I didn’t tell you this before but part of the reason I was sent to Detroit was to put some distance between myself and a boy named Johnny Golden.  Johnny was a jockey who had once ridden for my father.  That wasn’t the problem though.  He was Jewish and not accepted.  They were blamed for smuggling cotton during the war on the river by the North and South and also financing the war.  I met up with Johnny in Detroit and we gambled along the river together.  My family would have disowned me if they had known.  All during the war we were together until Johnny had some trouble with gambling or just the fact that he was Jewish and we split up.  We decided to part and meet in San Antonio.  Mary and I went down the river to New Orleans.  Oh what an adventure that turned out to be.

In 1861 the Civil War started and I had just turned 17. My father felt he needed to enlist so he become a confederate soldier and was killed in his first battle. My mother was devastated and I became the head of the household. Relatives were concerned about me with all the soldiers in the area and decided to send me to friends in Detroit to be cared for. It was still 1861 when Mary & I arrived in Detroit. It was thought that I would find a “suitable” young man to marry then return home to run the family business. My social life was exciting but I failed miserably at finding a husband. Could have been lack of trying. Luck had it that I was invited to visit a local gambling fraternity (gambling den). Who would have imagined where that would take me.

Cayenne,

I started the Golden Gossip Club way back in 1912. It started out as a woman’s sewing club but my love for playing cards had never left so we added card playing as our central activity. The original club had twelve wives from Deming as members. Our motto was: To tell the best things, To make the best of bad things, And to straighten mistakes. These women were my friends and accepted me as the respectable lady I had always wanted to be.

Most of you probably know me as Lottie Deno but I wasn’t born with that name. On April 21, 1844 I was born Carlotta J. Thompkins. I lived on a plantation in Warsaw, KY. Most people would say we were “well to do”. My father sold horses and tobacco abroad and sold hemp to the shipbuilders in Detroit. He was also an excellent gambler, one of the many things he taught me since there were no sons. He took me on my first trip to New Orleans in 1858. Quite an adventure for a thirteen year old girl on a southbound river packet. My father owned slaves and my nanny was a 7′ tall woman named Mary Poindexter. She went everywhere I went. Little did we know then that many of the places he took us we would revisit again later in life. I sure do miss her. I need to go because it’s time for the Golden Gossip Club to meet.