By Glenn Dromgoole

In my younger days, I played a lot of 42. Not so much in recent years, although I bet I could still make a 31 bid. 

One of my roommates in college pretty much “majored” in 42. He played it a lot more than he studied. Well, in all honesty, so did I. But he flunked out, and I didn’t.

Anyway, when I was an avid 42 player, I had no idea that the game had its beginnings as a religious endeavor. Kind of.

Dennis Roberson wrote an interesting book about the game of 42 — Winning 42: Strategy and Lore of the National Game of Texas. I met him a few years ago when he came to Abilene as one of the featured speakers at the West Texas Book Festival.

According to Dennis, the domino game of 42 was invented in 1887 in a rural hamlet called Trappe Spring, about 45 miles west of Fort Worth, by two boys, ages 12 and 14.

The two boys loved to hide in the hayloft and play cards, which was a strict no-no in their Baptist community in those days. One day their parents caught them. The cards were burned, and the boys got a whipping.

Undeterred, the boys found a religious loophole. Baptists approved playing dominoes. So the boys essentially made a card game out of dominoes – similar to Hearts or Bridge — and 42 was the result. No more whippings.

It takes four players to play 42, however, so they taught the game to their families, then to other people in town, and the game spread across Texas, then soldiers learned the game and took it beyond the Texas border, Roberson writes. 

In fact, the best 42 player in my college dorm was from Arkansas. (And maybe the worst was from New Mexico.)

I must admit we often played 42 on Sundays when we should have been in church. Well, as it turns out, maybe we kind of were.

Glenn’s new website, MoreCivilityPlease.com, includes a number of pieces he has written over the years having to do with civility, kindness, reason, and generosity.