Only Game in Town : In Far Reaches of County, Bettors Flock to Boulevard Store for Lottery Tickets

On the community bulletin board outside J.L. Skinner’s general store, there are notices of goats for sale, entertainment at the Live Joake Saloon, the Krazy Daze celebration down the road in Jacumba and word that Mrs. Elliott is selling a new batch of fresh raisin pies ($3.95).

So you can imagine the kind of excitement the California Lottery brought Thursday to this part of the county, 65 miles east of San Diego on Old Highway 80 (which means that the world is passing Boulevard by on the “new” Interstate 8).

All morning long, folks were dropping by J.L. Skinner’s to buy their chances for fortune. “Not ‘til 12:30,” Nadine Ridge would repeat over and over again. And then, with no one else listening, she would share a secret: There weren’t any lottery tickets to sell yet, because there was a mess-up and the tickets were not delivered Wednesday. But not to worry--J.L.’s son, Mike, had driven into San Diego to pick them up. And he was sure to be back by 12:30.

A few minutes later Skinner called his store with the bad news. There was a computer glitch at the lottery office in San Diego, and there would be no tickets today. Maybe tomorrow, he said.

Ridge might as well have closed up the store and gone fishing.

To every loyal customer who walked in the store asking to buy a lottery ticket, Ridge broke the news. And, loyalty notwithstanding, the customers moseyed on down the road a quarter mile to the competing Boulevard Liquor/Deli, where owner Severo Espinoza was standing behind the cash register, smiling from ear to ear. He didn’t get his tickets on Wednesday, either, but he drove into San Diego first thing Thursday morning and picked up his batch of 1,500.

Now, you have to picture Boulevard for what it is: an easy-going little hamlet with just two small stores--Skinner’s and the Liquor/Deli. With Skinner’s suffering a TKO on the first day of the lottery, you knew everyone in town had to be at the Liquor/Deli.

And they were. They even drove up from Jacumba to buy their tickets because there weren’t any lottery ticket outlets in Jacumba.

The first person to gamble at the stroke of 12:30 was Manford McBaster, a Caltrans employee in a bright orange shirt who hopes his boss won’t be reading about this. He put down $10--half on behalf of his wife, half for himself.

He went outside and, with a small pocket knife, scraped off the spots on the tickets. A crowd gathered as he scratched the first one. Zilch. The second one: nope. The third: sorry. By the fourth ticket, no one cared to watch any more; they went in to buy their own tickets.

McBaster had nothing to show for his $5. But, he said, he’ll be back next week, and he and his wife will continue to spend $10 a week on tickets.

The real crowd pleaser was Don Maher, who came out with 51 tickets. Imagine someone in Boulevard buying 51 lottery tickets! “I want my kid to have a good education,” he joked, since one-third of the lottery income will go to public education.

He laid the tickets out on the hood of someone else’s Ford pickup and, with his buddies looking over his shoulder, he started scraping. Of the first five tickets, four were instant winners of $2 each. He was on a roll and the crowd got bigger. He scraped and scraped and scraped.

“This is harder than working,” he moaned.

“How would you know, Don? You’ve never worked,” someone else shot back. Everyone laughed.

Martha Ruiz came out of the store, grinning a bunch. “I won!” she yelled to anyone and everyone in the parking lot. “I had to borrow a quarter to buy a ticket, but I won two bucks. This is fun! I’m gonna go borrow some more money.”

Maher, meanwhile, was still scraping away. But then, there was nothing better to do. Finally, he scraped off the last one. He spent $51 to win $28.

He went back into the store and bought 30 more tickets.

Frank Arguilez spent $6 for tickets, and with his winnings, was able to buy more tickets, finally playing 12 times before coming up empty. But he promised to buy at least one lottery ticket a day for the rest of his life.

“No way in hell I’m going to give up on this game,” he promised. “It gives me something to dream about.”

Back at Skinner’s, meanwhile, Nadine Ridge was busy waiting on no one. “Oh, don’t worry about us too much,” she said. “Most of our customers love us. They’ll be back when the excitement wears off.”

In Boulevard, no telling how long that will be.