to hear that,” said Golden. 

Achieving such a reader-writer connection presents a challenge to seasoned novelists, let alone a new voice.

 “I was also concerned about justifying the physical beatings which Thorp experienced in the novel,” said Golden.  Thorp in real life and in the novel won significant sums playing blackjack from Nevada to Puerto Rico, and casinos don’t appreciate that and display their feelings by barring card counters or worse.  To avoid repercussions, the real life Thorp had adopted a disguise, an episode Golden relates in the novel.

“But Professor McConkey,” Golden continued, “wisely told me that people often place themselves in the way of harm when they are obsessed with something.  That was the final element in fleshing out a compelling character for Thorp.  He was obsessed in proving that his probability theories worked in the real world of casinos.”

Golden will happily provide his author’s discount to those wishing to purchase a copy of Never Split Tens.  Contact his agent through elagencywest.aol.com.

The complete prospectus for the movie version of Never Split Tens can be found at

en.wikisage.org/wiki/Never_Split_Tens

en.wikisage.org/wiki/Never_Split_Tens_(movie)

en.wikisage.org/wiki/Never_Split_Tens_(movie_prospectus)

or

encyc.org/wiki/Never_Split_Tens

encyc.org/wiki/Never_Split_Tens_(movie)

encyc.org/wiki/Never_Split_Tens_(movie_prospectus)

Two books of science essays, an acting book, and a full-length murder mystery/comedy are next up for Golden.  Both Venusian Casino Junkets and Other Essays in Mathematics and The Probabilities of Gambling and The Body Shapes of Extraterrestrials and Other Essays in Astronomy Through Zoology, drawing on Golden’s scientific background, have been awarded contracts and are due for 2018 release.  New Comedy Dialogues for Actors:  The Role of Status and Fibbing in Characterization, drawing on Golden’s acting career, and Murder by Mistletoe, a full-length murder mystery/comedy stage play, have each received several letters of interest from publishers.

As far as moving to Nevada or back to California to continue his blackjack business, Golden is content to remain in Oak Park and continue writing and working on animal welfare and environmental causes.

“Writing exclusively for London magazines, I’ve found that my face is not well-known in Nevada and during my occasional trips I very rarely get banned from casinos for card counting.  But they to this day consider it cheating.  Not only would I like to keep my face unknown, but I would also like to keep it in one piece.  After all, I’d like to have a role in the film version of Never Split Tens!” said Golden, the ever optimistic writer/astronomer/musician/actor/activist.

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Details about Les Golden’s Renaissance Man activities can be found at:

encyc.org/wiki/Les_Golden and en.wikisage.org/wiki/Les­_Golden

The finances of producing Never Split Tens as a motion picture and the formal prospectus are presented at:  encyc.org/wiki/Never_Split_Tens and http://en.wikisage.org/wiki/Never_Split_Tens_(movie_prospectus)

Les Golden’s activities as a gambling writer are profiled on his alma mater website:  http://www.cornell65.com/interest/golden.html

His papers on the Golden Diagram (blackjack) and Magic  Circle strategy (roulette) presented at the 16th triennial International Conference  on  Gambling  and  Risk  Taking  in  June,  2016,  in Las Vegas are at https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/gaming_institute/2016/June9/

Les’ listing on the Comiclopedia International Database appears at:

http://www.lambiek.com/artists/g/golden_les.htm

Some of Les Golden’s animal welfare and environmental activism activities are described at:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/07/les-golden-oak-park-dog-a_n_1497423.html en.wikisage.org/wiki/The_Horrors_of_Zoos_and_Horse_Racing.

en.wikisage.org/wiki/CARE_Party_of_Oak_Park