I heard recently that the history of bingo is somehow connected to Las Vegas. But I thought that the game was a lot older than that, like going back hundreds of years. Do you know of a connection?
Yes, though we had to do some digging and the link is pretty obscure and brief. But first, a little background.
The game we know today as “bingo” is a direct descendant of the first Italian state lottery, Lo Giuoco del Lotto d'Italia, which was launched when Italy was united as a nation state in 1530 and still contributes a significant amount of revenue to the Italian government’s budget.
The game then spread throughout Europe and finally across the ocean to the U.S., where a version called "Beano" became popular on the carnival circuit in the early 20th century.
According to Wikipedia, in the early 1920s, one Hugh J. Ward standardized the game for carnivals in western Pennsylvania. “He copyrighted it and published a rule book in 1933.”
Apparently rather quickly, Beano migrated to the South. While attending a traveling carnival near Atlanta in 1929, a toy salesman from Brooklyn named Edwin Lowe was attracted to the game by the enthusiasm of the players. Lowe brought the game back to New York and it was an immediate hit at church fundraising events.
The early game had too few numbers and too many duplicate winners, so Lowe asked a Columbia University mathematician to work up some new possibilities, which resulted in 6,000 possible combinations.
It’s also believed that Lowe is responsible for changing the name from Beano to Bingo. As the story goes, one night a group of Lowe's friends were playing the game at his home and one lady, whose card was filling up, got particularly excited. Apparently, when her one remaining number was called, the woman jumped up and in her frenzy couldn't quite pronounce the word "Beano," instead uttering a stuttered "B-B-BINGO!" This story seems a little farfetched to us, but it's the only version we've ever come across, so perhaps it's true.
"I cannot describe the strange sense of elation which that girl's cry brought to me," Lowe is said to have reminisced afterwards. "All I could think of was that I was going to come out with this game and it was going to be called Bingo!"
Here’s where we come to the relationship between bingo and Vegas.
Ed Lowe was born in Poland, the son of an Orthodox rabbi. At age 18, he emigrated to New York, where his outgoing personality and instincts about people and their pleasures made him a natural as a traveling salesman. He founded a toy company that, in addition to Bingo, brought out Yahtzee (which is another interesting story), along with miniature and magnetized board games.
After making a fortune in “gaming” and on his way to a total of eight marriages (which produced only one daughter), Ed Lowe naturally gravitated to Las Vegas where, in 1963, he opened a $12 million 450-room Tudor-style motel called the Tally Ho on the south Strip. It featured 32 villas, six restaurants, four swimming pools, and a par-54 nine-hole golf course (some believed it to be the most challenging course west of the Mississippi). The one amenity it didn’t have was a casino.
The non-casino Tally Ho experiment failed fast; in those days, Vegas hotels needed gambling to survive. Lowe applied for a gambling license, but was denied. He sold out and the place closed; it reopened in 1966 as the Aladdin.
Lowe sold his toy company to Milton Bradley in 1973 for $26 million. He went on to become a Broadway producer and real-estate developer.
So there you have it: The man who popularized (and likely named) the game of Bingo in the U.S. had a brief business interest in Las Vegas.
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Dec-14-2017
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