Bingo

And then there was Bingo Night — Night of a Thousand Smokes. Unlike many of my encounters with adults at the time, which were generally populated with warm and kind church-going folk, Bingo Night was, for a 9-year-old, a den of vipers. These weren’t the aunts and uncles and grandparents who’d gently push you on a swing on a Sunday afternoon. I’m afraid many of these people would push you off a swing. Most likely so they could have a seat and burn one down, and flick ashes on your face. Defeated by the Bingo Gods too many times, these folks were cynical, embittered and endlessly raspy. But in many ways they showed me a path – directly away from the one that they were on. 

“Bottom of the board, OOOOOOOO Seventy Five!” Wayne Dickinson would bellow from behind the Lucky Jim Bingo King Air Blower. Aside from winning a game and ecstatically shouting that dumb and magical word so the entire room could hear you, Wayne delivering this line with trademark aplomb was always the most entertaining portion of the evening. Then, with a long-ashed Newport permanently wedged into his microphone hand, he’d hold the 75 Ball aloft with the other, offering visual proof to a ballroom full of life-hardened skeptics. Floppy salt and pepper hair. Rectangular wire-framed glasses with tinted lenses. Clocking in at 6-foot-something a hundred-and-nothing. Wayne cut a striking figure on the Bingo Night stage: a match striking a box, then slowly flaming out. In a room full of top-flight cigaretters, Wayne was second to none. 

Saturday night was Emerald Knights’ Bingo Night at the decrepit Hotel Montrose in downtown Cedar Rapids. It was the Corps’ main revenue engine, and locals streamed in from both the factory-adjacent neighborhoods surrounding downtown and the scattered farming communities of rural Linn County to have a crack at a fleeting win. And if the Emerald Knights were up-and-comers, the venue in which they chose to stake their future success was a has-been of the highest order. 

Opened in 1906 and occupying nearly half a city block, the 7-story Montrose was once a grand showpiece of Eastern Iowa. Hard evidence of an era pre-dating the age of Howard Johnson’s and Holiday Inns and Travel Lodges, the Montrose, with its light-filled rotunda, marble walls and 16-foot ceilings was once the playground of whichever jazz-age dignitaries and elites found their way to the Midwest. At the height of his creativity in the early 30’s, the artist Grant Wood – a hometown boy and at the time a local resident — even created paintings, murals and chandeliers for the hotel. But, like much of Cedar Rapids in the mid-70’s, the tasteful and extravagant touches had long been removed in a momentary money grab and replaced by a lot of cheap ugliness. It was often rumored that many of the Montrose’s rooms were now single occupancy residences, filled with men and women of ill repute.   

Accordingly, the once grand and gleaming Crystal Ballroom on the second floor of the hotel was now a giant ashtray, a bubbling petri dish of stained burgundy carpeting and row upon row of long folding tables filled to the brim with chain-smoking, small-time gamblers throwing away a buck at the long odds of winning two. And I was right there in the middle of them, sucking it all in, a captive of Mom and Dads’ dutiful obligations as parent volunteers for the drum corps. 

Truth be told, as much as I disliked being dragged away from my CBS Saturday lineup of All In the Family, Carol Burnett and everything in between, I was casually thrilled at the idea of playing the big board. Perhaps, I thought, I could siphon away a win or two from these cranky, nicotine-shriveled relics. I had no money of my own, so, my thinking was, as reimbursement for following them into a Benson and Hedges convention that night, maybe my dad would part with couple of bucks to play a game or two. 

Mom and Dad were there to walk the floor, double check winners’ cards, and sometimes man the card purchasing table, so my requests were always interruptive. Apprehensive, but still feeling I had the right to ask, I’d sheepishly approach my Dad and tap him on the shoulder, whispering, “Dad, can I have some money to play?” I felt I had the right to ask. 

“What? To play bingo? I saw some kids out in the hall doing something, why don’t you play whatever they’re playing? They look like they’re your age.”

“They’re not. Pleeeease? I don’t know them.”

“That’s why we brought you here, to make some friends.”

“That’s why you brought me here? Pleeeease?”

“Oh Russ, he can play a game or two.” Mom, always ready to pamper her baby with money! Or at least stop the incessant whining. 

Then would come the inevitable, exasperated sigh, long and loud enough to distract everyone from their cigarettes for a brief instant, and maybe even fill the immediate air with something other than smoke. Mom and Dad were nothing if not world class exasperated sighers. “Here. 

Three dollars for the night. Get good cards.”

“What?”

“Go.” 

It usually wasn’t until I’d purchased a card (two if I was feeling my oats), found an open seat and pushed my chair up to the long table that I remembered how fat my chances actually were. Up and down the table every woman – and they were almost always women – had at least six cards. Some of them had a dozen or more, arranged neatly in rows so that they could quickly scan the whole set once Wayne Dickinson called the numbers. 

Early on in my bingo days, I was also astonished to discover that, in addition to their leatherette cigarette pouches with the twist clasp, most of these women came to the Montrose with their own dabbers – sometimes personalized. If you’re not familiar with Bingo parlance, the dabber is the device each player uses to mark off, with colored ink, the called numbers on his or her Bingo sheet(s). Mark off 5 in numbers in a row – horizontally, vertically or diagonally – and you get Bingo. I should note here that public dabbers were freely accessible at the front table for anyone who asked. In other words, these folks were so committed to their craft that, at some point after careful consideration, they’d driven to the nearest bingo store and put good money down to purchase their own dabber. Probably a six pack. They were pros. They were the bingo equivalent to the person who shows up at the bar with his or her own pool cue. They meant business. However, unlike pool, the only skills required for this game were knowing all the letters in the word BINGO and how to count to 75. 

Needless to say, all of my daring bingo outings were a bust. That is, all except one. Due to a blur of what one might call “winner’s ecstasy,” the details are scant, but one night in the summer of 1975, I brought home the gold. And by “gold,” I mean 73 dollars. 

This is what I do remember:

My 20-year-old sister Sara was there with me that night. Apparently my non-stop pestering – always attempts to help keep the boredom at bay — had become a professional liability for my parents, distracting them from their crucial duties as deputized Bingo Monitors. So they asked Sara to burn a precious Saturday night accompanying me – to tamp down the Whine Machine and help facilitate my gaming. Or maybe I just asked her to join me as my “good luck charm.” But probably not. Bottom line is, that’s what she was. 

In the giddy panic that followed me dabbing in the fifth square in a row on my Bingo card, I first showed Sara before making any rash decisions. “Hey – I think I got it!” 

After briefly scanning my card, Sara completely lost it. “Oh my gosh, oh my gosh. You got it! Say it! Say it!”

“Hey! Hey!” I yelled to Wayne. “BINGO!!!” 

For good measure, Sara offered an adult’s perspective, “He got Bingo! He did. He got Bingo!” 

Ashes dropped all over the ballroom at the sound of 9-year-old shouting out the magic word. Then came the scowling disbelief, accompanied by an audible groan – a hacking symphony of familiar disappointment. This loss, I suppose, was more of an all-over, full-body loss for most of these folks. I remember necks craning up and down the aisles to get a glimpse of me, the Golden Child. Many, I think, were hoping to meet my eyes, deliver a silent threat, “You ain’t got no business playing the Lord’s Game. Empty my ashtray.” 

The next day, after deep introspection, Dad and I drove downtown to the Montgomery Ward sporting goods store, where I purchased what I’d long been missing in my life: my own, non-hand-me-down, state-of-the-art bike. Done up in black with flame decals in various spots, it was in the earliest style of a bmx bike, big nobby tires, a long seat, and fakey number plates featuring the word, in flames, “Wildfire.” As they say, “where there’s smoke…”