Whole Lottery Lot Is Latest Obsession

For most of his life, Mike Kennedy has collected stamps, marbles, labels from tin cans and orange crates, coins and baseball cards. You name it, he saved it.

Now they are all gone.

He might have kept his stamps, his favorite, if it wasn’t for a business setback that forced him to sell the collection to raise money.

But the die-hard collector is now back in form, this time with, of all things, used lottery scratchers. Lottery tickets too. And lottery memorabilia.

“This is an inexpensive hobby,” said the Garden Grove man whose long hair is a holdover, he said, from his days as a hippie and flower child. “The losing tickets are free.”

“Some people think I’m crazy for collecting them,” he said.

A worker at a nearby liquor store with a Lotto outlet picks up the scratchers that buyers discard. “He puts them in a box and saves them for me,” Kennedy said.

During better times, Kennedy said, he would buy up to $150 worth of live tickets a week. “Now I’m only buying two or three a week,” he said.

The 1962 Westminster High School graduate is also collecting memorabilia tied to Lotto and the California Lottery, such as how-to-play brochures, banners, ads, ink pens, hats, T-shirts, lapel pins and coffee cups.

He also saves losing lottery tickets, “but they’re not as pretty as the scratchers. They’re just plain Janes.”

Kennedy, a former Navy corpsman who worked as a certified nursing assistant after discharge, likes the look of the scratchers so much that he papered three bedroom walls with them. He said it took 1,200 losing scratch cards to cover each wall.

“I wouldn’t paste up my good ones,” he said. “I have tickets no one else in the world has.”

At first, Kennedy said, the collection was just a hobby, “but I realized how beautiful the scratchers are” and got caught up in them. His artist wife, Kathleen, said she just tolerates his new venture.

The thousands of tickets and memorabilia are in boxes in his apartment and at a nearby storage company.

He said some of the scratchers haven’t been scratched off. “Some people wonder how I can stand not knowing if they were winners,” he said. “Someday, they might be worth more to other collectors if they haven’t been scratched off.”

No matter now. The time limit to collect on winning tickets has passed.

“Some people don’t understand that collecting is more important then the money you might get for them,” Kennedy said.

“There aren’t many people collecting these, so it’s hard to say what (the collection) is worth,” he said.

Kennedy also has a new career in mind. He is studying at Crossroads Community Church in Westminster to become a minister.

“When I do, I’ll probably keep the collection,” he said. “There’s nothing in the Bible that says I shouldn’t collect them.”