Utah draws the line on the glittering ambitions of Wendover as the parade keeps passing it by.

WENDOVER, Utah —  Driving west from Salt Lake City through the high desert and into this town--following the route of Nevada-bound buses marked “Gamblers Special”--travelers find not much more than a way station that seems ready to blow away in a hearty storm.

There are a couple of motels, a Mexican restaurant, two lots selling junky used cars and some self-storage containers stacked just off the main street. Ramshackle homes along Mirah and Pequop avenues and the abandoned barracks of a World War II air base complete the scene.

Fuel-and-Water Stop

Bing Crosby entertained troops at the base in the ‘40s and said the town, even then, reminded him of “the end of Tobacco Road.” Bob Hope suggested that Wendover change its name to Leftover, and after the war, that’s about what it became, just a fuel-and-water stop for travelers running Route 40 from Chicago to San Francisco. Salt Lake City is 120 miles east, Reno a tankful of gas west.

“Someone asked me the other day: ‘Why don’t you have a chamber of commerce in Wendover?’ ” said longtime resident Marie Johnson, 71. “And I told him: ‘You can’t have a chamber with a dying community. You need people to be moving in, not out, to have a chamber.’ ”

But write no epitaphs for the name of Wendover. Just a few hundred yards beyond Mike Pantelakis’ Heritage Motel, past a white line painted across the highway, a 64-foot-high cowboy and huge marquees suddenly loom out of the sagebrush. “Super Hot Slots,” they promise. Or “Fabulous Prime Rib Dinners,” “Roy Clark in Person,” “Best Odds in Town.”

It’s Booming--Over There

Welcome to Nevada, partner. This is the other Wendover--Wendover, Nev., a community originally built with Utah money in the 1930s--and business here is booming, the population is growing and five major casinos are packed around the clock.

Here, straddling the state line, the philosophies of the West’s two most contrasting states--pious Utah and outlandish Nevada--meet. And there is little doubt about where the siren song blows.

In the Nevada Wendover (population 2,000), there is a new residential subdivision with sidewalks and paved streets, an 18-hole golf course, equestrian park, medical clinic and library, clothing store, shopping plaza, 24-hour cocktail lounges, throngs of visitors ambling around with their plastic cups full of coins--and no state income taxes or taxes on food.

In the Utah Wendover (population 1,300), there are no bars, no liquor store and no Lions Club--it moved west to the other Wendover.

Infamous White Line

At the Heritage Motel the other morning, Pantelakis was wrapping up the graveyard shift and feeling rueful. He watched the parade of cars and buses stream by outside heading for the other Wendover. These visitors--the vast majority of them Utahans from the Mormon-dominated cities of Salt Lake, Provo and Ogden--spent over $40 million just across the infamous painted white line in 1988.

“Marie’s right,” Pantelakis said. “We’re dying. Ask anyone what Wendover means and they’ll say gambling. Wendover, Utah, doesn’t exist. People will start checking in here and say: ‘Where’s your slot machines?’ I’ll say: ‘You have to go down the street for them.’ And they’ll say: ‘Well, then I’m going down the street.’ ”

Last year, Pantelakis and a handful of other businessmen decided there was only one way for Wendover to survive. It, too, needed gambling. This presented a formidable challenge because Mormons consider gambling a forbidden pleasure, and in Utah--the only state besides Hawaii with no legalized gambling of any type--28 of the 29 state senators are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Group Finds Backing

Nevertheless, the citizens’ group found two senators, both Mormons, willing to sponsor a constitutional amendment to legalize gambling in Wendover, Utah.

“We are a pocket of poverty, growing steadily worse,” the group said in a letter asking for senatorial support, pointing out that Wendover couldn’t even afford to hire a school crossing guard for Highway 40. More than 260 families were on welfare, it said, and in the last three years another 150 families had left Wendover, Utah, for a more prosperous life just across the line in Wendover, Nev.

Resolutions supporting the amendment swept through the Wendover City Council and the Tooele County Commission. Then in January, to the dismay of casino operators across the border and to the surprise of just about everyone, the Utah Senate Rules Committee gave its approval to the amendment.

Then the Utah Establishment rallied.

” . . . What’s next?” editorialized the church-owned Deseret News. “Demands for legalized brothels in Utah just because they are permitted in some parts of Nevada?”

‘Mini-Las Vegas?’

Sen. K. S. Cornaby expressed concern that Wendover, Utah, would become a “mini-Las Vegas.”

Two days after approval by the Rules Committee, the amendment was brought before the Business and Labor Committee, where by unanimous vote it was tabled into oblivion. Said Sen. Richard Tempest: “I’d rather see the city die than have people compromise their principles just to stay there to make a living.”

Today, Wendover’s (Utah) $1-a-year mayor, Glenn Beck, a retired railroad man, and the other residents of the beleaguered town watch the $40-million cavalcade of cars, buses and trucks swing off Interstate 80 and whiz by their doors.

When some of the first travelers in these parts, the ill-fated Donner party, pushed through the salt flats near here in 1846, they made wagon tracks that are still visible in the rock-hard salt. Now many of Wendover’s people today wonder whether that will be their destiny, too--whether in a generation there will be nothing left of Wendover, Utah, but memories of rectitude and a few traces of mortar and brick in the shifting sand.