Punch to Win 

by Bob Brooke

Every afternoon, men and women would go into their favorite corner bar for a drink before heading home for dinner. For the price of a penny to two bits (25 cents), a player could take a chance to win up to $500 from the punchboards on the bar. Using a stylus, the player pushed the punch completely through the foil to dislodge a paper message through the back of the board, which the player read, then collected his or her winnings, but more often than not, threw the punchboard down on the bar in disgust.

Punchboards were an early form of lottery game boards used in the 18th century. Though lotteries were as popular back then as they are today, they required a large number of players to be profitable. To enable one or several people to play, a local tavern owner would construct a game board out of wood eight inches square and half an inch thick, then drill small holes in it and fill them with small rolled pieces of paper on which he had written a number. He then covered the holes with paper. After a customer bought a chance at the punchboard, usually for a penny or a nickel, he would puncture one of the hole's paper covers with a nail and retrieve the piece of paper with a number on it. If the number matched those posted, the customer won a cash prize.

As time went on, tavern owners got greedy and realized they could punch the holes with the biggest prizes and keep the money for themselves since they had made the boards. If anyone asked who won the big prize, he would just claim that it was a stranger and put a new board up the next day. Some tavern owners went a step further and didn’t put any winning numbers on their boards. Players eventually caught on to this and stopped playing punchboards.

C.A. Brewer and C.C. Scannell of Chicago patented the modern punchboard in 1905. These new punchboards, made of cardboard, had paper covering both the front and back of each hole to help prevent operators from cheating. They came with a metal stylus and became popular purchases at drugstores, bars, and barbershops, much like today’s lottery tickets sold at convenience stores.

Although punchboards had been around for many years, they had never been so available or so portable. Brewer and Scannell created their punchboards so that one customer could play a lottery, with no contribution necessary from anyone else. This enabled the punchboard's owner/operator to sell chances to one customer at a time, and to immediately tell how much he had won, without waiting for all the punchboard numbers to be sold.

The invention of board stuffing machines and ticket folding and plaiting machines in the late 1910s allowed punchboard manufacturers to produce them cheaply. From 1910 to 1915, over 30 million punchboards were sold.

The concept of the punchboard had been around for many years before 1905. Many bar and pool hall owners making their own punchboards, drilling a few holes in a wooden board, then stuffing small pieces of rolled paper into each hole. Unfortunately, the customer only had the punchboard owner’s word that there was a winning number in at least one of the remaining non-punched holes, a fact that often just wasn’t true. Too often the owner/maker of the homemade punchboard would punch out the winning hole for himself, or he wouldn’t even have bothered to put a winning number in any hole. Profits from these homemade punchboards were very high.

Many people soon realized these homemade punchboards were probably fraudulent, thus the popularity of punchboarding declined. It took the invention of punchboard manufacturing machines, which could cover both sides of the board with a sheet of undamaged paper, to convince customers to return to punchboard gambling.

The mass-production of punchboards led to a general standardization of shapes and a standardization of the themes that helped identify different manufacturers' boards. Although most boards were rectangular in shape, their themes were unique. Some of the successful themes featured drawings of shapely pinups, and titles that implied that certain boards offered big payoffs, such as Win u Ruck, Barrel of Winners, and Sweepstakes Parley. Some punchboards had themes featuring racy drawings and titles such as Easy Double, Big Gusher, and Lady Your Fat is Showing.

Some punchboards had as many as 10,000 holes, and some as few as 25. Some paid out prizes instead of money, such as cigarettes, and some guaranteed that everyone was a winner. But they all had one thing in common—their calculated average gross profit or what the board's owner could expect as his profit when he sold all the holes and gave out all the prizes. Not bad, in an era when lunch cost 25 cents and a gallon of gas cost 10.

Punchboard sales declined significantly after WWII, as many states made them illegal. Many manufacturers attempted to disguise the gambling nature of the boards by stating that prizes were "for trade only" and not redeemable for cash. Cigarette, cigar, and beer companies used punchboards as an advertising medium, featuring packages of cigarettes or bottles of beer as prizes on their punchboards instead of cash. While some of these boards were operated as advertising gimmicks, most were still played for cash. The makers of a few products were successful with punchboard advertising, including Zippo lighters. Between 1934 and 1940, Zippo sold more than 300,000 lighters through punchboard advertising.

Despite the millions of punchboards produced, it’s difficult for collectors to find non-punched or unusual punchboards because most were simply thrown away when their original owner felt the board would no longer sucker another coin from an unwitting player.

Punchboard prices range from a couple of dollars for a board with dog-eared edges and faded colors, up to several hundred dollars for a non-punched board in pristine condition. As with most collectibles, condition is important in a punch-board's cost. And some punchboard themes have remained consistently more desirable, therefore more costly.

Though there have been numerous lottery-type games invented over the years, none fired the imagination of gamblers and collectors like the punchboard.

As an avid collector of a variety of antiques and collectibles for the last 20 years, Bob Brooke knows what he’s writing about. Besides writing about antiques, Brooke has also sold at flea markets and worked in an antique shop, so he knows the business side too. His articles have appeared in many antiques and consumer publications, including British Heritage, Antique Week, Southeastern Antiquing and Collecting Magazine, OldandSold.com, and many others. To read more of his work, visit his main website at www.bobbrooke.com or his specialty antiques site at http:// www.theantiquesalmanac.com

For the price of a penny to two bits (25 cents), a player could take a chance to win up to $500 from a punchboard.

Many punchboards had a theme, such as sports.

Card games were another theme that was commonly used for punchboards.

Some punchboards combined card games and

Some of the successful themes featured drawings of shapely pinups.

Punchboard manufacturers produced smaller versions to be used as parlor games.

Prizes for some punchboards included other items besides cash and cigarettes, including tins of candy.