In the summer of 1958 I was a teenager working as an accounting clerk for TransCanadaPipeLines during the construction of its natural gas pipeline, a massive project not unlike the first trans-continental railroad. My office was at the western end of the pipeline, a few km west of Burstall, a small Saskatchewan village about 40 km from the Alberta border.
As I recall, Burstall’s population was around 200. At the beginning of the project about 250 construction workers descended on the village, the majority of whom lived in a newly constructed bunk house at the construction site, and the others in various forms of rental accommodation in the village — from single rooms to entire dwellings. A co-worker from Edinburgh, Scotland, Ian MacDonald, and I were among the first half-dozen newcomers to arrive in Burstall so we were able to rent a furnished third-floor flat in a modern house owned by the family that operated the village general store.
Calgary and Regina were the nearest large cities, with Burstall being about halfway between them, approximately 400km from each, so there were a couple of hundred construction workers who had nothing to do most nights. One day I overheard the site superintendent, an Australian engineer by the name of Al Chapman, complaining to one of his foremen about how bored the workers were. They were making lots of money and had nowhere to spend it. I began thinking about what kind of an event might interest them and came up with the idea of a semi-monthly bingo game, limited to 100 players, each paying $100 to play, with the requirement to win being a full card. The prize of $10,000 would be about $100,000 in today’s dollars. The manager of the curling rink (obviously unused during the summer) said I could rent it for $10 a night.
Al Chapman loved the idea. I told him I would need to borrow a couple of labourers to help me solve my biggest problem: how many bingo games we’d have to buy in order to find 100 different cards. He countered that it wouldn’t matter if the prize was split, but I convinced him we should limit the possibility as much as possible. He armed a couple of labourers with petty cash and despatched them to buy every bingo game they could find in Medicine Hat and Lethbridge (the two nearest cities). We were both surprised and delighted that we had no trouble acquiring 100 different cards. Then I set about solving my two other concerns: whether the game was legal; and the risk inherent in hundreds of people, many of them transient construction workers, knowing there was that much unguarded cash in one place.
The nearest RCMP detachment was in the town of Leader, about 50 km north of Burstall. I drove there and explained my plan to a sergeant. I asked him if holding the game was legal and whether he could have a constable attend the game. He told me as long as I wasn’t making money on the game it was perfectly legit and he would be happy to assign a constable. He also suggested that after the game the constable should escort the winner to wherever he wanted to go. That turned out to be an excellent idea because the winner decided he wanted to get out of Burstall that night with his new-found wealth. I don’t know where the mountie took him, but I suspect it was Medicine Hat, about an hour away.
I don’t know if the games continued because shortly after the first one I was transferred to Moose Jaw, a fair-sized city about a half-hour drive from Regina, so boredom wasn’t a problem.