Bingo

A venerable Catholic Tradition, the men living on the third floor of the seminary dorm hosted a party for the community on Friday evening that included a meal with Bingo afterwards. Prizes included tickets to a Gopher football game, parking in the priests' garage stalls, books by C.S. Lewis and Archbishop Fulton Sheen, and various gift certificates from businesses around the community, as well as a variety of other gifts donated by the seminarians themselves. I think that every player won a prize of some sort or another, and everyone had fun. Who would have thought that Bingo would be so attractive to people? This led me to do a little research (and by "little" I mean about 70 seconds on Google) and I discovered the following about bingo from about.com.

(Bellis, Mary. The History of Bingo. <http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blbingo.htm>. Accessed 17 November 2007.)

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In the U.S., bingo was originally called "beano". It was a country fair game where a dealer would select numbered discs from a cigar box and players would mark their cards with beans. They yelled "beano" if they won.

The game's history can be traced back to 1530, to an Italian lottery called "Lo Giuoco del Lotto D'Italia," which is still played every Saturday in Italy. From Italy the game was introduced to France in the late 1770s, where it was called "Le Lotto", a game played among wealthy Frenchmen. The Germans also played a version of the game in the 1800s, but they used it as a child's game to help students learn math, spelling and history.

When the game reached North America in 1929, it became known as "beano". It was first played at a carnival near Atlanta, Georgia. New York toy salesman Edwin S. Lowe renamed it "bingo" after he overheard someone accidentally yell "bingo" instead of "beano". He hired a Columbia University math professor, Carl Leffler, to help him increase the number of combinations in bingo cards. By 1930, Leffler had invented 6,000 different bingo cards. [It is said that Leffler then went insane.]

A Catholic priest from Pennsylvania approached Lowe about using bingo as a means of raising church funds. When bingo started being played in churches it became increasingly popular. By 1934, an estimated 10,000 bingo games were played weekly, and today more than $90 million dollars are spent on bingo each week in North America alone.