Full Text of the Excerpt

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

...I might as well come to my sins. At Chapel Hill my name was "Dice Daniels." I was the leading crapshooter on the campus, and I had a reputation which I do not think was justified as a man who could just call the numbers and [laughter] sing to them. And I did in those days; I'd get down and croon and sing and name them with all the names out of the folklore of craps. And I shot a lot of dice.

CHARLES EAGLES:

Make much money that way?

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

I must have, but I don't remember that I was very far ahead. The only time I really got far ahead was when I stopped. Oh, it must have been half a dozen years later. I was in New York, and a friend of my brother-in-law there, Noble Cathcart and I, met Ogden Nash and a couple of fellows on the street, up about Fifty-seventh Street. And Oggie said, "Come on in and have a nightcap." So we got in, and somebody got out a pair of dice and I began to play. This was in the middle of the Depression. And I had those fellows in debt to me in the hundreds of dollars.

CHARLES EAGLES:

[Laughter]

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

Well, nobody among us had a hundred dollars. [Laughter] And so then it became a time that, as a gentleman, you had to lose money back. And I tried and tried to lose, and I got them deeper and deeper in debt. And finally I did get down to where they were only ten or twelve dollars behind, and I stopped, and I have never played dice since. But that was excruciating. It was a time when you were winning, and you knew they couldn't afford to win and you couldn't afford to let them win, but you couldn't help it. [Laughter]

CHARLES EAGLES:

You passed up a good career.

JONATHAN WORTH DANIELS:

Maybe so [laughter] , I don't know, but I haven't gambled since.