How do you spell fun in Elmore?

A stream of idle chatter among those who arrived together quickly shifts to hugs, laughter and handshakes as the line outside grows, and people greet one another.

Welcome to Family Bingo Night, a Thursday night favorite from early July to mid-August where you’ll find seniors and small children, families and friends, tourists and locals sitting side by side at folding tables.

And you can’t beat the price. Admission is $1, or free if you bring a baked good for the prize table, and cards are three for $1 with a maximum of nine cards.

Doors open at 6:30 p.m., and games run from 7 to 8:45 p.m.

Teacups hold colorful felt and paper bingo chips, but unlike most bingo games, people aren’t playing for cash.

“How many are here for high-stakes money?” yells Joe Ciccolo, known as Bingo Joe, to the 35 people ready to start the game last Thursday night.

For those who raised their hands, “out the door,” he joked.

“This is family bingo where the prizes are baked goods, things for the beach, and who doesn’t need a new boat?”

A toy boat, that is.

Beach balls and sand buckets, bird feeders and card games, coloring books and dollar store trinkets line the rest of the prize table, and after buying their cards, everyone is ready to go, but not before a song:

“There’s a little quaint place in northern Vermont,

Some like to call it the beauty spot.

There’s a mountain and a lake and so much more,

It’s the place I call home, it’s Lake Elmore.

I’m going to Lake Elmore, I sure do like it a lot.

I’m going to Lake Elmore, the beauty spot of Vermont.”

It’s kind of like a cult, Ciccolo laughs. “Everyone just starts singing along, whether they’ve been here before or not.”

Ciccolo wrote the song about five years ago to commemorate Warren and Kathy Miller’s 30th anniversary of running the Elmore Store, and since then, it has been a tradition to sing the Lake Elmore song before every Family Bingo Night.

There were a few complaints, though. The song didn’t mention anything about bingo. So this year, a new verse was added, and it didn’t take people long to pick it up.

“It happens in the summer, at the lake.

Inside the Town Hall, so don’t be late.

Bring a baked good and you’re ready to go.

It’s a great family night when you play bingo.”

Fun times with family and friends are what it’s all about.

Dave Peters — you may know him as Uncle Dave, World-Famous Bingo Caller — wears a T-shirt that says “Don’t call my name … Call my number.” He’s been calling folks’ numbers for 23 years, and has been attending bingo night for even longer than that.

“It’s a lot of fun,” he says, because it gets people together, and nobody takes it too seriously.

“O-76,” Peters called.

And Ciccolo burst out in song and dance again, “Seventy-six trombones led the big parade, with a hundred and ten cornets close at hand.”

“B-2.”

Any number ending in a 2 was followed by a quick toot-toot on a wooden whistle.

And then, came, “B-not after, but B” Peters started, and the crowd answered with “four,” before dotting the number on their bingo cards.

“Not malignant, but B-9,” Peters said in a string of B’s during the big four corners game that is played only with B’s and O’s.

“We get science, math, everything into our bingo games,” Ciccolo said.

Peters’ daughter has joined her father at bingo for several decades, and now brings two children of her own. She remembers winning brownies and $2 at the event when she was a kid.

And it was just as entertaining.

For straight-line bingo, Bingo Joe demonstrates the possibilities with hands stretched out to the sides — horizontal — one stretched up, and one stretched down for vertical, and — a little dance with hands stretched diagonally in one direction and then the other. Those are the ways you can win with five numbers — or four and the free space — in a row. At least for that game.

They also played a little four corners, with four numbers in a square in one of the four corners; big four corners, with each of the four corners covered; an “L”, and a few others.

And during the 10-minute intermission around 8 p.m., everyone streamed outside to take turns jumping rope in the street.

“I come for the comedy, good times, and lots of laughs,” said Roger Currier, who’s been coming with his wife and later their family for 60 years.

“I’ve been coming for 57 years,” said Currier’s daughter Julie. “I look forward to it every year, to see the neighbors I grew up with.”

Julie lives across the country now, and works for the Army, but she is able to telecommute to work in the summers, so she always returns for a few weeks.

Her son Chris, who traveled from Colorado, said he’s been coming to bingo for 40 years to see “the same parents, neighbors and ladies down the street who used to scold me. You couldn’t get away with anything up here,” he said.

During the summers, the Currier family returns to life on the same street, with lake homes that are closely spaced.

Organized by the Lake Elmore Lake Association, Family Night Bingo has taken place for more than five decades, and money raised from the games goes to a fund used to remove milfoil — an invasive plant — from Lake Elmore.

Last year, the association was able to raise $1,088 over the course of seven weeks of bingo.

Martha Trombly, lake association president, has been a “bingo-ette” for Family Bingo Night for 13 years, collecting admissions, selling cards, and checking winning bingo cards.

She warned people living at and visiting the lake to watch out for red flags with white stripes sticking out of the water. The flags mark divers, and last Thursday morning people who may have been unaware were doing laps around a flag on their Sea-Doos while a diver was working below the surface.

State law says any motorized boat must stay at least 200 feet from a dive flag to prevent injury.