Slumming at Monday Night Bingo and Job News from the County
Continuing my anthropological adventures finding out what others live for
After I was laid off from my job as a technical writer at Sun Microsystems in 2004, I started but soon abandoned a blog called Outsourced, Off-shored. This story is adapted from that blog.
In the East Coast where I'd grown up and in the Midwest where I'd raised my children, none of the churches I attended had Bingo nights. But, as I found out one night after I got laid off at fifty-nine in 2004 from the job that had brought me to the San Francisco Bay area in 1989, many churches and other types of organizations here are still using Bingo nights as fundraisers.
Posted to Outsourced, Off-shored on 3/2/2004
A large permanent sign on the corner of the fence around the church parking lot announced: BINGO EVERY MONDAY in big red letters. The name of the parish and the Mass and Confession times were in much smaller black letters above the Bingo announcement.
As I found out when doing some research in the diocesan archives for an article about the history of the parish, Holy Cross advertised its bingo night in the San José Mercury News classifieds in the 1970s. San José was then part of the Archdiocese of San Francisco, and then-Chancellor Monsignor Daniel Walsh put a stop to it with a letter to the pastor: “It does hold the Church up to some criticism when they actually advertise bingo.”
I decided to volunteer to help at the parish Bingo for the first time that Monday night, because I couldn't concentrate on any of the things I had to do at home. I had expected a call for a second interview for a writing job at Santa Clara County by Sunday night, but no call came. The wife of one of the County Commissioners had told me about the opening, so I thought having that connection might help my chances.
Although I hadn’t any directly related experience, I thought my many years as a technical writer in the computer industry and my M.A. emphasis on writing might impress the manager, and that he might agree my skills were transferable. Pundits were always touting the idea that you should lard your resume with glowing accounts of your transferable skills. By then I already was pretty sure that the only thing employers really care about was whether you had already done the kind of job they were seeking to fill, so I should have known better.
On Monday noon I had gone shopping for a tape recorder to use for interviewing subjects for articles I was planning to start writing again as a freelancer for notoriously low- or no-paying Catholic publications. I already had an interview lined up with EWTN (Eternal Word Television Network) news announcer and author Raymond Arroyo. As long as I had more time after the layoff, I was planning to write more about Catholic things dear to my heart. And if I got the county job, my work day would be limited, as it had not been at Sun, and so I'd be freer to continue freelance writing at home in the evenings. That, at least, was the plan.
At the store, I picked up last Thursday's paper, which was lying around on a counter, and I found that Santa Clara County would be laying off twenty-one hundred people. The current chair of the Board of Supervisors wrote about how they were going to have to spread the pain around to the various county agencies.
"Aha," I thought, "maybe that's why I didn't hear anything. They may not be able to fill that position now."
Then just before I left the house in the evening on my way over to the church hall to help at Bingo, I saw an email from a Sun tech writing group manager that I know from another division than the one that laid me off. She thanked me for sending my resume and promised to look it over. Couldn’t be more noncommittal than that. I’d heard that Sun managers weren’t hiring people laid off in any of the last seven rounds of layoffs. Even though the official line was that layoffs were under the guise of needed staff reductions and that hiring managers were encouraged to hire from those who had been let go, the reality was that being one of the laid-off workers put your qualifications in the shade.
Every time I had made it past one of the layoffs, I joked I was glad I was a survivor, like one on the TV show by that name. But after the seventh layoff, my new wry joke was I’d been voted off the island.
The parking lot was full of bingo players’ cars. I parked on the street and made my way into the low-roofed, utilitarian, and rickety parish hall, which was probably built in the 1970s and was not aging well. The hall stood behind the much more attractive small Italianate basilica-style church, whose cornerstone had been laid in 1920.
The games had already begun. In a big room with a polished wood floor surrounded by bleachers that had done double duty as a basketball court before the school had closed, long rows of tables were lined with bingo players. Many of them seemed to be regulars since they were equipped with translucent bingo daubers of varied colors, and cups and plates full of snacks. Some set up special stands for multiple bingo cards they played at the same time.
On the way in, I noticed Brother Lude wearing a carpenter’s apron over his black shirt and pants, and, as usual, he was wearing his Roman collar. Brother ran the Catechism program in the former school building and put his hand to almost everything else around the parish, except the sacraments. He worked the Bingo Night every week with help from parishioners, and he was so popular with everyone that when he graduated from the Diocesan Institute for Leadership in Ministry, Bingo was shut down for the first Monday night in anyone’s memory, and all the players and volunteers went to the Cathedral to cheer Brother Ludie when he got his certificate from the bishop.
As you can imagine, a lot of jokes are made about his name, but when I looked it up, Lude turned out to be a popular name in Malta, where his family originated. It's a variant of Louis.
And his name regrettably kind of fits the jokes. He was a blatant flirt, with both sexes. Women and men almost universally seemed to be attracted to his swarthy face and his good head of curly black hair. I soon figured out he was selling tickets based on his charm. “Oh Brother Ludie, come over here. I want to buy my tickets from you. You bring me luck.”
To keep my mind off my dislike of the outrageously flirtatious religious brother and the sinking feeling I had about my job hunt, I sold Wild Tic Tacs and Popeyes for $1 each, hawking them up and down the crowded rows of tables, between the rounds of bingo. Tic Tacs and Popeyes are pull-tabs. If you get the right symbols to line up, you win whatever amount of money is stamped on the hidden area that is revealed when you pull the tab away.
Brother Ludie was making his way up and down alternative rows, pulling pull-tabs out of the pockets in his apron with a flourish, and he was selling a lot more than I was.
A snack bar set up on a card table between bleachers did a good business in hot dogs, nachos, cookies, candy bars, and soft drinks. What looked like pieces from a leftover birthday sheet cake, with thick, yellow frosting roses, unnaturally green frosting leaves, and white piping, were presented on paper dessert plates, covered in Saran Wrap, and to my mild surprise, the pieces of leftover cake were selling briskly.
As one might expect from the sedentary nature of this form of recreation, and the high-calorie snacks, most of the players were overweight. Not that I should talk. Technical writing, which I’d been doing since 1985, is another sedentary occupation.
The parish schedules Mass in Italian once a week because the parish was first created in 1906 as a mission to serve the many poor Italian immigrants who lived in the neighborhood. At first, of course, the Masses at the mission church were in Latin, but after the Second Vatican Council Latin was replaced with English. And there was one Italian Mass offered at 1 every Sunday afternoon. I’d joined the Italian choir in 2002 soon after I moved to the neighborhood. I had taken one semester of Italian before my trip to Italy at the end of 1999, and I thought it would be a good way to improve my Italian and to get to know my neighbors.
Even though most of the younger generation Italian-Americans had moved away to bigger homes in subdivisions south of downtown, many of the septuagenarian, octogenarian—and some even older Italians—who are still around attended the Italian Mass every week. And some come back from other neighborhoods around the South San Francisco Bay.
Two of the women working the snack bar were from the Italian Mass. I guessed they were native Italians by the better cut of their clothes and their hairstyles. It seemed to me that the Italians in the parish who were born in this country don't have the same smart style sense as immigrants from the old country.
I introduced myself to one of the snack bar helpers, who told me her name is Rosa. I asked if she was Italiano. Rosa corrected me nicely, saying, "Italiana."
"Oh! Si! Si!” I exaggerated as I pounded my forehead. I knew the difference, but I get flustered. I have a smattering of several languages, besides English and Latin, in order of fluency, French, Spanish, and Italian, and when I get flustered I forget everything I know. Or I answer in the wrong language. I was relieved that at least I didn’t say, “Oui! oui!” instead of "Si! Si!"
Some workers in the “Silicon Valley” high-tech industry along with many lawyers and other professionals have also been attracted to the neighborhood as I was by the number of well-kept, moderately priced Victorians and Craftsman-era bungalows and the chance to live in a mostly safe, pleasant neighborhood near the city’s downtown, but you don’t see the professionals at Catholic diocesan churches like this one, except for the odd exceptions like myself.
At some point, a missionary order of priests had come to serve the parish. The neighborhood’s changing demographics brought in Mexicans, Filipinos, and others from many varied national and economic backgrounds who own homes or rent. Spanish Masses and Spanish catechism classes were added to the schedule.
I noticed some of the Filipinos, who volunteer for everything, were around—they attend the English Masses—but I didn’t see any Latinos.
Then I ran into a second-generation Italian American, whom I’ll call Lolly, who I know because we both sing in the Italian choir. Lolly is in her late 60s, and she doesn’t speak Italian. I told her, “I just asked Rosa if she was an Italian guy!”
Lolly replied distractedly but pleasantly enough I should stick to English to stay out of trouble.
She was following Brother Ludie with her eyes as he sold pull tabs, and she was toying with a silver ring with ten raised beads on it on the third finger of her left hand. I knew it was a rosary ring. The ten beads are to help you keep track of the ten Hail Marys in a decade of the rosary.
I had one of those rosary rings, a gold one, because Jun, the Vietnamese organist at the Italian Mass, (which had a Korean choir director!) had given gold rosary rings to me and other choir members one Mother’s Day—after he had tried a month earlier to sell them to us for $75 a piece and failed. Lolly refused the gold one from Jun because as she told me, Brother Ludie had given a silver rosary ring to her after her husband died, and it had sentimental value, and she didn’t want to replace it, even with a gold one.
Helpers arrive at 5:30 every Monday, and the bingo doesn’t close down until around 10, so it was a long evening. On a break from hawking pull tabs, I picked up a newspaper called the Bingo Bugle, North America’s Casino and Gaming Newspaper, Bay Area edition.
The Bingo Bugle listed all the locations for Bingo around the area, from American Legion posts to Cache Creek Indian Bingo to First Samoan Congregational Church. First Samoan? Interesting. Later I found that Samoans are one of the many ethnic groups the Bay Area is home to.
An ad for the Italian Men’s Club Bingo promised “The Best Gourmet Food in Bingoland.”
The paper was illustrated with many photos of gamers. One woman smiled back over her shoulder at the camera, and the caption told us that her name is Louise, and she plays bingo in Salinas nine times a week.
I told another one of the other volunteers, “There’s a woman here in the Bugle who plays bingo nine times a week.” She said, “Some of them here do that. Then they don’t have enough to pay their rent.”
A full-page ad touted the 16th Annual Bingo Bugle World Championship Bingo Tournament and Gaming Cruise, starting at only $1,823. A column titled “Bugle Cruise News” told the story of one Edith Stults of Braintree, Massachusetts, who for years dreamed of taking the cruise but “felt that with a house to keep up and property to maintain, it was an expense she simply could not manage.” But Edith was sure that one day her chance would come. And it did. She’ll be going on this year’s cruise. “How did she do it? ‘Simple; I sold the house!'”
More Wisdom from Bingoland
Another column called “Bingo by Bessie” had a logo with a woman’s head, shoulders, and cleavage showing above her black and white shirt. Bingo numbers are floating around the cartoon woman’s thick, wavy, black head of hair. Bessie seems to be a philosopher of sorts.
“I see God has spoken again to a prominent minister of the Church. It now seems certain that Bush will be our next president or so says the chosen one. This news could really come in handy when it comes to saving money. If it’s all settled there is no need to contribute to the campaign fund of anyone. No need for any of the candidates to get out on the road. . . . Now if God said it, it must be true. . . . ”
Bessie continued,
“I ask God for money a lot, like when the utility bills come due, or when I am playing Bingo or the slots, or when I vote for someone I really want to be elected.”
(Why Bessie would need money while voting is anybody’s guess. But probably she meant she asked for her candidate to win.)
“Sometimes God tells me to help others when I can hardly take care of my own needs, and I try to obey Him. I have heard that you get back tenfold, and so far God owes me millions in tenfolds.”
(Note to Bessie, maybe you would be able to take better care of yourself and others if you didn’t gamble money away?)
Bessie closed the column by saying that she didn’t believe the minister was right that the next election is “a done deal.”
“Sometimes I think, [sic] it is possible to mistake feelings for inspiration. I’ve done it. Like the time I was playing bunco and I thought God wanted me to roll the dice one more time.”
I don’t think she was trying to be funny with that last line, but I just had to laugh. Speaking of laughs, here is a meme from the Bingo Bugle World Championship Bingo Tournament and Gaming Cruise Facebook page. I think it says it all.
When I came back from selling my last four-pack of Popeyes, I spoke for a minute with another Italian-American volunteer, Jo Amato, an 83-year-old dynamo. She told me she only missed one week of bingo in thirty years, and that was after her husband Tony died three weeks ago.
When I blurted out to Jo that I was feeling like a dope pusher, she gave me a big uncomprehending smile and edged away.
But no, really, I couldn’t make myself go to help out again there.
Another of the volunteers, Pat, a stocky greying blond guy in his 50s, one of the few Irish-Americans I’ve met at the church, had shown me how to sell the Wild Tic Tacs and count the money. He too seemed distracted. Without looking away from Brother Ludie where the brother was playing the players, Pat told me that the bingo brings in $3,000 a week.
This way of making money to run the church plant and to pay the salaries is convenient for the pastor, Father Louis Favero, “I doh-ne like to ask for money.” One day, when Father Favero was processing into the church for Mass, I was startled to see him wearing a gold bracelet.
This is a weird parish, I started to think at that point. After Bingo night, I knew for sure. Maybe it’s not weird, but if it’s normal, I don’t know what happened to the Church I thought I was coming back to. But that’s a whole other story.
My main point though is, isn’t it obvious that Bingo is the wrong way to fund a parish?
This weekly bingo probably started innocently enough. That’s how it generally goes with moral decision-making. We start with small rationalizations and once the slightly wrong thing gets established in our thinking and gets structured into our routines, then the slightly wrong thing inevitably starts to grow familiar and accepted, and whatever expansions into more-wrong things that are associated with it also get covered under the initial rationalization. The original goal is lost sight of, and the enormity of the current evil is not seen because it has become a part of what we are used to, like the proverbial elephant in the living room.
What would Jesus do? The question is an old one, by the way. Author Stephen Prothero in American Jesus noted that in 1897, the year my old Victorian house was built, a writer called Charles Monroe Sheldon wrote a book called In His Steps: “What Would Jesus do?”
I can state with certainty that Jesus wouldn’t be using his charisma to push bingo cards and pull tabs to addicted retirees and blue-collar workers to pay for the support of His Church.
When I had been trying out a lot of Protestant denominations on what turned out to be my way back to the Catholic Church, I learned that Protestant preachers aren’t ashamed of asking for money. They quote St. Paul, “The worker is worthy of his hire,” along with another verse from the Old Testament that says oxen should not be muzzled while they push the treadmill to grind the grain.
The general run-of-the-mill Catholic tends not to perform any religious observance unless it is binding under pain of sin. Since tithing is voluntary these days, that means it is not practiced by most Catholics. Most Catholics seem to have forgotten or were never taught that the precepts of the Church still apply, including this one, that Catholics must contribute to the support of the church.
Immigrant families used to give sacrificially, and from their sacrifices, many beautiful dignified churches were built in Massachusetts where I grew up. And the generosity continued even to the next generation. Each family gave according to its means. I remember that my blue-collar family just getting by in the 50s used to put $1 in the collection plate when $1 was the minimum hourly wage.
And so I was appalled one Sunday when I attended Mass at a church in the upscale Mission San José area in Fremont, north of San José, in the 1990s. In spite of the neighborhood’s affluence, the church building was undignified. It looked like a motel from the outside and had folding chairs inside.
What appalled me the most was finding out that even the well-to-do were still mostly donating dollar bills. After Mass, I asked an usher I knew to help me get change from the collection basket. “You can just give me a $10 bill and I’ll put this twenty in,” I told him. He scoffed, “It’s going to be hard to find a ten in this basket. It’s full of dollars.” And he was right, it took him a while. He ended up giving me $10 in dollars.
The next day after Bingo, Tuesday morning, I opened the previous day’s mail. All my speculations about the reason I hadn’t heard from the county about the job would have been laid to rest if I’d looked at the mail when it first arrived. A letter from the man who’d interviewed me informed me that they had identified a number of other candidates who were a better match for the position than I was.
I was on the way out to daily Mass when I opened the letter, and I had to come back in the house to try to compose myself. The comfortable mental picture I painted about myself in that job flooded over me.
For the next nine months of that temporary position, as I had dreamed, I would have an interesting job, a respectable role in the community that I now call home, a two-mile commute, a chance to learn about the county and to meet local people and get more grounded. I had looked forward to working in an office that was well-managed with a clear chain of command.
I had to continue to cry and pray through that loss in front of the Blessed Sacrament after Mass that day.
With all the uncertainty about my future, all I could do was say, Jesus I put my trust in you.
Things got even worse before they got better. That summer, just after I finally got hired for a technical writing contract, I was diagnosed with tonsil cancer, and as a result, I was summarily let go before the contract started. I couldn’t have worked anyway, the chemo and radiation treatment was grueling, and mouth sores made tube feeding necessary. But I made it through, although I was given the grace to be at peace about the outcome in any event. God must not have wanted me just yet.
After treatment, I finally found another technical writing job at Cyclades, a small computer storage company started by Brazilians, which was a hoot, because the Brazilian spirit there was such a contrast to other previous work environments at other Silicon Valley companies.
Cyclades was then purchased by Avocent, an Alabama storage company, and it was another fascinating anthropological experience to travel to their headquarters for training and get exposed to their southern ways. Coke for breakfast, anyone?
In 2005, I started singing Gregorian Chant and Renaissance polyphony at St. Ann Choir in Palo Alto. In 2006, I started singing chant and polyphony in another choir formed at the new Mother of Perpetual Help Oratory in Santa Clara, which was erected to offer traditional Latin Masses.
After another layoff in 2008, I found the best job of my technical writing career, which also included course development, which ended in 2011. Since my last layoff, I’ve been writing full-time, mostly living off social security and my small 401k, and happily publishing more and more of my writings at more and more notoriously low- or no-paying Catholic publications, and at this Substack, surprised and delighted by receiving some gratifying recognition at this late age.
This was originally published at Dappled Things magazine’s Deep Down Things blog here. Names have been changed. Rewritten and republished with kind permission.