Early Recollections
I have just been asked about how I was first introduced to the game of bingo. When I think about my very first encounters with bingo it seems that bingo has been with me, to a certain extent, all my life. Even before I was born, it seems that I was destined to play bingo. This is evident in the fact that right before I was born, my older brother received a bingo game. This was a game with four or five reusable boards (they had two sided buttons with numbers on them that could be depressed and replaced). The bingo numbers were determined using a pair of dice in a special dice cup. This was supposed to be a sort of travel bingo game. It is with this game that I was first introduced to bingo.
Things I Learned
There were many things I learned from those travel bingo boards. Of course, I learned to play bingo. I also learned how to count (at least, till six). I also learned some of my letters (hey, BINGO are five letters in our alphabet! Learning those helped me learn the rest a lot more easily). I learned to play competitively, I learned to play fair and I even learned how to cheat (my brother had a way of getting the dice to fall however he desired about one half to one third of the time - this was based on the mechanism of the dice rolling cup which used a fairly constant measure of force for tossing the dice). Later on, I also learned basic concepts in mathematics and statistics with the aid of these boards and dice. As you can see, my parents (and older brother) were very innovative and they made the most of the equipment available in order to provide their children the finest education they could. Bingo happened to be an integral part in all this.