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Bingo is such a mainstay of the Catholic Church in America that it has become fodder for comedy. The popularity of Bingo exploded during the 1930s, and at the time it gave many Protestant clergyman yet another reason to mock the Catholics. It is said that the Godfather of Bingo was a man named Edwin Lowe. Lowe was in both the right place at the right time and the wrong place at the wrong time. Lowe had been in the toy and games business for some time when he started up a new company just in time for the stock market crash. The one in 1929. Lowe hit the road as so many did during the Great Depression looking for a money making opportunity. One fateful night as he was making that interminable drive from Atlanta to Jacksonville, Lowe came upon a carnival and the rest, as they say, is history.

Inside this carnival a variety of games were being played and by far the most popular was one called Beano. The game of Beano consisted of people sitting around a table filled with beans. Up front there was a fellow who was calling out various numbers. Meanwhile the players put the beans onto a card if they had the corresponding number until someone managed to fill an entire row or column, either vertically, horizontally, or even diagonally. The ante to play a game was a nickel and the prize was Kewpie Doll, which was the toy fad of the time.

Edwin Lowe stepped forward to try his hand at a game of Beano and found it was impossible to locate an empty seat. Lowe also noticed that many of the players verged on the obsessive, turning the game into an addiction. The guy calling out the numbers that night tried several times to put an end to the game, but was continually shouted down. The legend goes that a little girl who was mighty eager to win one of those precious Kewpie Dolls found herself a winner and jumped up stuttering the word “B-b-b-b-ingo!” rather than Beano. Lowe had been told by the caller that the game originated in Germany under the name Lotto, but he had changed the name to coincide with the use of beans. Lowe determined that this game had money written all over and left with a new name.

Bingo.

About a month afterward, Edwin Lowe got a call from a priest in Pennsylvania, complaining of a lack of contributions to the church. In an instant, Lowe realized that Bingo could be a perfect way to raise funds for churches. He got in touch with a math professor at Columbia to figure out a simple way of creating thousands of individualized and differentiated bingo cards. Apparently the new game took off quite rapidly. By the middle of the 1930s Bingo was much a mainstay at Catholic fundraisers as Mah-Jong was among the Jewish population. The ability of the Catholic churches to raise tremendous sums of money in the midst of a depression did not go unnoticed by the Protestants and it was not long before accusations were being made that Bingo was nothing more than illegal gambling; not long after charges were being raised of bingo rackets that were being controlled by the Italian Mafia. None of these wild charges managed to stick and Bingo continued to grow in popularity, eventually spreading outward from church basements to be embraced across the country.

Sources:

http://www.onlinebingo2.com/online-bingo-history.htm

http://www.strangelife.com/bingodoc/bingohist.html

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