Hosey: What happens in Gas City stays in Gas City

The timing of this couldn’t have been any better.

The days have warmed up and the COVID-19 infection rate has gone down, and before you know it, swarms of pleasure seekers will parade up and down the great white ways of Larkin Avenue and Jefferson Street as if they were twin Las Vegas Strips intersecting at a White Castle and an old Kmart.

Mayor Bob O’Dekirk thought he saw a lot of out-of-town license plates on the night lot of the looting and vandalism — and the night he grabbed an unwitting pedestrian — last year, but that will be nothing compared to the mob of tourists heading to Joliet now that alcohol sales and gambling machines are allowed at all the city’s gas stations.

Yes, with one quick vote the city council made Joliet a true destination town, a veritable Sin City of the Midwest.

Not that everyone was on board with this. Like Councilwoman Jan Quillman, for example, who actually was on board but made a big production about her internal struggle with it.

“It’s a tough one because I made a mistake the first time because I was led down the wrong path by the former city manager and I’m trying to be fair,” Quillman said, blaming former City Manager Steve Jones for her decision to allow a new Thorntons on Collins Street to sell alcohol and operate gambling machines, opening the door for every gas station in town to do the same.

Only Quillman actually sought the advice of former City Attorney Marty Shanahan before she voted last year, and he provided this insightful bit of legal wisdom: “I can’t tell you what another gas station will do.”

No wonder they fired that guy.

At any rate, Quillman wants to blame Jones, but no matter whose fault it was, she now faced the dilemma of turning Joliet into the Prison City of Steel, Stone, Champions, and Gas Station Gambling and Alcohol Sales.

“I just don’t know. I don’t think yes is right, I don’t think no is right,” Quillman mused before heaving a sigh, pausing dramatically and announcing, “I’ll vote yes.”

Councilman Larry Hug, on the other hand, was a little less conflicted. He voted against the measure without hesitation or explanation, but previously said, “I will not support anything that allows people to stand there and drink at a gas pump, in a gas station,” which does seem like a fairly wild idea, even for a party city like Joliet.

The prospect of gambling in a gas station while others guzzled beer at the pumps and showgirls danced around the place and who knows what else was going on at the new Thorntons Casino was too much to pass up, so I headed over there to get a look for myself. Only there were no showgirls, no one was drinking at the pumps and there wasn’t a single gambling machine to be found.

Could the Thorntons on Collins Street, the one that started this whole mess, end up the only gas station in town to pass on gambling? The people at Thorntons refused to say, even one named Kerri Arnold who sent a press release touting the company’s summer-long 50th anniversary celebration.

In honor of the anniversary you can get a soda for 50 cents, Arnold’s press release said. But she can keep it. We’ll take the beer at the gas pumps and a spin on the gambling machines someplace else.

• Joe Hosey is the editor of The Herald-News. You can reach him at 815-280-4094, at jhosey@shawmedia.com or on Twitter @JoeHosey.