STRICTLY BUSINESS: COMPUTER INSTRUCTOR AT 12, COMPANY HEAD AT 23

Russ Felker received his first computer, an Apple II+ when he was 8.

It was a match made in computer heaven.

By the age of 12, Felker was an instructor for Pro Computer Center. Each Saturday, Felker, a student at Cape Central Junior High School, taught a group of children, many his own age, how to use the IBM PCjr., expected to be the home computer of the future.

Little more than a decade later, Russ Felker, 23, is president of a computer technology company -- Dolphin Technology, of Northbrook, Ill.

"I've been interested in computers a long time," said Felker recently. "By the time I was 11, I had been using computers four or five years."

Felker, son of Dr. and Mrs. J. Russell Felker, of Cape Girardeau, was a computer whiz as early as the fifth and sixth grades in Cape Girardeau schools.

After completing high school at Cape Central and attending Southeast Missouri State University, Felker moved to the Chicago area, where he started working for Victormaxx as an engineering intern on design.

Felker said he became aware of the Victormaxx job when Chris Coy, one of his college professors, told him about it. Coy had a brother at Victormaxx at that time.

Felker became national sales manager at the company, and when one of his previous bosses, Kevin Coy, purchased a company out of bankruptcy, Felker was asked to join the new company, as president.

"We had been keeping in touch," said Felker. "Victormaxx came under new management, and I decided to go with Dauphin. It has some pretty high technology and a lot of potential."

Dauphin is a story in itself -- one that made the pages of the Wall Street Journal last month.

"The journal called it the tale of two geniuses," said Felker, who had a hand in helping things end up "beautifully" for Dauphin.

Let's back up.

One of the geniuses involved in the Journal story was a high-tech entrepreneur who shot to the top in 1992 and crashed in 1995. The other is Kevin Coy, a high-tech investor who came in to pick up the pieces.

In a nutshell, Alan Yong, who fled from Malaysia during the Vietnam War and landed in Chicago, earned a master's in business administration and opened a Chinese restaurant. He sold the restaurant for a quarter-million dollars and started building an electronic system, which went public in 1991, and landed a $480 million laptop contract with the Pentagon.

Yong went on to design a hand-held PC, and IBM agreed to manufacture the tiny computer. Yong found his Dauphin stock worth $140 million.

But, the hand-held computer may have been ahead of its time. IBM found itself with a warehouse full of the product which hadn't been paid for. Dauphin found itself in bankruptcy court, its employees terminated, its equipment warehoused.

Enter Kevin Coy.

Coy, the son of European immigrants, also had gone boom and bust in the high-tech game, until he launched a company called Victormaxx Technologies Inc., to product "virtual reality" games.

While taking the company public, Coy was ousted in an internal power struggle, but he walked away with $2.5 million in stock and severance and a determination to remain in the high-tech field.

During a pickup game of basketball, Coy learned of the Dauphin crisis.

Coy assembled a small investment group, bought out IBM'S $40 million claim against Dauphin for $750,000, and let Yong keep about 15 percent of his holdings. Yong remains a stockholder and board member but is not working on the property.

"We came in, evaluated everything and struck the deal with IBM," said Felker. "Everything is going well. We're still under the Chapter 11 umbrella, but we're on a track which could take us out of Chapter 11 by the end of the year."

A gambling analysis

The House bill is HR497. The Senate bill is S704.

Floor votes in the House and Senate are expected by year's end to establish a national commission to study legal gambling's effects in the United States.

The plan, which has already drawn the endorsement of President Bill Clinton and more than 100 legislators, would set up a panel to study the gambling industry's economic impact, political contributions and influence, connection to crime rates, effect on compulsive gambling, and who should regulate Indian gaming.

The bill's backers say they have 102 co-sponsors in the House and eight co-sponsors in the Senate.

Needless to say, the industry and some lawmakers from gambling districts aren't happy. Neither are the more than 120 Indian tribes that have permitted gambling interests to build casinos on Indian lands throughout the nation.

Rep. Frank LoBiondo of New Jersey, a Republican whose district includes Atlantic City, says the bill amounts to a "power grab by the federal government."

But Sen. Paul Simon, D-Makanda, Ill., one of the Senate's most prominent liberals, is a partner with conservative Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., in promoting the Senate version for a gambling study panel. Both Simon and Lugar represent states that have approved gambling.

Ten Illinois gambling riverboats have been around more than two years, and Indiana is expected to see its first gambling projects by mid-1996.

Simon submitted a lengthy report on "The Explosive Growth of Gambling in the U.S." to the U.S. Senate floor in July.

"Local governments, Indian tribes and states, all desperate for revenue, increasingly are turning to what appears to be a quick and easy solution -- legalized gambling," noted Simon in his report.

Temporarily, it often works, noted the report. Poverty stricken Indian tribes suddenly have money. Cities like East St. Louis, Ill., with every possible urban malady, find themselves with enough revenue to take care of minimal services.

Simon, in his report, points to four questions:

-- How rapidly is this phenomenon growing?

-- What are its advantages?

-- What are its disadvantages?

-- Is there a role for the federal government to play, and should it play a role.

Simon, and Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va., the House sponsor, stress that the commission would not outlaw legal gambling, but casino and riverboat gambling officials fear it marks the first step toward a ban.

Frank Fahrenkopf Jr., president of the American Gaming Association, told the Associated Press that his group has a great story to tell, but "we are concerned, however, given the anti-gaming sentiments of the commission's proponents, that the commission would be biased against the industry."

Lawmakers said they expect House Judiciary Committee approval of the bill by Tuesday and a floor vote by the end of the year.

Who should object to such a gambling study? The study, as we understand it, would have no mission other than studying gambling. It could present some interesting findings concerning advantages and disadvantages, and possibly some suggested solutions for the disadvantages.

B. Ray Owen is business editor for the Southeast Missourian.