BINGO - THE HISTORY OF THE ENDURING GAME

It has been estimated that more than $90 million dollars are spent on Bingo each week in North American church basements, Bingo parlors, casinos, and online. There are an estimated 60 million Bingo players in the United States – almost as many men as women – people who make 1.2 billion visits annually to commercial, charitable, military, and casino bingo operations.

But it is more than just the game.

In our fractured age, when the old values of community and family are imperiled, it provides a place for “a community of likeminded individuals to pass the time, gossip, and enjoy each other’s company,” as one Bingo hall operator said.

It’s been doing that in parts of Europe for almost 500 years, a little less than a century over here.

The game began its North American run around 1929 when a New York City toy salesman named Edwin S. Lowe stumbled into a small rural carnival in Georgia. The Depression had hit Lowe’s company hard, and he needed a new idea. Lowe had come upon the carnival late on a December night, and as he wandered the grounds, most of the carnival booths had already closed.

All but one.

That one was packed with people hunched over a horseshoe-shaped table littered with numbered cards while a caller took wooden discs from an old cigar box one at a time and read out the numbers printed on them. The players marked the called-out numbers on their cards, if their cards had them, until someone completed a row of numbers, horizontally, vertically, or diagonally.

That person yelled “Beano”, the round ended, and the winner was presented a Kewpie doll.

The tent was so crowded, Lowe later remembered, that “I couldn’t get a seat.”

But he had found his idea.

“I noticed that the players were practically addicted to the game,” he later said. “The pitchman wanted to close-up, but every time he said, ‘This is the last game’, nobody moved. When he finally closed at 3 am, he had to chase them out.”

Bingo began about 1530 when people in Florence, Italy began playing a public lottery called Lo Giuoco del Lotto (loosely translated as “Everyone’s Playground”), which was the first public lottery with cash prizes. It was played with a game card divided into nine vertical columns and three horizontal ones. The vertical rows contained blank spaces or numbers in random order. Each player held one Lo Giuoco del Lotto card, and an official caller drew small and numbered wooden “coins” from a cloth bag and announced the number drawn. As with the modern game, those players who had the called-number on their card would cover it with a chip or mark it. The first player to completely cover a horizontal row was the winner.

It was – and remains – that simple.

The game quickly spread to nearby Genoa and Venice where it was used to raise money for public projects and eventually became an Italian “national” lottery, even though Italy itself was not united until 1861. With the exceptions of a few suspensions during time of war, Lo Giuoco del Lotto has continued on a weekly basis until today and currently contributes more than $75 million a year to the Italian national budget.

From Italy, the game moved to France in the 18th century where it was played by the wealthy, and to Germany in the 19th century where it developed – as jigsaw puzzles originally had been – as an educational game for children. Some versions taught multiplication tables. Others taught such things as spelling, historical dates, and animal names.

Finally, in the late 1920s, the game came to North America where it was called “Beano” and became a carnival game. It was apparently first played in Atlanta and other parts of Georgia. And it was there that it was discovered by Lowe.

Lowe had been born in Poland and educated in Palestine before he immigrated to the United States when he was eighteen. After having worked as a toy salesman, he founded his own toy company, the E. S. Lowe Company, with $1,000 in capital and two employees in 1928.

It was especially bad timing.

In 1929, the stock market crashed, all but wiping out the company and sending Lowe back on the road making sales calls pondering the problems of his fledgling business, and looking for a new idea. There, he found the small carnival and its Beano game.

And struck gold.

When the game’s operator was finally able to close on that December night, Lowe buttonholed him, and the man told Lowe he had first found the game being played in Germany, had named it Beano, and was trying it in the US.

“It was an instant hit,” he said. When he returned to New York, Lowe tried the game out on some friends and found them becoming as attentive and absorbed as the people he had seen in Georgia. During one of these trial sessions, a woman became so excited when she heard her final number called she jumped up and, tripping over her own tongue, yelled “Bingo”.

“I cannot describe the strange sense of elation which that girl’s cry brought to me,” Lowe later said. “All I could think of was that I was going to come out with this game, and it was going to be called Bingo.”

By 1930, Lowe had renamed the game Bingo and was selling a twelve-card version for $1 and a twenty-four-card version for $2. Just as it had been on the Georgia carnival circuit, the game was an instant hit.

Several months later, after Bingo had been launched and had solved many of the financial problems facing his small company, Lowe was approached by a priest from Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Members of his congregation, the priest said, had suggested the church run Bingo games to help with the parish’s finances. The priest had bought several copies of Lowe’s twenty-four-card Bingo set and tried the idea. But there was a problem, he said. There were too few card combinations and, therefore, too many winners.

A single round could produce as many as six winners, the priest said.

Lowe quickly realized the possibilities inherent in using Bingo as a fundraiser and saw the reality of the problem the priest had discovered.

A much greater number of cards – all different – were needed. Lowe hired an aging Columbia University math professor named Carl Leffler to increase the number of possible cards, and Leffler was able to increase the possibilities to 600 new and different Bingo cards. In what is probably an apocryphal story, it has been said that the task drove Leffler insane.

There are 1,474,200 different Bingo card possibilities in the modern game.

With the new variety of cards, the game worked well in the Wilkes-Barre church basement and then spread to other sites. By 1934, there were an estimated 10,000 Bingo games being played each week, and Lowe was employing 1,000 people and running sixty-four printing presses around the clock.

“We used more newsprint than the New York Times,” he said.

He also published Bingo’s first Instructional Manual and a monthly Bingo newsletter that was distributed to 37,000 subscribers.

As church groups and fraternal organization began holding low-stacks Bingo games, the Center for Gaming Research at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas said, Bingo became known “as the most permissible form of gambling in America”. So permissible, in fact, and so much a part of our lives and language that some people could suggest – with tongue only partially in cheek – that “tithing is what the church did before Bingo” and others could refer to the United States Congress as “playing Bingo with billions”.

Today, Bingo has gone online with games played 24-hours-a-day and is attracting large audiences in casinos. The Foxwoods Casino in Connecticut has a Bingo room with 3,600 seats and several others seat more than 1,000.

But, unlike many of the other casino games, “GCB, The Gaming Business Magazine” reported, Bingo was designed “for the pace of leisure, the cause of community fund-raising and the social interaction of neighbors.”

A bingo winner, sitting with other players, raises his hand at an event at 4555 Notre-Dame-de-Grâce in Montreal in 1941.

It has kept that.

And people keep gathering over their Bingo cards “to pass the time, gossip, and enjoy each other’s company,” as that Bingo hall operator said.

Today, Bingo is played for profit in some form or another in forty-eight of the United States’ fifty states, on over 100 Native American reservations, in all the Canadian provinces, and in countless church basements and American Legion Halls. A directory of places to play in the US, originally intended as a travel guide, is published and updated every six months and lists something like 7,000 locations in which the game is played in the United States. Another couple of thousand locations can be found in similar Canadian directories.

“If they ever closed this place down,” another Bingo hall operator said, “20,000 women would be homeless.”

Written by Chuck Lyons in "History Magazine", USA, August/September 2018, excerpts pp. 16-18. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.