“G46,” the announcer called over the roar. It was the sound you’d expect from 550 people, most in their 20s and 30s, most drinking beer.

"B2." The kids — everyone seemed to call them that - studied their cards. The lucky ones thumped the number with fat-tipped felt pens: Covered!

"N33." They ate cheap hamburgers. They checked their cell phones. They flirted.

"I18." A handful of the old-time diehards claimed the front tables: White-haired people with Czech and German last names, members of the SPJST Lodge #88, people who have been playing bingo there for decades.

"B1." But young professionals started showing up a couple of years ago. And this summer, they began showing up in packs, sometimes so many that fire code meant the lodge had to turn people away.

"O69."

The crowd erupted: "WOOOOAAAA!" This was their new tradition, their response to their favorite number.

The volunteer selling bingo cards - a conservatively dressed woman in late middle age - put her hand over her mouth. "Can you believe them?" she said.

But her hand only half-hid her smile. She was in on the joke.

$6 pitchers

SPJST halls are sweet pieces of old Texas, throwbacks to an era when "immigrant" often as not meant "Czech." In 1897, Texas Czechs founded the Slovanska Podporujici Jednota Statu Texas as a handy-dandy, Swiss Army knife of an institution, the Bass-o-matic of fraternal organizations. SPJST lodges offered life insurance! They promoted the Czech language and culture! They provided small-town nightlife! They raised money for scholarships and charities! And - wait, there's more! - they gave the Catholic Czechs a wholesome-feeling place to dance and drink beer, away from disapproving Protestants!

Like most American fraternal organizations, the SPJST peaked sometime in the early '60s, around the time that Lodge #88 built its current headquarters - "the Heights lodge" everyone seems to call it, though its grounds abut the Garden Oaks Little League field. The lodge used to have an Olympic-size pool out back, one of the biggest in Houston, but that was filled in years ago. Otherwise, though, not much has changed since 1964.

Three Saturday nights a month, live bands play dance music: polka, big-band, country and western. A cheeseburger with all the fixings cost $2.25. A slice of homemade cake, 50 cents. An entire pitcher of Shiner, $6.

Nobody is quite sure how long Thursday nights have meant bingo. "A hundred years," says Jo Ann Buri, chair of the bingo committee. She's joking, mostly: Lodge #88 turned a 100 years old only this year. But she's pretty sure that lodge members were playing back in the '40s. "And it was probably illegal then," she laughs.

These days, Lodge #88 has about a 100 active members, and it felt lucky to draw 250 people to a bingo game. But the bingo committee aimed to attract more. Somebody put a tiny BINGO sign in front of the out-of-the-way lodge. And - more important - somebody else took out a little ad in Heights-area newspapers. They thought they'd set an ambitious goal: 300 people.

Young people started showing up. At first there were only a few, then dozens, and then somehow - Facebook? Yelp? old-fashioned word-of-mouth? - hundreds of them. The bingo committee celebrated when bingo night 300 people - then 400, 500, and more, more, more.

Some of the kids wore high, high heels; some wore khakis; lots wore those painfully hip thick-rimmed geek glasses. There were khaki-pants engineers, pediatrics nurses straight from their shifts, architecture students who talked about redesigning the hall's front entrance. They came from Kingwood, from Pearland, from Montrose, from the Heights. There were Asian kids, white kids, black kids, Hispanic kids, gay couples, guys with tattoos.

They saved seats for their friends and gave themselves team names. They brought birthday cakes, tablecloths and lucky stuffed animals. They established new rituals: cheering "O69," booing when someone calls "Bingo!"

Some of the elderly, old-school bingo players thought the kids were rude and noisy. Most of those players switched to the regular Knights of Columbus game. But then some came back: After the SPJST crowd, the Knights of Columbus seemed dull.

Generally, though, the SPJST lodge members were thrilled. The bingo money would support children's charities, the SPJST youth group, help cover the building's maintenance. But even more exhilarating was the sight of all those kids, lined up, in all places, outside the Lodge #88. "They're young professionals!" bingo-night volunteers gush, sounding like proud grandparents. "They're so polite! They offer to clean up! And you should see some of the fashions these girls wear!"

But this summer, while lots of the kids were home from college, the scene went out of control: Suddenly, it began attracting more than the 756 people that fire-code regs allow inside the hall. The line snaked out the door, and lodge volunteers had to turn away people whose friends were inside.

For the first time in anyone's memory, SPJST Lodge #88 was the hot place to be. While other fraternal organizations were dying, Lodge #88 had the unexpected problem of turning young people away.

The hush zone

Larry Pfluhaupt, a longtime SPJST member, was working the floor Thursday, checking bingo claims and awarding prizes. He was cheerful about it, but you could tell that he sort of wished it were his turn to be the caller. Larry is a shameless ham, and the kids love him.

They love his Texas drawl, they love his style. Larry doesn't just announce "B11"; he calls "Birdlegs." And back when they used to play the complicated racetrack game - back before the crowd got too big to handle it - Larry's whinny made the kids go wild. For "O69," he saves up special lines for them: "That's the average IQ of people in here," he'll say. Or with a sly grin: "That's the number of the NASCAR driver disqualified for being ... out of position."

Out of the spotlight, Pfluhaupt observed the crowd, blessedly down from its crazy peak. The college students had gone back to school; the Texans were playing; and it was a drizzly night. "Manageable" was the word that everyone used: The room seemed full, but not crammed, the way the kids like it. The beer and popcorn lines moved briskly. Nobody glared at anyone saving seats. Nobody got turned away.

When the night's last game was called - the cover-all, the game with the $500 prize, the game that gets everyone's attention - the stage seemed to exert a gravitational pull on Pfluhaupt. The cover-all game is a long, slow one, requiring the winner to cover every square on his card. With other games, Pfluhaupt explained, you might hear "Bingo!" after 23 or 26 numbers had been called. With cover-all, it's more like 47.

The part he likes best is "the hush zone": that period, somewhere around the 43rd number, when the roar subsides into a low hum. The kids stop flirting, stop drinking, and begin to hang on the caller's voice, their fat felt-tipped pens poised and ready.

Around the 46th number, even the low hum became unbearable. "Shush!" someone said - yes, actually said the word "shush!" - and suddenly everyone seemed to be shushing everyone else.

Pfluhaupt grinned. The kids may have come for the cheap beer, but now they were hooked on the game, Thursday-night regulars, likely to come back. Maybe someday they'd buy SPJST life insurance. Or maybe, in October, the cheap beer will lure them to Czech Day. Or maybe - who knows? - in their mysterious tribal wisdom, they'll pick Saturday-night polka as the next hipster trend.

Whatever: The young faces looked good in that old hall. The bingo committee had gotten lucky. But the lodge's members were paying attention when their numbers started coming up. And now they were in the hush zone with this young crowd, and they had no intention of letting their unexpected prize slip away.

lisa.gray@chron.com