Orange County Register
Finding her roots by chanceNEWS FOCUS: An O.C. woman finds a new career and rediscovers her Indian roots in a gambling-machine business.
September 14, 1998
By IBON VILLELABEITIA
The Orange County Register
From Huntington Beach
Nancy Bridgeman always knew she was an American Indian, but for much of her life that identity never touched her white world.
Bridgeman was a grandmother by the time she began learning about her roots. The unlikely catalyst to her education: a gambling machine.
In 1988, after a career in real estate, Bridgeman and her family pooled their skills to turn their home into a gambling-machine manufacturing business.
Before long, Bridgeman made her first contacts with American Indian casinos and visited her first reservation. Today she is a leading voice in California's debate over Indian gaming rights.
For years, state officials and American Indian tribes have been wrangling over the type of games allowed on reservations. The Indians have launched a November ballot initiative aimed at protecting their casinos.
"Gaming is the return of the buffalo," said Bridgeman, 60, who is part Cherokee and part Seneca-Cayuga. "There is an Indian saying that says the day the buffalo return, prosperity will return to the Indians."
A twist of fate led the Bridgeman family to its new enterprise.
One day in 1986, while working on a real estate deal in Las Vegas, Nancy's husband, Jim Bridgeman, a retired rocket scientist, strolled into a casino and meandered among the rows of gambling machines. He watched the jingling machines gulp down dollars from free-spending customers and figured he could make some money by putting his computer skills into designing more thrilling games.
"I saw the video poker games and thought they were very primitive," he said. "I thought we could do them better."
And the seed of Pari-Mutuel Gaming Inc. was planted.
A NEW CAREER
While the family took care of the real estate business, Jim locked himself up at home and began converting card games into Las Vegas-style video gaming machines: Seven Card Stud, One at a Time, Pick'em Poker, Texas Hold'em, Omaha, Pai-Gow.
The business grew steadily, and soon the rest of the family took up other responsibilities as orders from casinos rolled in. The Bridgemans moved their assembling workshop from their garage to warehouses in Indio and Fresno, where they now produce the $6,500-apiece gaming machines they sell to casinos, cruise lines and riverboats across the country.
Nancy and Jim and their four adult children work like a small army of scientists in the garage-turned-laboratory of their two-story home on a shady cul-de-sac.
Jim, 61, who once designed nuclear missiles for a top-secret U.S. Air Force project in Montgomery, Ala., programs computer games with the help of his son Lance.
Nancy is in charge of designing the cards, numbers and graphics that appear on the machines' screens.
Daughter Stephanie takes care of marketing the family business, sending out brochures to potential buyers and attending gambling trade shows and conventions to promote the machines.
Son Robert designs the hardware.
And son Jerry inspects the machines before they are shipped to casinos.
IT IS LIKE ROCKET SCIENCE
Jim said creating video card games is not very different from designing missile defense systems. Both operate on the principles of logic, with some slight variations.
"Programming missiles is a more mathematical thing. You have a bomber that's coming to the United States, and you have to launch a missile so that it gets close enough to knock it off. If the bomber changes direction, you have to change the missile's direction through radar returns," said Jim, who also designed satellites for an aerospace company in Pasadena. "It's pretty much coming up with an equation to find a solution.
"Gaming is more about random numbers and solutions. The basic element of any card game is probability. It's like a deck of cards you are shuffling. There are some basic premises, but you just throw open all possibilities."
The Bridgemans believe their success as video card game inventors lies in not being gamblers themselves. Nancy said she doesn't even know how to shuffle cards. While in college, Jim would play card games once in a while, but only for the fun of staying up all night with his friends, he said.
"When you create a video card game, you have to make it simple enough so that the player can understand it," Nancy said. "We took the essence of the game and made some variations with it. If we were gamblers, we would have come up with complicated video games nobody would play."
The Bridgemans have invented close to 100 games.
FINDING HER ROOTS
In recent months, Nancy has been traveling to reservations, visiting lawmakers and community leaders and attending fund-raisers to push for the Indian gaming initiative.
It is an unexpected role for Nancy, who grew up far away from reservation life, and mostly ignorant of her American Indian heritage. Born in Tucson, she was aware that she was part Cherokee, but her family never told her that she was also Seneca-Cayuga, she said.
As a child she lived in Fresno, along with her eight brothers and sisters. The family worked as migrant field workers until they saved enough money to run a raisin farm. She knew nothing about the world of gambling and casinos.
"We didn't gamble at home," she said. "My father always said it was a waste of time."
After she married Jim and had children, Nancy graduated with a psychology degree from the University of California, Irvine.
Nancy said she supports Proposition 5 because she believes it's good for the Indians. Recently, the Bridgemans patented a video gaming machine that looks like a Las Vegas slot but operates as a lottery-style machine. The invention allows the development of a type of gaming machine the state currently sanctions, regardless of the result of Prop. 5.
Nancy said gaming machines have given her a new purpose in life. Not a single day goes by in which she doesn't read something new about her heritage: a slice of Indian history, an Indian treaty or a fact of reservation life.
"It's been a real awakening for me," she said.
Link to: California's Modern Indian War
California's Modern Indian War-BLACK BACKGROUND