ORANGE : Smokers Can Light Up at Senior Center Bingo

Bingo aficionados will be able to smoke cigarettes while playing at the Orange Senior Center when weekly games begin there next month.

Orange Elderly Services Inc., the nonprofit group that operates the center, won approval from the City Council on Tuesday to run the games and allow smoking. But it will probably have to use its first six months of profit to buy $23,000 worth of ventilation devices called “smoke eaters.”

Keith Regan, executive director of the center, said the equipment will guarantee that clean air will begin circulating in the building within an hour after the final bingo game each Friday night.

“That is where I get comfort personally,” he said. “I’ve never been a smoker, and the last thing I would ever want to do is put anybody in harm’s way.”

The nonprofit organization is projecting that the games will bring in about $5,000 a month for the center, which has seen donations decline over the past two years.

Nick D’Amico, a senior who uses the center, protested the smoking provision, saying that cigar smoking caused him to have a heart attack in the late 1970s. “There are alternative ways to earn money besides bingo,” he said.

But Mary Henderson, another user of the center, said she gave up cigarettes 25 years ago and still supports the bingo games. “I cannot be around secondhand smoke, but from what I’ve learned, that will not be a problem at the senior center.”

The bingo games also will be played simultaneously in a smaller, nonsmoking room, center officials said.