Bingo!! Hawaiian Gardens-style

Did you ever wonder, What's the deal with Bingo in California these days??? Probably not, I'm guessing. Unless you are a huge dork like me. That's what I'm here for, folks, to answer the questions you are afraid to ask.

Here's an interesting bit of bingo-trivia: there is a place in Hawaiian Gardens (at less than one-mile-square, it's the smallest of Los Angeles County's 88 cities) called The Bingo Club that actually rakes in about $30 million each year. You thought bingo was for churches? You are right. California law mandates that only non-profits can run bingo games, and are required to give the bulk of the money (after prizes are paid out) to charitable causes. But when you gross $30 million, the "leftovers" are about $5 million per year!

This bingo parlor is run by the non-profit Irving I. Moskowitz Foundation. Good ol' Irv is a retired dentist living in Florida, but he uses the bingo revenues to fund his pet projects, which most notably includes buying up land in Israel and establishing settlements on contested land. For various reasons, he is not so popular with various constituencies. And he attracts a fair amount of press coverage for the, uhm, creative way in which he's able to take $1 at a time from old people in an obscure little city in LA and funnel it across the world to fuel an international conflagration.

So, do you have an image of a bingo hall as a sad hall full of rows of tables and cheap plastic chairs, occasionally filled with old people who look like they are disabled or at least live on a fixed income?

BINGO! You nailed it. Although the new facility is a vast improvement over the cramped strip mall location it used until late 2008, the demographic at the Bingo Club in Hawaiian Gardens is about what I expected. Only fatter.