JOHNSON: Smoking ban helps wring the life out of bingo nights

By Bill Johnson, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Saturday, July 14, 2007

Ihate to keep harping on this, but this one is personal. The Bingo Mine is going out of business.

I hate the smoking ban. Call this the hate column, if you will. But this thing is ruining people's lives.

And yes, I love bingo.

I got hooked on it during the couple of weeks I got off after returning from Iraq the last time. I guess I was in search of something quiet, very solitary, with a potentially big payoff for my troubles. The anti-Iraq.

Way too many people gave it to me - not just for liking bingo, but loving it. Even my kids were all over me.

"Are you really getting that old, Dad?" my son, Ben, told me every time I would gather up my multi-colored markers. Even my wife laughed hysterically when I first told her of where I had been.

And then, settling down, she asked: "Can I go?"

I loved it even though I am a notoriously awful gambler. It is a certainty that I couldn't pick the winner in a one-horse race. A couple of weeks later, I took her.

Her first night working the boards, she won twice - a $100 "postage stamp" haul and, later, the $500, session-ending "black-out" bonanza. I had been going for months and never won a penny.

Soon, I had the whole family - including Ben - wielding marking pens.

It has been two years. Kirsten has won multiple times. I have yet to yell, "Bingo!"

So we were planning to go Friday night. Friday night bingo might well be bingo nirvana. Other players are extremely nice and welcoming. Mothers wheel in babies. Couples bond over their array of boards, some rubbing the good luck charms they place around their boards before the first number falls.

It turned out, there are no Friday night games anymore. I called Larry Stallcup.

He has owned the Bingo Mine for almost exactly 20 years.

"Oh, it was fabulous back then," Larry Stallcup, now 73 years old, recalled. He would have 170 to 180 people inside, marking boards, every night. "For bingo, even in Lafayette, that is quite a few people."

It remained that way until 1990 when the first of the Black Hawk and Central City casinos opened. He immediately lost some 22 percent of his customers, he said.

Still, business remained steady and quite survivable until last July when the statewide smoking ban went into effect, which he estimates has cost him at least another 18 percent of his clientele.

"There is so much competition for the entertainment dollar these days," Larry Stallcup said. "I guess I just couldn't keep up."

The smoking ban, he says, wasn't the total death knell. The groups that ran the games suddenly found it, frankly, not worth their effort to schedule them. Who would show?

Evenings over the past year became a wasteland.

And with little revenue coming in, and with a $12,000-a-month lease payment to make, Larry Stallcup, a former police chief of Lafayette, discovered he simply couldn't make it anymore.

He plans to close the place when his lease runs out in March.

"People just are not showing up the way they used to. Is it smoking? It has a lot to do with it. People hate having to step outside to do it. It affected business."

Boulder Swim Team, which ran the Friday night games, got out because of it, he said. Attendance had plummeted.

So he is now looking for replacement groups. He thinks he can get the Lions to pick up Friday nights, Larry Stallcup says. It will continue to be a struggle, he adds, until he finds another, cheaper place to land come March. He is now scouting joints in Broomfield and Thornton.

American Legion Post No. 111 has long run the best games inside the Mine. It still runs a Wednesday noon game, but abandoned its Monday afternoon sessions shortly after the smoking ban hit.

"We lost, I'd say, 35 percent of our players," Gary Force, the post commander, explained. "For a while there, it was really bad. And it was all the smoking ban."

He believes the post has regained now maybe a third of the players lost a year ago, yet the numbers remain not at all what they were before the ban.

And wherever Larry Stallcup goes, Gary Force says the post likely will follow.

"We're flexible," he said, "and we will move with him as long as he doesn't go too far away. It has to be accessible for our membership, which does all the volunteering."

You need to know of the Bingo Mine and its demise because it is a very good snapshot of the relative-havoc a bad law, which is the smoking ban, has engendered.

Perhaps many of you are right: Things certainly will equal out.

I just wonder at what cost.

In this case, of course it is only bingo. Yet the people it benefited most were those who the service agencies who ran the games used their scant profits to assist, mostly the young and elderly.

OK, maybe I am taking that too far.

But I don't think so.

johnsonw@RockyMountainNews.com