pre-bingo-cards

[PRR]

Some of you remember "bingo cards", reader response cards bound into magazines to request literature from advertisers. A whole field of numbers.

In 1933, beer was legalized, a radio was built in a beer keg, and literature service was fill-in-the-blank.

[shooter]

all I remember from the magazines I read was;
PO box xyz
Pueblo Colorado.


It was google of old, (early 70's?)
you could request information, order booklets.  I recall I could get lots of information, on most any topic for a buck.!


aside;
After Pam n I hiked up Guadalupe Mt, TX, she wanted to see Roswell NM, when that was over I picked Pueblo CO!!  When I bought Pam's car I talked to the head mechanic about the shop manuals, he asked If I knew what i'd bought, I said "Nope, I just watched her head turn 180 n knew that's the car I was paying for"  was motor trends car  of the year, Ford's Lincoln LS V8.  Told me If I got the chance, set the cruise control at 140 and it'll just roll til she's outta gas.


Roswell to pueblo went by pretty quick 

[PRR]

Pueblo was a similar service for USDA and similar literature. How to build an outhouse. How to neuter a goat.

Every professional rag had advertisers with more to say than they could afford to buy space for. And of course existing brochures and catalogs of only specific interest. Many of these rags put readers in contact with advertisers, via numbered request-links.

Looking into it: the game of Bingo was almost unknown in 1933, a regional fad, and was not called Bingo yet, maybe Beano (which means something else now, and got an igNoble for it). So while number grids must have existed, they were not as popular as after Bingo took off. And by 1960 they may have expedited semi-auto reading of illiterate scrawled numbers (you could go by location not by character-squint).

Roll until out of gas... I had that car under a lesser brandname. I had a couple Ford rigs which could hardly go 2 days without a hose up their side. Now I have the opposite situation: the Honda uses little fuel and I don't go out lately so the fuel curdles-up in the months between fillings.

[PRR]

In 1946- only featured products had bingo numbers. You wrote the number and your contact, four to a penny postcard. The magazine cut them up by number and forwarded to the company.

The 1967 true-bingo scheme probably relied on higher tech: test-scanners and simple computers.