Don’t Forget Your Free Space: For over 50 years, Auto Bingo has been helping the miles slip by

Vintage Auto and Find-A-Car Bingo cards; image by the author.

Road trips, specifically interstate excursions during week-long family vacations, are a somewhat overlooked piece of automotive history. They’ve produced endless tales of roadside attractions and mom and pop eateries – some good, some bad – that can often achieve epic status years, even decades, later. Yet every highway getaway has one common thread embedded within the “family vacation” headline: How to keep buckled occupants busy for over an hour in between stops at the UFO Watchtower (Hooper, Colorado) and Bishop Castle (Wetmore, Colorado). One entrepreneur came up with a solution in the mid Fifties in the form of Auto Bingo.

Auto Bingo was just one product from the Regal Games Manufacturing Company based in Chicago, Illinois. The company’s history dates back to the late Thirties when Erich Spitzner – a German immigrant then working in a local bank – purchased the struggling Regal Printing Company. Spitzner started printing/manufacturing bingo cards/games shortly thereafter, and by 1941 had applied for a patent on the now familiar sliding red window; it was awarded in 1947. Auto Bingo itself was launched as early as the mid 1950s, however current company owner Michael Robert states that 1957 is its traditionally accepted start date.

The name Auto Bingo, in one sense, has become a bit of a generic name for the line of bingo cards the company produced. There were actually four different versions, all on different colored cards: Auto Bingo, Find-A-Car Bingo, Interstate Bingo and Traffic Safety Bingo. We located two vintage editions at a recent swap meet – they are more prevalent online – for just a handful of dollars each in used but usable condition, the most entertaining of which (to us) was the Find-A-Car Bingo.

Logic states that with the advent of computerized hand-held games in the mid-Eighties, and more recently in-vehicle DVD systems, games such as Auto Bingo would have quickly been driven to the nether regions of forgotten entertainment, however that’s not the case. Widely successful for decades, Spitzner retired in 1985, which handed the day-to-day operations to Kurt Geringer until 2011, when Robert partnered with Spitzner’s daughter, Louanne Dunlap. To this day, Regal, still based in Chicago, continues producing three of the four original games: Interstate (orange cards); Traffic Safety (blue cards); and Auto (green and pink cards). Currently, the games can be obtained through a growing number of outlets, including BJ’s Wholesale and Cracker Barrel restaurants. But if electronic games are still your preference these days, there’s good news.

“We’ve just launched the Auto Bingo games as an iPad app, which includes our new bingo card, I Spy; we’re also hoping to re-launch Find-A-Car shortly, which has been on hiatus since the mid-Nineties. We’re a growing company; conservatively we’re prepared for a total sales figure north of a half-million cards, which equates to a 30 percent growth over last year,” said Robert.

This article originally appeared in the September, 2012 issue of Hemmings Motor News.