It was a small city on the East bank of the Illinois River far downstate, away from where any prying eyes might decide to try to take a peek where they don’t belong.

It was a hillbilly Mecca of hunting, fishing and illegal gambling known as Little Reno until Halloween night, 1953, when a swarm of state police put an end to all the fun and cost the city hundreds of jobs and an inestimable amount of income.

Jean Blessman and her husband Don, who had returned home from the Korean War just a couple months earlier, were a young married couple having dinner that night in the back room of the Town House restaurant owned by Jean’s father when state police stormed through the doors carrying axes and left with every piece of gambling equipment — a roulette wheel, a blackjack table — and a couple thousand dollars. Jean’s father, Louis Becker, told the couple to just stay seated and enjoy their meal while the troopers ransacked the adjacent rooms, which is what the Blessmans did.

Basically, the Blessmans calmly enjoyed their Saturday night meal as troopers all around them, and all around the city, hauled off the lifeblood of Little Reno and left in its stead little old rural Havana, known for quiet streets and not much else. The gambling equipment, according to news reports, was all tossed in a pile and burned.

Gambling had been a big draw that brought in visitors, and those visitors brought in entertainers, and it all added up to a very busy downtown scene, especially on weekends. Now Havana’s downtown looks more like a silent Norman Rockwell picture postcard.

“We didn’t notice it then but it eliminated jobs, and you take that much out of a business’s income, they have to make it up,” Jean said.

The illegal gambling was something that Havana provided that most other places did not, and it was enough of a lure to get people to drive in their cars to seek out the city.

“Gambling drew in a lot of people from other cities,” Jean said, sitting in her living room with Don in the couple’s home on the fringe of downtown Havana. “There wasn’t really any place else close that had it. There were none in Peoria or Pekin. Everybody had them (slot machines) and it drew all these people from around the state.”

Even the drug store had a stool in front of its slot machine so that children could reach, such was the laissez faire attitude of the whole scene in the town at the time. Jean said she personally stood on the stool at the drug store and played a nickel in the slot machine once. She was supposed to be going to see a movie and she did not think she could find a way to explain to her parents how her money had multiplied so she bought a bunch of candy and dropped it on door steps as she made her way home after the movie.

At one point, Don owned and operated a newsstand that had its own slot machine. Don said that combined with the gambling, Havana’s great duck hunting spots turned the city into a destination spot. The area, Don said, was a rich spot for hunting and parties of men would make a week of it, spending their days duck hunting and their nights gambling.

Jean said Havana was always an “old farm town” so when everybody would come into town on Saturday night, they would park their cars and walk from place to place within town until the end of the night, when they would find their cars and drive home.

The city received a boost in the 1940s from the opening of Camp Ellis, a World War II training camp for soldiers in Table Grove, which opened in 1943, according to the website illinoisancestors.org. The camp housed as many as 25,000 soldiers at a time, and according to Don, men would be bused in Saturday evenings and left to their own devices until Sunday.

“Saturday night was a big deal in the ’40s,” Don said.

Camp Ellis closed in 1945, but reopened as a National Guard post from 1946 until 1950.

In 1950, the Town House bar and restaurant opened across from the courthouse. It had been built by Becker in partnership with Ed Long, who died the year before the building was completed, according to a 1986 interview with Long’s son, Edo, that ran in the Daily Times. Long already owned a tavern at the corner of Market and Plum, where Babe’s is now, kitty-corner from the Town House, when he and Becker went in together to open up the new place.

The gambling in Havana was allegedly an offshoot of the gambling riverboats run by the Chicago gangster Al Capone, according to several accounts and to pervasive rumor. However, in his 1986 interview with the Daily Times, Edo Long said his father’s decision to have gambling in his establishments was his own decision. He was not strong-armed into having gambling, he did it because he liked the money that gambling brought, Edo said.

The week after the raid on the city the local weekly paper, the Mason County Democrat, noted that just weeks prior to the raid, then-Gov. William G. Stratton had called on local governments to put an end to the “evils” that their local law enforcement agencies had overlooked for so long. A coordinated simultaneous raid of several gambling oases throughout the state followed that call, with Havana being one of the targets.

It has basically been a downward trend for the city since then. While the realities of a declining economy and how it affects a city like Havana are too numerous to peg solely on the loss of gambling, it sure was a harsh blow. A decrease in visitors resulted in a decrease in revenues for businesses, which resulted in fewer jobs, which drove people out of the city to find work.

According to Jean and Don Blessman, a lot of businesses had to close up shop when gambling was halted and many jobs for young people were lost. Even today the city struggles with losing young people who cannot find jobs in their hometown.

According to the City of Havana’s Comprehensive Plan, which was created in 1969, the population of the city increased from 3,451 in 1930 to 3,999 in 1940. By 1950, just a few years before the raid, the population had reached 4,379. After the raid, though, the population decrease began, with the 1960 population recorded as 4,363. The 2010 census listed Havana’s population at 3,301, which was down from the 2000 census population of 3,577.

“It was kind of a fun town to grow up in but even with the soldiers there I don’t know of any crime,” Jean said. “We had one policeman and on Saturdays he locked the door at 6 p.m. and went home until morning. It isn’t that the gambling caused any crime, because it didn’t at all that I heard.

“We had two movies downtown. There were lots of restaurants in town and lots on the highway. It was just a way of life at the time but it ended quickly.”

Now, 60 years after the Saturday night Halloween raid on Havana, video gambling is legal statewide, though having a few machines tucked away in a few local taverns does not provide anything unique enough to draw visitors in droves. City officials, though, are hoping to make use of the city’s riverside location and its proximity to multiple wildlife areas as resources to lure visitors.

Follow Ken Harris at Twitter.com/kenharrispdt