Lottery for Poor: There’s Always Hope

Inside a friend’s apartment in a scruffy area of Los Angeles, Jerry Hanah, a diminutive, unemployed, middle-age man with a worn countenance, was holding a winning California Lottery ticket. It had two $2 symbols plus a “nugget,” which meant it was worth $4.

Now Hanah had to make a decision that confronts hundreds of thousands of small-time lottery winners every day:

Should he cash in the ticket for the money? Or should he use the winnings to buy four more lottery tickets?

There were economic factors to consider.

Hanah, 65, lives off a Social Security check and seeks out day-labor jobs to supplement his income. He spends a lot of time walking the streets to get places. (“I can’t always afford the bus fare.”) He drinks a lot of beer, often from cans inside paper bags. (“Helps settle my nerves.”)

This morning, he said, he’d found a dollar on the street. (“People lose money, they get drunk and lose it out of their pockets. You might find 15, 20 cents. You do that a few times and you have a dollar.”) He’d used the money to buy the ticket at a liquor store on Pico Boulevard near La Brea Avenue.

And now he was going to take his ticket back and exchange it.

For four more tickets.

A man who’d met Hanah on the street a couple of days ago was surprised. He questioned whether that decision was financially prudent.

Hanah shrugged.

“Four dollars ain’t gonna buy nothin’ right now--you know that,” he said. “A six-pack’s gonna run you $6.”

It is that kind of thinking that worries opponents of legalized gambling, who contend that in subtle but sinister ways, far removed from the weekly televised glory of “The Big Spin,” California’s lottery is ensnaring poor people like Hanah.

Their fears are bolstered by a Los Angeles Times Poll that found that 72% of the lottery players always put their winnings directly into the purchase of more tickets. Such a practice greatly increases the odds that the player will eventually lose his initial investment.

“That’s the trouble,” complained an official of Gamblers Anonymous. “When they hit a $2 or a $5 winner, they never cash it in. They buy more tickets.”

Last fall, when the lottery’s first days were greeted by wild enthusiasm, a number of clergy, educators and representatives of organizations that serve the poor said they were afraid low-income residents would buy more tickets than they could afford.

Stores Issued Warning

A nervous county Board of Supervisors warned stores with county contracts to sell food stamps not to apply to the state to sell lottery tickets, at the risk of losing the food-stamp contracts.

And at a small lock-and-key shop in the Martin Luther King Shopping Center in Watts, where 110 people showed up to buy tickets in the first hour of lottery sales, the shop’s manager told a reporter she was worried.

“These are poor people, and they really can’t afford to spend all this money,” Beverly Collins said then.

But these days, Collins says the biggest regular lottery players she has are seven or eight individuals who buy an average of about three tickets every day. She says her fears have proven groundless.

“It doesn’t look the same as it did at the start,” she said.

Just a Diversion

Collins and others familiar with the ticket-buying habits of low-income people say they believe that most have simply recognized the lottery for what it is--a diversion from an often dreary life.

Most ticket buyers, these observers reason, seem capable of employing a dual mentality: At the moment of purchase, they willingly give in to the momentary fantasy that says each ticket is a real chance at a fortune. But in the back of their minds, they also recognize that the odds are too low to warrant a substantial investment, and thus regulate themselves.

Robert Blackshear, who spends a lot of time hanging out and drinking beer with Jerry Hanah, puts it more bluntly:

“That’s what gamblin’ is !” said Blackshear, an angular man of 57 who lives off a Social Security disability check. “They’re not guaranteeing you you’re gonna win. Everybody knows that. It’s just a long shot. But anybody gambling is expecting to win, whether they’re ignorant or not.”

Plays It Safe

Blackshear described himself as a regular player--”maybe 10 a week”--but said he was not enamored enough by the game to disrupt his personal priorities.

“I ain’t gonna hurt myself,” he said. “I wouldn’t put myself in jeopardy. It doesn’t get in my way. I wouldn’t even give up my cigarettes for it.

“Most of the time I’ll have a beer or two and I’ll feel lucky and I’ll think, ‘I’ll get me two or three tickets. Mix it up after a beer. I might be lucky.’

“The most I ever won was $4. It’s like going to Vegas. Gambling, you got just as much a chance.”

A reporter had bumped into Hanah and Blackshear outside Showplace Liquors on Venice Boulevard, a few blocks east of Crenshaw Boulevard, where black neighborhoods fade into burgeoning Latino and Asian neighborhoods to the east and north.

4,000 Tickets Weekly

The liquor store sells about 4,000 lottery tickets a week, a substantial number for a store its size. To attract more, owner Seiei Higa has posted handwritten notices broadcasting the names, dates and amount of every winner of $100 or more.

A couple of mornings before Hanah was to find his lucky dollar on the street and buy his winning lottery ticket, he and Blackshear were killing time. They had walked east on Venice for 15 or so blocks from Blackshear’s apartment. Hanah wanted to check his mail at a nearby board-and-care facility.

On a block of old Victorian homes just around the corner from Showplace Liquors, Blackshear was scrutinizing scores of losing lottery tickets that had been scratched outside the store and then thrown into the gutter. A supermarket chain was advertising a drawing for losing lottery tickets, he explained, so he was going to scrape up some. He’d also look for winning tickets that might have inadvertently been thrown away.

Beer Running Out

The cans of beer that Blackshear and Hanah had been drinking from small paper bags were finished. They decided to buy some more.

Hanah was about to walk into the liquor store to buy them when the impulse struck Blackshear. He handed Hanah another dollar and told him to get a lottery ticket.

“We might win something,” Blackshear said.

“If we do, I’m gonna split it with you,” Hanah said good-naturedly.

Hanah bought the ticket and came back. The men decided to take turns scratching off the six emblems.

Hanah scratched off “$25,000” and “$2.” Blackshear told him he could scratch off the rest, too.

Hanah scratched off a “$500.” Then another “$500.” One more and they would win.

He scratched off another “$2.” Now they had a chance at winning two ways.

Hanah scratched the last emblem. It was “$25,000.” They had three pairs. They were losers.