A Game Goes Up in Smoke : Bingo Organizers at Redondo High Call It Quits, Saying Players Won’t Come When Smoking Is Banned

In the past seven years, the Redondo Beach Sea Hawk Booster Club’s twice-weekly bingo game has raised about $1 million for Redondo Union High School, paying for everything from bleachers and pitching machines to running shoes and eyeglasses.

But the booster club intends to host its last bingo game on June 29.

The decision, which has touched off controversy and regret among players and school officials, was not prompted by qualms about gambling. The cause, rather, is looming anti-smoking regulations that by 1996 will outlaw tobacco use by anyone at any time at schools that receive revenues from state tobacco taxes.

“You’ve got to have a cigarette going when you’re playing bingo, just because you get really nervous,” explains bingo enthusiast Annette Norman, 43, who has been puffing for 34 years. “You either smoke or you eat.”

Smoking, the games’ organizers argue, is to bingo what peanuts are to baseball and beer is to poker. They fear that if Redondo’s school board follows through on a likely plan to ban bingo players from lighting up in the next few months, the bingo game itself will go up in smoke.

“We need 185 players to break even, and we don’t think we would draw 185 nonsmokers,” said bingo manager Julie Woodruff. “We just don’t think we can survive the nonsmoking policy.”

Last month the booster club board decided to take preemptive action with its vote to close down the game on June 29, the day before the club’s 1993-94 fiscal year begins.

Bingo organizers say they would reconsider their decision if school officials found them another place to hold the game. But so far, they say, school officials have made no offers.

“It was an agonizing decision,” Woodruff said. “It took us about five months to even seriously contemplate it.”

Bingo organizers called it ironic that although tobacco taxes bring the South Bay Union High School District about $18,000 a year, the boosters’ bingo games in the past few years have been providing Redondo Union High alone with more than 10 times that amount.

“They only give them $18,000? That doesn’t buy a computer,” Booster Club President JoAnn Stone said incredulously. “We built bleachers in the girls’ softball field. We bought them pitching machines. We’ve done so much. It doesn’t make sense.”

Redondo Union High’s bingo is not the only such game jeopardized by the smoke-free movement. The state health law could ring the death knell for dozens of school-hosted bingo games statewide that raise money for schools, bingo organizers say.

“They’re cutting funding to education and then they make it impossible to fund-raise,” complained David Shannon, athletic director of El Camino College, which hosts bingo fund-raisers for three South Bay high schools.

“Every school in California will operate with less funds next year” because of the state’s overall budget crisis, he said. “And yet, if they want to legislate a nonsmoking environment, it will further cripple our ability to run (athletic and other) programs.”

Several members of the newly created Redondo Beach Unified School District’s governing board said they want to save the high school’s bingo game.

Trustee Bart Swanson said he would like to move the game to another campus building, one that is off-limits to students and that can easily accommodate smokers.

“My vote would be to put the whole thing off for a year . . . and dedicate a space for them (that allows smoking) and is not going to conflict with any law,” Swanson said.

State officials and others, however, say that may not be possible if they want to comply with the health regulations.

The state smoking ban, approved by the Legislature in July, 1991, says districts that receive state tobacco revenues, all of which are earmarked for tobacco prevention education programs, “shall prohibit the use of tobacco on school property” by July 1, 1996.

“Friday night bingo games are not an exception,” said Sally Christie, program assistant for the Healthy Kids, Healthy California Office of the California Department of Education. “The point is to create safe, clean, healthy environments for our kids. You can’t have exceptions to that type of goal.”

Valerie Dombrowski--like Swanson, a member of the new unified school district’s board--agrees. Unless parents and teachers are firm about a no-smoking policy, she said, students will not get the message.

“I personally feel you don’t say ‘Do as I say, not as I do,’ ” she said. “The rule has to apply straight across.”

Like other bingo games in schools around the state, Redondo Union’s game was started to offset severe funding cutbacks in public education following Proposition 13.

Volunteers, mostly parents, operate the bingo game, doing everything from calling out numbers to arranging tables and chairs. All of the money, except what is needed to cover expenses, goes to Redondo Union High. Although the boosters primarily support athletic programs, bingo proceeds have paid for everything from art supplies to reading materials.

The bingo game, held in the cafeteria every Tuesday and Sunday, usually draws about 200 players a night.

Bingo players, many of them toting cigarettes and bottles of the colored ink that they use to dab on their game cards as bingo numbers are called out, start arriving at the cafeteria by 4 p.m., where they meet for an early dinner and chat. By the time the first bingo ball is drawn at 6:30 p.m., the room is hazy with smoke. Ashtrays steadily fill up as the night progresses. A small group of nonsmokers, usually no more than a half dozen, , play in a tiny room at the back.

In the main room, opinions vary as to whether the game would survive a smoking ban.

Pauline Coil, a 74-year-old Torrance resident, doesn’t need to think before answering the question.

“I wouldn’t come if I couldn’t smoke,” she says, pulling a Virginia Slims out of its package and thumbing a lighter. “I tried three times to quit,” she adds, starting to cough. “I can’t do it.”

Seated two rows away is Jane Kalinski, 57, who is not so sure a smoking ban would mean the end of bingo.

“I’m a smoker, but I can quit,” Kalinski of Torrance says as she busily dabs blue ink on a large spread of bingo cards. “I think they should try it and see how many people are going to come. I could do it, but maybe a lot of people couldn’t.”

Indeed, fears that a smoking ban would drive away players seem well founded.

When bingo organizers at a Catholic School in Perris decided to ban smoking about six months ago, so many players stopped coming that they ended up reversing the policy, said Steven Montgomery, co-owner of a Bingo Bugle Newspaper franchise in Sun Valley.

And bingo hosts in the San Gabriel Valley and the city of Walnut closed their doors within a week of a smoking ban because of diminishing crowds.

“We’re already so discriminated against. It’s like (nonsmokers) are trying to run your life,” said Sarah Hall, a retiree and a smoker who plays at Redondo Union’s Tuesday night games. “We’re not going to stop playing bingo. We’ll find other places to go. But it’s the kids here who are going to get hurt.”