Rain early…then remaining cloudy with showers overnight. Low 51F. Winds SSW at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 90%. Rainfall near a quarter of an inch..
Rain early…then remaining cloudy with showers overnight. Low 51F. Winds SSW at 5 to 10 mph. Chance of rain 90%. Rainfall near a quarter of an inch.
Updated: November 25, 2025 @ 4:26 pm
KEISHA MCCLUSKEY AND Amanda Daubenspeck were among the large crowd at Monday’s turkey bingo at St. Eusebius in East Brady, a holiday tradition for around 100 years.
AMONG THE MANY volunteers who help make the annual St. Eusebius turkey bingo a success were (from left) Jackie Decorte, Julie Griffiths and Jenna Buechele Rupert.
KEISHA MCCLUSKEY AND Amanda Daubenspeck were among the large crowd at Monday’s turkey bingo at St. Eusebius in East Brady, a holiday tradition for around 100 years.
AMONG THE MANY volunteers who help make the annual St. Eusebius turkey bingo a success were (from left) Jackie Decorte, Julie Griffiths and Jenna Buechele Rupert.
EAST BRADY – When you start talking about things that happened a hundred or so years ago, some of the details can get a little sketchy.
So, when organizers with the annual Turkey Bingo at St. Eusebius Catholic Church in East Brady set about planning this year’s pre-Thanksgiving event, they took a little leap of faith in deciding to promote this year’s event as the 100th anniversary.
“A hundred years — who do you even talk to?” bingo organizer Jenna Buechele Rupert asked, noting that anyone who witnessed the first turkey bingo at the East Brady church is long gone, and that accounts of those early days have been passed down through multiple generations over the years.
All evidence points to the fact that the bingo, which is held on the Monday before Thanksgiving, just like it has been for decades, started about a century ago, if not earlier.
Rupert said that fellow bingo organizer Joe Schumacher “thinks that it has to be at least 100 years.”
“We’re assuming it’s at least 100 years — but we’re going to celebrate 100 next year too,” she said.
One of the pieces of evidence that the bingo originated around 100 years ago comes from a story in a 1998 issue of The Leader-Vindicator. In that article, longtime bingo volunteer Joe McClaine, who passed away in 2018, said that the bingo was already well established at the church by the time he started helping out at the age of nine back in 1935.
McClaine said that his father, Joe McClaine Sr., and mother, Eva, helped with the poultry delivery — which was much different than today’s effort which awards frozen turkeys and chickens.
“All chickens and turkeys were live with their heads sticking out of a hole in a burlap bag,” McClaine said in the 1998 interview. “By 8 o’clock in the evening, it was a sight to see! A real mad house!”
He went on to say that as the bingo players, mostly women and children at the time, won the live birds, they would continue playing while holding on to their uncooperative winnings, which were at their feet under the bingo tables.
McClaine said that in the early days, the turkeys and chickens were delivered to the church, and were kept in a basement room that is still known to this day as the “chicken room.”
Rupert said the event still relies on that room, but instead of holding live birds, the unheated room keeps the stash of around 90 chickens and 25 turkeys properly frozen.
She said that her father, Charles Buechele, remembers the live prizes, and that parishioner Mary Barnhart recalls her father helping raise turkeys for the event.
Although the state of the prize birds has changed over the years, Rupert said little else has changed to the longstanding church tradition.
“Very little has changed,” she said. “The price of bingo has not gone up in years. And we still use the hard [bingo] cards and the Rex Hide rubber chips.”
Rupert said the bingo chips, which came from the long-since-closed local Rex Hide factory, are dwindling in number each year, and that younger church members scour the church hall floor after each event in order to find those that fell off the tables during play.
Many of the event’s volunteers have also been a part of the tradition for years, she said, noting that she can count on the same people year after year to help out.
“They know exactly what to do,” she said, noting that they always step up to donate homemade pies and baked goods for the big night.
While Joe McClaine was a fixture as the bingo caller starting in the 1960s, since his passing, several others have taken over the role, with Corey McCluskey handling the duties for the past three years.
Rupert said another tradition the organizers try to keep going is for the volunteers to come together in the church kitchen during the day of the bingo to bake pies together.
She noted that the late Mary Theresa Hile ran the church event for many years, and that she passed along much of the operational knowledge when Rupert started helping out around 2012.
Although much has remained the same, the article from 1998 shows that the early years had some major differences from today.
“The evening itself was a thing out of the past. According to McClaine, the men would sit on benches and buy tickets for a prize wheel to win turkeys,” the article said, with McClaine adding, “They all smoked cigars, pipes and cigarettes. The air was really blue. … The ladies and the kids played bingo — just a lot like today. Turkey on the wheel, chicken on the bingo.”
At Monday’s bingo, Rupert said she was grateful to see the tradition continue, with a strong turnout for the event.
“It’s such a cool tradition,” Buechele Rupert said. “And it’s our church’s last longstanding fundraiser.”
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