Cruising South Richmond on a recent rainy day, checking out the site of the proposed casino — there were piles of spent tires, brambles, a rusted trailer and clumps of tangled wire — one is reminded of Tom Robbins’ saucy description of the frayed warren below the James of tobacco factories, truck dealerships and working-class houses.
Robbins, an alum of Virginia Commonwealth University who briefly toiled for the Richmond Times-Dispatch sports department, wrote in one of his best-known books, “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues,” that “South Richmond was a neighborhood of mouse holes, lace curtains, Sears catalogs, measles epidemics (and) baloney sandwiches.”
