The Road to Odds : A Simi Group Buses to Indian Bingo, on Trail of Fun and Profit

They climbed onto the big red and silver bus in the parking lot of a Simi Valley shopping center, 36 Saturday travelers in their easy clothes, heading out for the distant enchantment of Crazy T, 6-Pack the Hard Way and a $35,000 Do-It-Yourself.

Almost everyone on the expedition lit up a cigarette right away, and soon, in the smoke-clogged cabin, they crossed that hazy boundary that divides the reach of California law from the pull of Big Stakes Bingo.

Their destination, San Manuel Indian Reservation in San Bernardino County, was 90 miles away. The ride was free, courtesy of the house.

Hardly had they rolled onto the freeway, however, before they began to part with their money.

“Just a few things to go over; then, when we get over the hills and things, we’ll play some games,” their leader, 34-year-old ex-police dispatcher Mindy Richards, said into a microphone at the front of the bus.

She took a stack of cardboard bingo boards out of a box and dispensed them as she went down the aisle.

An assistant followed, collecting cash--$2 to play, $5 toward a pack of bingo cards.

They played eight games on the bus: seven for $10 payoffs and one for a pack of cards to play on the Early Bird games.

Some of the players got a little excited as Richards called out numbers.

“Now hit me. Hit me. Come on , Mindy,” Dorothy Brown, a retired nurse and foster mother, shouted. “Damn it. I needed I-22.”

That was just letting down among friends, Richards said.

Two hours later, she said, up to 2,600 players would fall library quiet in the great bingo hall, and remain so for six hours as the numbers rolled in the big-stakes games. For Indian bingo is no church social.

Exempt from California laws that limit church and charity bingo payoffs to $250, Indian tribes in Riverside and San Bernardino have developed bingo into an odd synthesis of a community parlor game and Las Vegas stakes.

Thousands of bingo players arrive seven days a week on buses to bet anywhere from $25 to more than $100 in the hope of winning pots that start at $500 and have no limit.

A complex bus system brings a large part of the nightly assembly of players from all over Southern California. It works through coordinators like Richards who advertise by word of mouth and flyers.

As compensation for her efforts in organizing the trips, Richards keeps the $5 she collects from each passenger. But the house throws in $5 worth of Late Bird cards to make it an even deal for the passengers.

Her duties include maintaining the group’s esprit de corps by promoting the philosophy that if one wins, they all win.

“We haven’t hit big yet,” she said.

Any night could be the night.

Just before 5 p.m., the bus rolled behind another into a crescent-shaped driveway under a Navajo-style stucco and wood-beam building on the outskirts of San Bernardino. Armed guards stood by.

Richards rushed in ahead of her group and secured a place in the center of the hall, lined with row upon row of white plastic-top tables and swiveling cafeteria chairs bolted to the floor.

Preparations for Play

The players used the hour before the 6 p.m. warm-up games to prepare for the long night ahead. They taped plastic trash bags to the edge of the table tops, spread out handbags containing daubers--the paint-filled bottles bingo players use to mark their cards--and bags full of cigarettes and munchies such as Red Hots, M&Ms;, chocolate kisses and even a can of Cavendish & Harvey Ltd. candies.

They also positioned their lucky charms.

“That’s my elephant,” said Gail Beaston, a Simi Valley office manager.

“That’s my Teddy,” said her friend Judy Skowronski, a Simi Valley bookkeeper. “They have to be together like good friends, like we are. The elephant’s trunk has to face the door to bring in good luck.”

“That’s my granddaughter,” Ann Gillum said, pointing to a small color photograph in a porcelain frame of a young girl in white gloves.

Others went to the snack bar to buy nachos, buttered popcorn and pastrami sandwiches.

At the head of the table, Richards sat with Elly Levine and her daughter, Sharyn. They occupied themselves by ripping small tabs off cardboard tickets called pull tabs, bought for $1 each from youths carrying them in plastic hardware baskets.

Paper ‘Slot Machines’

Each tab uncovered slot-machine pictographs of lemons, oranges and cherries. Three of a kind lined up was a winner.

Dozens of spent pull tabs lay on the table.

Elly Levine said she had spent $25 already. Later, she whispered that it was actually more. “I didn’t want my daughter to know.”

Her daughter, meanwhile, had depleted her $60 stake to $7, but had $100 in winnings to show for it.

“She got me hooked the day I turned 18,” Sharyn Levine said, pretending to sneer at her mother. “Isn’t it disgusting?”

Phyllis O’Donnell, who wore a black polyester blouse in a silver-dollar pattern, won $115 on a pull tab.

O’Donnell is a crossing guard now but used to be a hospital volunteer. She has been playing bingo “forever,” she said.

She was ripping open pull tabs at almost the rate others were eating popcorn.

“You gotta play ‘em to win ‘em,” she said.

“My husband was inducted into the service in ‘42, killed in ‘44,” O’Donnell said. “That’s all I have left in my old age, believe me. That’s where my money goes.”

The Bingo Haze

Early in the evening, a haze of smoke as dense as a Los Angeles inversion layer filled the hall. Even as some players began to dab handkerchiefs in the corner of their eyes, almost everyone in the room continued to puff on cigarettes.

“Bingo players are smokers,” Gillum said. “You drink a lot of coffee. You smoke a lot. Same thing as when you play cards.”

As Richards predicted, though, they didn’t carouse. Alcohol is not sold in the bingo hall, and excess talking is against the rules. Without any urging, the hall fell silent when the caller pulled up the first Ping-Pong ball and said the number in a soothing voice:

“N-32.”

The only sounds were whispered chatter and the transactions among players and young men and women in “San Manuel” shirts hawking extra game cards, pull tabs and blank cards for the Do-It-Yourself jackpot.

Of the 285 employees, many wearing nameplates with nicknames like Crazy Eddie and Grandpa Larry, only about 5% are Indian, said general manager Arthur Rozen, a small, bald man who patrolled the aisles all night in a blue double-knit jacket with gray and maroon vertical stripes.

Outside Management

The San Manuel band of the Mission Indian tribe contracts with the management company that Rozen formed to run the hall. Under the arrangement, the company will turn over 60% of the proceeds to the Indians and keep 40%, once the first $4 million of the $7 million cost of the project is paid, Rozen said.

Rozen, who came out of retirement from a Las Vegas auto leasing business to run the hall, is originally from Massachusetts, and a veteran of bingo.

He couldn’t remember the year he opened his first hall, after Massachusetts legalized bingo. He said it was early in Franklin Roosevelt’s first term.

“But I’ve never had an opportunity like here, where the prizes are unlimited,” he said. “This thing is kind of fun for me.”

He regards himself as more of a social director than a gambling king.

“A lot of the people are older,” he said of the clientele. “They don’t drink. They come from quite a distance. This is their social life. They don’t mind losing. It’s an evening out. If they don’t win, they almost win.”

Variety of Players

Although bingo may have a reputation as the game of single and often elderly women, the Simi Valley group included two married couples; a retired machinist and a Southern Pacific car repairman who also play up to two nights a week at local church games, and five mother-daughter teams.

“It’s a great thing for mothers and daughters to do,” said Judy Shinkowsky, who was sitting with her daughter, Wanda, across from Beverly Smith and her daughter, Robin Rodriguez. “She said she’d rather come and play bingo with me than go to the bars and drink.”

Wanda had not been attending recently, her mother said, because she just had a baby. But “grandpa,” who was just as happy staying home, was baby-sitting. He has separate deals with his wife and daughter.

“He gets half of what I get and 10% of what she gets,” Shinkowsky said. “He makes out better staying home.”

With 2,000 to 2,500 players in the hall, most of them smoking, the odds of catching emphysema were probably greater than the odds of winning the $500 to $3,000 pot at the end of each game.

Playing Multiple Cards

It was easy to improve the odds, of course, by buying more cards. Most players did so, beginning some games with six or eight columns of cards, three deep, a burden of concentration from which there was little respite.

Once the playing began, the games went on without break, beginning with warm-ups, then a series of Early Bird games, then the 11 regular games, the Late Birds and the Night Owls.

The inexorable selection and calling of the numbers left no time even for dashes to the snack bar or ladies’ room, of which the house provided three for each men’s room.

Therefore, the players used the buddy system, covering for each other with bursts of extreme concentration while their partners took care of necessities.

The rhythm of the contest allowed everyone to be on duty for the big jackpots, interspersed throughout the evening. These games, designed to be difficult to win, grow by $3,000 to $5,000 every night until somebody finally scores. Dry spells can easily build the pot to more than $100,000, creating an anticipation that only increases the turnout and, consequently, the odds.

Marketing Bingo

“It’s like a department store has a special to bring ‘em in,” Rozen said. “We’re marketing all the time.”

The Do-It-Yourself, which is won when all eight of the numbers a player has written in advance on a blank card come up in 20 Ping-Pong balls, began the night at $35,000 and ended it at $40,000. Nobody won. Nor did anyone win the $22,000 Super Jackpot by filling in a whole card in 52 numbers. That pot grew to $25,000.

The Simi bus had only one bingo--won by Rita Proud of Moorpark, who usually plays at the Moorpark Trailer Park, where she lives. She won $750 on her first Indian bingo trip, splitting a pot with another player who got bingo on the same number.

As the excitement of that moment faded and plastic trash bags swelled, hour after hour, with paint-dotted losing cards, disgust showed on the faces of Dorothy Brown and her friends Renee Quezada and Imogene Latham, at the far end of the table.

“Quote me,” Latham said. “This is the lousiest pack I ever had.”

It wasn’t really a complaint against the house, just a serious bingo player’s frequent lament.

Committed Player

Latham said she never misses the Saturday trip.

“I love bingo,” she said.

“I love it, too,” Brown said. “You see, when you get to a certain age--25--what else is there for you to do? Keeps us out of the bars. What was that number?”

“You see, you’re talking, you missed the number,” Quezada sniffed. She took little part in the conversation, hovering instead over six columns of cards, daubing until her arms were covered with powdery pink paint.

Latham, a bus driver for the Las Virgenes Unified School District, went on talking. She said all her charges know about her bingo trips.

“Oh, you better believe it, they know,” she said. “Everybody knows. I let everybody know. I haven’t been winning, though.

Nevertheless, she declined to divulge how much she had spent.

“That’s my business,” she said. “I don’t want my daughter to know how much I spend.”

“My daughter gives me money,” Brown put in. “She’s a good girl.”

“I’m 63 and I still have to keep working,” Latham said.

“Oh, she’s got money,” Brown said. “She just doesn’t want to spend it.”

No Luck From Late Bird

About 11 p.m. the last Late Bird ended with no luck for the three women.

“No, no, no,” Brown said in a last protest. “No way. You’re kidding.”

They packed up their things as the caller’s soothing voice announced the Night Owl games.

“She won’t let us stay,” Latham said, feigning a scowl toward Richards.

“I don’t want to stay,” Brown said.

“Why not? You don’t have anything else to do,” Latham said.

“I cook every day. I clean the house.”

“Oh, we don’t want to hear it.”

Some slept on the way home. Others gossiped quietly.

A little after 1 a.m., they fanned out into a dark parking lot.