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No booing in Bingo - so they've moved on

ST. PETERSBURG Displaced players take their markers uptown after the priest at St. Therese's announces the game's over.

By Lin Young
Published April 8, 2007

Bingo is a major form of entertainment for those who say it provides a place to meet people and exercise their brains by concentrating on their numbers being called out.

Many have favorite places where they've faithfully played for years - or decades while getting to know other players - becoming like family.

St. Therese Byzantine Catholic Church on 13th Avenue N was one such place. The church held afternoon games twice a week for nearly 30 years in its 10,000-square-foot hall. That all ended last month.

That familial unit was torn apart March 20 without a word to the faithful players, when Father Robert Evancho posted notices on the doors and elsewhere stating Bingo would end March 31.

To add further insult, after players booed him upon learning of the decision, Evancho ordered March 20 to be Bingo's last stand.

Evancho says he never heard the booing. The decision to cancel the last three game dates was made because he thought if people were already angry about Bingo ending, they would just become angrier if they came back for the next few weeks, he said.

However, some players say what made them angry was the prospect of regular players, some of whom are in their 80s and 90s and use wheelchairs or walkers, not knowing about the change and arriving to find the doors locked.

Among those who enjoyed those Bingo matinees were St. Petersburg residents Jean Bower, Joanne Cortis, Lorna Holder and Edith Snyder, along with snowbird Opal LoBianco, who said she had played there for 26 years.

Now many former St. Therese players play Bingo on Tuesday nights at the Disabled American Veterans Hall on 37th Street N, home of the Sunshine City Kiwanis game.

"When you go twice a week, you become family," Cortis said. Plus she said there were other benefits. "You know everybody's retired, 24/7 is a lot of husband," she said. St. Therese gave women a "legitimate place to go" during the day.

"What about the people who came in taxis and wheelchair transit and found the place locked up?" Cortis asked. "I called everyone I had a number for and told them not to come - it's closed."

They were further upset after hearing that money was the reason for closing. They don't buy it.

Pinellas County Bingo rules, which are tighter than state rules, require that organizations publicly post what they made the previous week, said Kenny Alderman, Sunshine City Kiwanis Bingo volunteer.

St. Therese "made plenty of money," LoBianco said Tuesday night as the other women confirmed that they had seen the signs with the amounts posted. "They always made a profit," Cortis said.

Not so, Evancho said in a telephone interview, adding the games were "losing money, and we had a very difficult time getting help and the attendance had dropped."

He cited a monthly electric bill that soared to $3,000 in summer for air conditioning, along with monthly bills of $700 for water, $600 for cleanup, $400 for supplies and $450 for paper products.

"We were making a profit but I guess it wasn't up to his expectation," said Barbara Maslar, a church member and volunteer. "I don't know what his expectation was, because in the financial report we were making money; a lot of the church expenses were coming out of the Bingo income,"

She said she knew that the church wasn't making the same profit it had 20 years ago. The church's monthly expenses aren't broken down. "It's a base electrical bill," Maslar said. Other groups, such as a school, nuns, a ladies guild and men's club, use the building or paper supplies, she added.

As for volunteers, of its 125 members, only 11 to 15 volunteer for the Tuesday and Saturday games from noon to 4 p.m.

Pinellas County Bingo rules state games must be run by volunteers from the charity or nonprofit organization that benefits from profits.

During the summer, about 80 to 100 people came to play and winter snowbirds lifted that number to as high as 125, Evancho said.

During the summer "when we had the least amount of people, the bills were the highest," Evancho said. He said he didn't think the players "really care about our bills, they just want to play bingo," adding that he regretted that people no longer had a place to play Bingo in the afternoon.

"The last couple of years we hadn't been as lucrative as we had been," volunteer Eleanor Rudlow said, adding it had picked up during the last few months. She said Evancho didn't confer with volunteers, but told them about a week before he posted the notice.

Maybe the priest would have liked to have had more volunteers to cover for when people were sick, Rudlow said, but getting more wasn't possible because many parishioners work.

[Last modified April 7, 2007, 20:50:13]