Number’s up for northern bingo game

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This article was published 29/03/2012 (5264 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

FLIN FLON — Joann Skeavington unfolds the chalky pieces of paper and neatly arranges them on the kitchen table in front of her.

Her ink dauber ready to go, she listens as the nearby radio switches from a news announcer’s baritone voice to the familiar rumble of plastic balls.

As she has most Saturday mornings for the past 28 years, the Flin Flon homemaker is participating in that northern Manitoba ritual known as Rotary Radio Bingo.

“I enjoy knowing that it’s supporting the North, supporting the Rotary Club, and I enjoy the chance to win,” says Skeavington, 54, a mother of two. “I just enjoy being able to play in the comfort of my home, too.”

But following the game this Saturday, Skeavington and the thousands of others who have tuned into the bingo over the years will have to find new ways of injecting thrills into their weekends.

After nearly four decades, Rotary Radio Bingo — heard on CFAR-590 in Flin Flon, CJ-1240 in The Pas and 610-CHTM in Thompson — is signing off for good.

An aging listenership, online gambling and competition from NCI radio’s Saturday morning bingo — an institution in its own right — have eaten away at the profitability of the Flin Flon-based game.

Whereas weekly card sales stood at roughly 6,000 a decade ago, they have plummeted to less than 600 today. With the writing on the wall, the Rotary Club of Flin Flon recently voted to cancel the bingo and focus efforts on more lucrative fundraising opportunities.

Wayne Fraser, longtime chairman of the bingo, says the decision was regrettable but inevitable.

“It’s been at least four or five years that we’ve been cutting the meat off the bone, and now we’re down to the bone,” he says.

Long before the days of cost-cutting, Rotary Radio Bingo launched in 1974 when the Rotarians borrowed the model from two previous organizing groups.

Bingo first hit Flin Flon radio airwaves in 1972, when CFAR became the only station outside Winnipeg to pick up the Royal Winnipeg Ballet radio bingo.

Within two years, the ballet company, disappointed with low revenues, turned the bingo over to the Rotary Clubs of Manitoba, which ran it for about six months.

That arrangement would not last, either. So was radio bingo in the north a dead end? Not quite.

Within a few months, a Flin Flon Rotarian, Jack Gordon, bought airtime on CFAR to host his own bingo to generate dollars for his daughter’s run in a local teen pageant.

The ensuing success had Gordon urging his club to operate its own weekly radio bingo. They agreed, giving birth to a new fundraiser — and northern custom.

Broadcast live by Rotarians from CFAR, or occasionally on location, it didn’t take long for the half-hour program to find a faithful audience.

“A lot of people have been playing this bingo for 30 or (nearly) 40 years, and they like their Saturday morning with coffee and bingo,” says Fraser.

In time the bingo expanded beyond Flin Flon to The Pas and, in more recent times, Thompson, where Elaine Clemons has tuned in for nearly the past decade.

It was a habit that paid off early on for Clemons. In 2004, playing the bingo for just the second time, she walked away with $94,000, the program’s largest jackpot ever.

Clemons has since turned the bingo into a social outlet, with she and her family scouring cards for numbers to blot out.

“You can usually sleep in Saturdays, but we’d play it,” she says. “It was something to get up for.”

Clemons often plays the NCI bingo before switching stations for the Rotary edition. Unfortunately for the Rotarians, their jackpot — currently at $2,500 — lacks the drawing power over at NCI, whose top prize now stands at $276,000.

And NCI’s bingo is most popular on Rotarian turf.

“I’d have to say the majority of the North is what supports our bingo,” says David McLeod, CEO of NCI, which reaches virtually all of the province.

Now, as the Rotarians prepare to call their last numbers, both Clemons and Skeavington plan to support the charitable game one final time.

Skeavington hasn’t had the same luck as Clemons, having won only a case of Pepsi, though she did come within one number of 2004’s record jackpot.

Win or lose this weekend, Skeavington knows that Saturday mornings — both in her home and across the North — will never quite be the same.

“I just took it for granted that Rotary Radio Bingo would be here forever,” she says.

Jonathon Naylor is editor of The Reminder newspaper in Flin Flon.

jonathon_naylor@hotmail.com