Hopes and Dreams Wait With Buyers on Lotto Ticket Lines
At 12:17 p.m. Wednesday, the Lotto machine in Victor Salem’s storehad rung up $4,259. The line, 15 players deep, had snaked past the Twinkies and Ding Dongs and was heading straight toward the laxatives. The air was bristling with fantasies.
Tom Tucker, 56, a regional sales manager from Huntington Beach, said that, if he won the $120-million jackpot, he would quit his job immediately. Many in Salem’s line were verbally giving notice.
“Take This Job and Shove It” may have been Wednesday’s state song.
Shortly after noon, Lotto broke a national record--$120 million and counting, eclipsing Pennsylvania’s 1989 mark of $115.6 million. The odds of winning on one ticket, state officials said, were 1 in 23 million. Dying in a commercial airline disaster was a far more likely possibility.
Since the beginning of the California State Lottery on Oct. 3, 1985, and the advent of Lotto a year later, the latter had notched a previous high of $68.56 million on Feb. 21 of last year.
None of the people in Salem’s line at the Super Junior Market on 7th Avenue in downtown San Diego had ever won previously--even small amounts--but all figured their chances were good. As Terry Toma, 22, of Spring Valley put it, fantasies had thrown them into overdrive.
“I want to go to Hawaii, buy a Rolls Royce, live in a castle and have maids all over,” she said. Gloria Yanik, 50, a legal secretary from Chula Vista, dreamed of taking her winnings and using them to sabotage the blues--ending once and for all the suffering of the people she loves the most.
“I would hire a full-time nurse for my mother and father,” Yanik said. “My father is a former coal miner from Pennsylvania. He had prostate cancer, and the chemotherapy wrecked him. He’s confined to a wheelchair, and now my mom has a bad heart.
“With a full-time nurse, my dad could travel and someone would always be with him. He loves to fish. That’s his dream. . . . I’d like to find a way of giving him back that dream.”
“After I won, I’d rush to the airport and jump on the first plane out of the country,” said Susan O’Shea, 40, a city employee from Encinitas. “I wouldn’t care where it was going. I’d just fly . . . . “
Colleen Blakely, 42, a city employee and O’Shea’s friend, said the tickets each held in their hand were like mirrors to a world of fantasies and problems. Blakely dreamed of taking her winnings and employing homeless workers by the hundreds.
“But . . . “ she said with a sigh. “I know it won’t happen. I fully expect to lose.”
John Turcich, 51, a businessman from Warwick, N.Y., said he expected to lose, too, but loved the adrenaline rush of thinking--hoping, even praying--he might have a chance.
“Think about it,” he said with a gleam in his eye. “It would be like getting $10,000 a day for 20 years. It would be like having the ($5.5-million annual) salary of (Boston Red Sox pitcher) Roger Clemens--for 20 years--without ever throwing a baseball.”
Shannon Shaw, 21, a receptionist for a local firm, was putting down $178 as part of an office pool. Office pools were the rage Wednesday. She said the picture of her group’s fantasy was: Quit job, pay off massive debts, travel widely and buy many new things.
George Pratt, a clinical psychologist with a private practice in La Jolla, admitted he was buying a ticket on his way home from work Wednesday. He called it a guilty pleasure that played tug-of-war with deeper professional concerns.
Pratt said Lotto players reminded him of actors in Greek tragedies waiting for the moment when the hero and heroine would, in spite of their deep despair, be saved by a god that descended magically “and totally without logic” out of an azure sky.
Pratt said some players, at least unconsciously, are apt to be depressed by Wednesday night’s results, since they will firmly re-establish the very real obstacles they face and are hoping the winning ticket will overcome.
“For a lot of people, it will be just one more disappointment,” he said.
Still, Pratt said, a lot of people enjoy playing, even knowing they’ll lose. He said the adrenaline rush, the feeling of belonging to an endeavor that just about everyone shares, is what really gets them going.
Joel Siegal, an attorney in Escondido, said he thought the shared feeling was exactly what state authorities had in mind in following the lead of other states and finally instituting a lottery.
Even so, Siegal bought $15 worth of tickets.
Siegal said he was wary of the “unreasonable expectations Lotto engenders. If you watch TV, and let’s face it, most of us do, you’re conditioned to have these unrealistic expectations--and to think they’re normal. If I won, I’m not sure how much different my life would be.
“I’d probably stop using the generic toothpaste and buy Crest. Instead of spilling ketchup on my old brown suits, I’d be spilling it on my new tuxedo. In other words, I wouldn’t change at all.
“So why do I buy a ticket? The way I look at it is, somebody’s got to win it, so it might as well be me.”