Beans and Numbers – a "Bingo!" Combination
Today I would like to tell you the story of how a cigar box, carton cads and a handful of beans can make one rich and famous.
Did you know that contemporary Bingo game descends from the Italian National Lottery Lo Giuoco del Lotto d’Italia, that was first organized in 1530? Today the Italian State lottery is indispensable to the government’s budget, with a yearly contribution in excess of 75 million dollars.
In 1929 the game was eventually brought to the US from Germany. It was made really popular by an American businessman Edwin S. Lowe. One night he was returning back home tired and exhausted, when he decided to drive on to Jacksonville, Georgia in order to start his business appointments at the earliest. Jacksonville met him with bright lights and noise on a town carnival…
One year before he started his own toy business that was about to collapse because of the market crash. That night he couldn’t even imagine that this eventual overnight stop will bring him money and fame.
It was rather late at night and the carnival was about to end. All the booths were closed except one that was really overcrowded with people. He stood on his tiptoes to see what was happening. The action centered on a horseshoe-shaped table covered with numbered cards and beans. People looked concentrated and interested while putting beans on the cards with numbers after a pitchman was pulling numbers from an old cigar box and saying them out loud. “Beano!” used to cry out one of the players when he covered one of the number lines of his number card with beans. As Ed Lowe recalls, he was so excited that tried to participate in the game himself, but he couldn’t get a seat. He noticed that the players were nearly addicted to the game. The pitchman tried to finish the game several times but no one was going to leave. When he finally closed at 3:00 a.m. he had to chase everybody out. After locking up, the pitchman told Lowe that he had run across a game called Lotto while traveling with a carnival in Germany the previous year. His immediate thought was that it would make a good tent or carnival game and bring good profit.
It was the Beano game, the one that made him popular.
Read the end of the story in my next post.
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