Weekly games help raise funds for senior center

Published on Page 10 of the July 10, 2013 issue of Morgan Hill Life

By Staff Report

It’s Tuesday night at the Morgan Hill Community Center and in the expansive Hiram Morgan Hill Room, people sit in muted silence at tables with bingo cards in front of them. The anticipation mounts as the players wait for the caller, a gray-haired man in a neat dress shirt, to announce the next number. A ping pong ball pops out of a spinning cage and Morgan Hill accountant Phil Robinett examines it careful and speaks clearly into a microphone: “B-6.” Players stamp ink dabbers on their cards. Several more balls are examined by Robinett. “B-10.” “G-52.” “I-21.”

“Bingo!” a woman shouts. Cricket Rubino, an organizer and volunteer helping to run the bingo game, examines the woman’s card and reads the sequence back to Robinett.

“That’s a good bingo,” the caller announces. “We have a good bingo.”

Since its onset Jan. 3, 2013 when Tuesday Night Bingo at the Morgan Hill Community Center formed as a fundraiser to support the Senior Center, it has grown into a favorite pastime for some who come from as far as Monterey and Salinas to play this game of chance.

“The appeal of bingo is to sit down and relax and enjoy time with my wife,” said player Jon, a Morgan Hill resident who chose to not give his last name. “We just come here together and play. It’s a fun night out.” One night, Jon’s wife Paula won $1,199, the maximum amount before the Internal Revenue Service requires the winnings to be reported.

“There are some bingo players who really enjoy gambling, and a lot of them win,” said Morgan Hill resident John Tarvin, one of the bingo game organizers. “For a lot them, this is how they get out and socialize and be with other people.”

A variety of games help keep players coming back, Tarvin said. There’s 15 regular games at Tuesday Night Bingo. Tarvin rattles off names of the games: pull-tab, flash games, a Lucky 7 Progressive Jackpot bingo game, Cherry Bells, Cry Baby, and Good Neighbor. Morgan Hill’s Tuesday night bingo game is the only one in the South Valley that offers wireless Blue Dog electronic card minders to let player keep up with all of the calls simply by pressing one button when a new number is called.

And of course, there’s good old-fashioned bingo paper, a grid of letter-number squares to keep players’ mind focused on finding the numbers as they’re called.

Rubino described how the idea for the bingo night came about after the Morgan Hill City Council voted on the budget and money was cut for senior programs at the Senior Center. “Doors would be opening later and closing earlier at the Senior Center so seniors would have no place to go for good blocks of time,” she said. “So we decided to do something that would create a good flow of money that we could then put into the Senior Center programs. And I just thought that bingo would be a great thing.”

The Tuesday Night Bingo is operated by the Friends of the Morgan Hill Senior Center as an alliance member of the Morgan Hill Community Foundation. All the money raised goes as grants to pay for various programs at the center. Last year $8,400 was given to the center’s programs thanks to the money raised by the bingo games.

Volunteers help make it all happen, Rubino said. “We have wonderful volunteers.
“Many have no real connections to the Senior Center, but they believe in what the Senior Center is for and what it does for people. It takes a team of 10 people to run every bingo night – that’s a lot of people. So we would love to have more volunteers.”

As the night goes on, ping pong balls keep popping out of the machine. Robinett reads more calls. Someone shouts out the magic word “Bingo!” and Rubino rushes over to double check the numbers with the caller.

“That’s a good bingo. We have a good bingo,” Robinett says. “We have a winner.”