A Bingo Night Goes Up in Smoke

Let us solemnly turn our cards over and engage in a moment of silence for the longest-established permanent bingo game in Camarillo.

After 18 years, the weekly fund-raiser at Adolfo Camarillo High School is dead--as in dead and G-17, O-3, N-44 gone.

They buried it last night. More than 250 players--far more than the band of hardy regulars that usually shows up these days--gathered for one last hurrah in the school cafeteria.

After spending so many Tuesday nights vying for $250 jackpots, they’ll have to move on. Games 15 minutes away at the Point Mugu naval base offer payouts nearly triple that size. Bingo two hours north at the Santa Ynez Chumash reservation offers new cars and jackpots as high as $2,000.

But there’s another lure that’s just as powerful for many bingo players, some of whom still mourn the passing of Lucky Strikes: You can smoke--even if you have to smoke outside--on the base and on the reservation and at lodge halls and even in some church basements.

But nowhere in California are you permitted to smoke--even outside--on the campus of a public school. That means high school bingo games are going the way of high school Latin, and more families than ever are being sentenced to years of hard labor in forced peanut-brittle sales.

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Bingo at Camarillo High was a big deal.

The school has six telephone numbers listed in the white pages. One of them is for the “PTA & Bingo Committee.”

Since its inception in 1981, the game raised more than $750,000 for school activities. It bought the school a running track, a football stadium and an outdoor stage. It paid for scholarships. It helped fund numerous clubs and teams, and allowed the school to hold an annual luncheon for a visiting author.

“For those of us who have counted on that money, it’ll be hard,” said Linda Ayerza, the school’s activities director. “We might have to start product sales, and we haven’t done the door-to-door thing for a long time.”

At the game’s swan song last night, Terry Tackett, the school’s principal, gave the crowd a sentimental salute. “I’d like to throw a kiss to you and I’m afraid it’s forever,” he said. “I wish you health, happiness and a bingo in any facility that you play.”

Bruce Colell, the school’s music chairman, also thanked the players.

“Over the last 18 years your money has supported our department in so many ways,” he said. There were the band uniforms, the choir outfits, the buses to concerts and competitions, the food at summer band camp, the music for the jazz ensemble--a hundred things that would never cross the mind of anyone whose most fervent wish at the moment is for N-56.

Longtime volunteers--some had been with Camarillo’s game since the beginning--strolled down long rows of lunch tables, helping those who needed it. This game had brought out more people than any in recent memory.

A warm night also helped; the heating system had balked at the last month’s cold temperatures and some players had sat through the games bundled up in coats and mittens.

“If we had this turnout every night, we wouldn’t have to shut down,” said Tackett, who had been in on the birth of the campus game as dean of students in 1981.

But bingo success takes more than good intentions. It takes hard work, perseverance, consistency of purpose, and a thick blue haze.

In 1998, the state’s smoking ban took full effect. Not surprisingly Camarillo’s game had been running in the red by $2,000 a month since the start of the school year.

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Of course, the smoking ban wasn’t aimed at Camarillo alone.

The no-smoking-even-outside rule has reduced bingo’s popularity by 15% and sounded the death knell for a number of games at California schools, said Don Carrier, editor of a players publication called the Bingo Bugle.

“It’s one thing to not allow smoking in the hall,” he said. “But if you can’t go outside, where the wind is blowing, and have a smoke, then something is wrong somewhere.”

Who could disagree?

I say, let the poor wretches puff away outdoors, where the smoke can dissipate in the stratosphere.

For which is better: Allowing nicotine addicts to shiver on a school loading dock, butts in hand, as they donate their gambling losses to the Science Club--or allowing the schools to turn our teenagers and, God help us, their parents, into nonstop shills for companies peddling gift wrap, junk candy, greeting cards, supermarket scrip, and on and on?

Do we want to push our children into premature sales?

Such questions are pointless now. The law is the law, and bingo at Camarillo High is dead.

That didn’t surprise Dorothy Johnson, proprietor of Dorothy’s Chuck Wagon cafe. A few years ago, she fought Camarillo’s proposed anti-smoking ordinance by printing up 500 T-shirts that said: “Welcome to Commie-Rio.” It didn’t work.

“You can’t fight City Hall,” she said, “and you sure can’t fight the state.”