Scratch & Win

ARCHIVAL: la Fever! Show us your lotto tickets!

Ian Coss : In the mid-1980s, a strange new phenomenon swept across America.

MUSIC: Enter

ARCHIVAL: The largest lump sum cash payment in the history of the Maryland State Lottery..

Ian : Lottery jackpots unlike anything the world had ever known. So big they would drive media coverage, which inspired more people to play, which only made the jackpots bigger. This cyclical effect became known as lottery fever.

ARCHIVAL: This September in Florida, a record 105 million jackpot sparked the latest outbreak of lottery fever.

Attention shoppers, CB's Foods Villa Park has just been notified that we sold the 42 million dollar winning Illinois lottery ticket.

Ian : In the 80s, lottery winners became minor celebrities.

ARCHIVAL: How did you pick the numbers? What did the numbers mean? Do you play regularly? Every week.

Ian : And the drawings themselves were a TV staple. Or at least, they certainly were in Massachusetts.

ARCHIVAL: Number 1, 12, 34…

Dawn Hayes: So long story short, uh, a friend sent me a article that was saying that the lottery was doing a open call for hosts, and they thought I'd be great for.

MUSIC: Shift

Ian : This is Dawn Hayes, who at the time was a recently graduated communications major, living in Boston and working as an assistant to the manager of an A.M. radio station. Not her dream job. Being the face of a nationwide obsession: dream job.

Dawn Hayes: What they did was they had a talent search. They just opened the doors and said, anybody come on down and audition to be the new lottery host.

Ian : The way Hayes describes it, the scene was something akin to an American Idol audition: long lines, people ushering you along, and finally a brief moment in a sterile conference room, in which to make an impression.

Dawn Hayes: They asked you a few questions. Thank you. Next

Ian : Amazingly, Hayes survived that first round.

Dawn Hayes: I got called back

Ian : and the next round, and the next round.

Dawn Hayes: So they went from 4, 000, I think down to 126. To another number And then at the end, they had a, pageant of sorts.

MUSIC: Out

Ian Coss: What did you do in that pageant? when it was down to to the finalists?

Dawn Hayes: Well, that's a kind of a cool story, too. So, keeping in mind this is in the 80s. I'm a black woman. There 16 finalists. lot of the white women, I'm sure, thought that, well, we don't have to worry about her. So I always dressed down when I was around them. So the day of the pageant, uh, I went there was a, clothier, Yolanda . And when you wanted anything special, you would go to Yolanda.

Ian : Hayes went to Yolanda.

Dawn Hayes: Got the most amazing Um, dress, shoes, and earrings, like, that was just stunning. Walked into the finale, glasses on, no makeup, did my change, bang. And then when I literally, when I walked out of the, of my area to dress, it was like, what, who's that?

Ian Coss: it's like that moment, you know, that moment in every teen movie where like there's the nerdy girl and all she has to do is, Take off her glasses and let her hair down and everyone's all of a sudden like, Oh my gosh, she's beautiful.

Dawn Hayes: Exactly. That was exactly it.

MUSIC: Enter

Ian : Hayes advanced once again, to the very last stage -- complete with a mock drawing and a whimsical pageant question. At this point, there were just three finalists. One would become the face of the Massachusetts lottery. And looking across the stage she could see the obvious face for the job was up there with her.

Dawn Hayes: Very Boston, you know, Kelly red hair, very Irish looking.

Ian Coss: And did it feel just inevitable that the redhead Irish woman would be the face of the lottery?

Dawn Hayes: It all played out as you would think it would in, Boston, you know, it was the way the time was.

MUSIC: Out

Ian : Hayes came in second place. No job, no big break. But her dream was not over yet. Hayes, like the lottery itself, was going to get a second chance at stardom.

MUSIC: Theme

Ian : From GBH News this is Scratch and Win, the making of America’s most successful lottery. I'm Ian Coss.

In the 1980s state lotteries became a cultural presence like they had never been before, driven by televised drawings, constant press coverage and of course slick advertising. It was not enough for the states to just offer an appealing product. If they wanted to drive growth, they needed to tell a story about that product, weave it into the imaginations and daily lives of their citizens. All of which raised a delicate question: just how far should the state go to promote gambling?

This is Part 6: The Game Dreams Are Made Of.

MUSIC: Out

BREAK

Ian : There are three core games that the Massachusetts lottery rode to the top of the lottery charts. Two we've heard about: scratch tickets and the numbers game. The third is lotto.

Ian Coss: Could you just talk me through the design of the Lotto game? How does it work?

Jonathan Cohen: built on long odds and big jackpots

Ian : Jonathan Cohen, who we've heard before, is the author of "For a Dollar and a Dream: State Lotteries in Modern America."

Jonathan Cohen: And the appeal is that there will be many, many drawings, and over time, and if nobody wins, the pot gets bigger. So that the odds stay the same for each drawing, but over time, what you will win will be more and more money.

Ian : I find that today, that term "lotto" doesn't mean a lot to people, or it's become almost a generic stand-in for "lottery." But it's a distinct category of lottery game that includes products I'm guessing you have heard of: Powerball and Megamillions. Those games, which now can have jackpots well over one billion dollars, are lotto games.

Jonathan Cohen: the fundamental piece of Lotto is that there's a rollover and that the jackpot is not fixed and it gets bigger over time and that was relatively innovative.

Ian : Like everything else, Lotto was once new. And perhaps not surprisingly at this point, the first lottery in America to try this new kind of game was Massachusetts.

Ian Coss: So can you tell me the story of Massachusetts' first attempt at lotto?

Jonathan Cohen: Yeah, it's a, it's a really short story.

MUSIC: Enter

Jonathan Cohen: they introduced it in 1978 and Lotto, it just doesn't work.

Ian : Lotto is a delicate game. It has to be handled just right in order to catch on.

Jonathan Cohen: Players are tasked with selecting a set of numbers from within a specific range. Um, so the most common sort of structure would be you have to pick six numbers ranging from 1 through. 49,

Ian : That yields fourteen million possible combinations. The odds here are way longer than the daily number game. And you want the odds long, because the jackpot will never grow if you have too many winners. The hits have to be rare. But at the same time, you need people to keep playing. That's what I mean when I say it's a delicate game.

Jonathan Cohen: You need people to sort of put their faith in a game that they've never played before, on the promise of a massive jackpot, and then, then the snowball can start.

Ian : In Massachusetts, that first version of Lotto never snowballed. It never reached that point where the jackpot is so big it becomes a story, and everyone starts imagining that they could be the lucky one in fourteen million to receive a truly life changing amount of money.

Jonathan Cohen: the lottery commission just like gives up.

Ian : About three months after the game launched, it was canceled, without ever having a single winner. The fever didn't catch.

MUSIC: Out

Ian : Like he said, it's a short story.

Eventually, Massachusetts got back into the lotto game, in 1982. And the contrast between Lotto 1.0 and Lotto 2.0 is pretty stunning. In a word, the difference was "marketing."

MUSIC: Enter

Ian : Lotteries of all kinds throughout history have depended on good advertising. Because as we saw with the failure of Lotto, the game only works if a lot of people play. Scale is essential. But as states began the long process of bringing these games out of the shadows and into the public sphere, one of their big limits was often advertising. For example, there was a federal law on the books prohibiting all interstate distribution of gambling promotion by mail. That meant if the Lottery placed an ad in the Boston Globe and it landed on a doorstep in Rhode Island, the paper was breaking the law. Similar rules were in effect for broadcasting, which meant that lottery drawings for many years could not be shown on TV at all, let alone lottery ads. By the late 1970s, those restrictions were lifted. Marketing budgets increased, and lotteries started to find their voice.

This is when Larry DiCara mounted his ill-fated campaign for state Treasurer, the one with all the candidates with similar sounding names. The irony is that those early ads that DiCara felt were too enticing, too pushy, they look tame compared to what was coming.

MUSIC: Out

Jack Connors: So, in the earliest years of Hill Holiday, The only people that would hire us are the ones that didn't know better.

Ian : Jack Connors is one of the founders of the ad agency Hill Holliday. In the 1970s they were just getting started, taking whatever clients they could get. But after working on a political campaign for a powerful Boston Democrat -- Connors happened to meet State Treasurer Bob Crane, the so-called 'czar of the lottery'.

Jack Connors: And, uh, I happened to fall in love with Bob Crane. He was a true character.

ARCHIVAL: The little darlin No, now we shouldn't be having fun, so It's

Ian : Crane, remember was a vaudeville man, an entertainer, who reveled in the rough political style of the state. When Connors first met him, the treasurer seemed larger than life.

Jack Connors: I saw him as a, as a very happy warrior. But, to him, It was all a sport And your job is to hit one out of the park.

Ian : We heard from Jack Connors back in episode two. I introduced him as a long-time friend of Crane's, which he is, but that relationship really began through marketing.

The failure of Lotto was obviously a black eye for Crane's lottery, which up to that point had been on a hot streak. And that same year the first version of Lotto was canceled, 1979, the Massachusetts Lottery dropped its original ad firm. It was time for fresh ideas, and Jack Connors was able to get an audience with the Treasurer.

Jack Connors: as is the case with a lot of state contracts, there's a sort of a bidding process. But, in this case, it wasn't so much about who was going to charge more or less. Everyone was averaging the same percentage, if you will. So the competition really was about who's creative is the most attractive to the treasurer and the head of the lottery, etc. And we had built relationships, but we had to win, we had to go over the final hurdle.

MUSIC: Enter

Tony Winch: Hill Holiday was considered the most creative agency in Boston. We were the, uh, blue collar crazy guys.

Ian : Tony Winch worked in Creative at Hill Holliday, and describes the place as pretty much lifted straight out of Mad Men. Golf in the hallways, three martini lunches...

Tony Winch: We would joke around. We said, if you don't get the work done in the morning, it's not going to get done. Because you'd go out to lunch with guys or clients. And you'd roll back in at three o'clock and at four o'clock they'd have cocktails.

Ian : They had a phrase for it: 'A.M. Advertising'.

Tony Winch: was a very, very different era.

Ian : But the work that did get done stood out. It was creative, inspired, a little edgy.

ARCHIVAL: This is Hill Holiday's Real Life, Real Answers campaign.

Ian : Hill Holliday made waves by creating ads that didn't always look like ads,

ARCHIVAL: There's a lot of paperwork here.

Ian : There was this famous campaign for Hancock Insurance that never actually says what Hancock is selling.

ARCHIVAL: They look real. The actors don't look at the camera. They look away. They mumble and shrug. The sales pitch is never spoken. It's soft, but it sells.

Ian : Hill Holiday was one of many agencies around the country ushering in a new era in advertising -- a looser, weirder era that was less about products and more about feelings.

Tony Winch: In fact, I never thought I was working. It was so much fun.

Ian : In other words, they were exactly what the Lottery needed.

MUSIC: Out

Ian : Crane's lottery took a chance on the young upstarts.

One account executive at Hill Holiday told me that when they first got that lottery contract, it was a third of all their business. It was a huge get, snagged from the most prestigious agency in town. And it became their showpiece, a chance to really flex their creativity.

ARCHIVAL: I got my load at 5. 18 on the road by 6. 03

Tony Winch: for instance, we did a TV commercial with a guy in a truck,

Ian : Again Tony Winch was a Creative Director on the Lottery account.

Tony Winch: and he was going down Route 495, and then to Route 128.

Ian : This ad was for the daily Numbers game, which was still a big money maker for the lottery. In the ad, that truck driver sees so many numbers that eventually he stops to place a bet.

ARCHIVAL: Keep me in. 495.

Tony Winch: Every time they saw a number, we wanted them to think about playing that number in the lottery.

ARCHIVAL: They began with an old tin can. They gave the 802.

Ian : In another ad, a cab driver keeps encountering the number 802: on a clock, a gas pump, a diner receipt...until she too can't resist running into a convenience store to play her number.

A lot of early lottery advertising focused on how the games brought in money for education and other good causes. Or they tended to be informational, simply explaining how the games worked.

These ads were clearly something else.

ARCHIVAL: you play. 802. Hey, is this a winner? Just a hunch.

Ian : They're leaning into the thrill and mysticism of betting on numbers, and also normalizing it -- something you do as part of your daily routine.

ARCHIVAL: Have you played your number today?

Ian : But for the relaunch of Lotto, Hill Holiday would raise the bar once again. It was 1982, so the state was now in the midst of its tax revolt, and the only political pressure Bob Crane faced was to bring in as much money as possible. The attitude was: ‘let it rip.’ So Hill Holiday stuck one of their sharpest minds on the task: Seamus McGuire.

Jack Connors: Seamus Maguire was, uh, just a wonderful human being and a great writer.

Tony Winch: He did an awful lot of his best work if he was in a bar writing things down on a, uh napkin.

Ian : McGuire's barstool brainstorms were so legendary that the agency installed a full mahogany topped bar with a brass rail in the corner of his office.

Tony Winch: Full bar, in his office and he could literally sit on a barstool and create that way.

Ian : So here we have McGuire, a drink in his hand and a twinkle in his eye, staring down the same old game the state had tried before: Lotto. That was the name: just "Lotto". Apparently there was one other name idea in the air too: they could call it "Pick Six" -- referencing how many numbers you got to pick. But McGuire didn't like either of those names. They were dull, instructive -- a little pedantic even. McGuire wanted something fun and catchy. He wrote down the name: "Megabucks," along with a phrase: "The game that dreams are made of."

Again, Jack Connors.

Jack Connors: if people are going to buy a ticket, they weren't buying a ticket to read the directions. It was, it was very simple. We didn't want to complicate it.

Ian : And for the TV ad, Seamus McGuire brought that simple dream to life.

Jack Connors: I don't know if you recall the Wendy's commercial, Where's the Beef?

ARCHIVAL: It certainly is a big bun. It's a very big bun.

Ian : This is the iconic 80s ad where three elderly women inspect a hamburger with a giant bun and a tiny patty.

ARCHIVAL: Where's the beef?

Ian : Culminating of course in that classic line, delivered by a cantankerous Russian-American woman who did her first TV commercial at age 80: Clara Peller.

ARCHIVAL: Where's the beef?

Jack Connors: The woman who was the star of that commercial, Seamus brought her in to do a lottery commercial.

Ian : It's actually even more impressive than he's making it sound. Because McGuire hired Clara Peller to be in the Megabucks ad BEFORE the Wendy's ad came out, when Peller was basically unknown. Somehow McGuire could spot a phenomenon when he saw one, and Peller became the star of Megabucks.

It's a pretty quirky ad.

Jack Connors: The scene is a boardroom, and all those old stuffy gents in the boardroom looking at a bucket.

ARCHIVAL: Uh, who, uh, who, uh, who, uh, who called this meeting? Uh, oh, not me. I, I, I, I don't know. I did. She did. I did. She did. She did. I did.

Ian : The bucket on the table is a mop bucket. And Peller's character is all done mopping floors, because she just won Megabucks.

ARCHIVAL: Have you all heard of Megabucks? Megabucks? Megibucks? Megabucks. Oh, Megabucks. In the Lottery's Megabucks game, the jackpot grows every week until someone wins.

Jack Connors: And, uh, she gets to the head of the table and says, now you'll be cleaning the floors.

ARCHIVAL: I'm sure you'll all enjoy working for me. Megabucks, the game that dreams are made of.

Jack Connors: It was entertaining. You know, you just had to keep the produce fresh. That was critical.

Ian Coss: What do you mean by keep the produce fresh?

Jack Connors: back in the day there was this theory, it's probably still accurate, maybe more so, that the average, person was exposed to 1, 500 commercials or ads a day, whether it's from the newspaper, on the bus, on the radio, TV, whatever. 1, 500 commercials a day. And, our job was to make sure that our customer's commercial was remembered.

MUSIC: Enter

Ian : Looking back with some distance, 1979 is an inflection point at the Massachusetts Lottery. Thanks to that new ad agency, and a bunch of other changes we'll get to later in the series, this is when a middle of the pack lottery starts to separate, and become the envy of all lotteries.

And to me, the timing of all these changes does seem conspicuous. The state suffers its first big stumble in Lotto, and the next year we see the beginnings of this shake-up -- we see Crane starting to rotate out the more cautious choices he made early on, and bring in people he trusted, and who shared his sensibilities. All in time to relaunch Lotto in 1982. Except now it was Megabucks.

I should be clear this is all conjecture on my part. I can't ask Crane about the reasoning or timing of these changes. But I could ask Jack Connors, the ad executive, and he for one saw Bob Crane's hand at work.

Jack Connors: as charming as Bob was, as great an entertainer as he was, it was important to him that this be successful. And if the first one failed, then the second one couldn't.

MUSIC: Out

BREAK

Ian : One of the key insights of Lotto games, is that it doesn't actually matter how long the odds are. I mean what's the difference between one in a million, vs one in ten million, or one in a hundred million. They are all impossibly long odds. The number that matters is the size of the jackpot; that's a number anyone can understand.

And it's important to stress that lottery prizes were not always the kind of money that launched you into the realm of the super-rich. The early lotteries were built on modest prizes and a lot more of them. Winning the jackpot would be enough to buy a house, maybe even quit your job. But not live in luxury for the rest of your life. That was new in the 1980s, new with Lotto. And it was very much in line with the times.

Ian Coss: Why do you think that Megabucks and other lotto style games took off the way they did in the 1980s. Was there something kind of deeper and broader going on in the culture at that time that fed into that, that craze?

Jack Connors: Well, this may be a bit of a reach.

Ian : Again, ad-man Jack Connors.

Jack Connors: But this was the first time in the history of America where People's children may not do better than their parents. That was the dream. And, uh, at some point in that general vicinity, that didn't happen anymore. And so it was a good time for that get rich quick kind of thing.

Ian : And I'm not sure Connors' theory here is such a reach. In fact, lottery historian Jonathan Cohen told me the exact same thing:

Jonathan Cohen: The 1980s is a period of stagnating incomes for blue collar workers persistent, unemployment in many parts of the economy, sort of the, first shockwaves from globalization and so all of that, uh, I think it helps explain the appeal of a 40 million jackpot.

Ian : This era of deindustrialization shook the whole idea of American meritocracy -- that if you work hard you will go far, and your children will go farther. But that's not all that was in the air.

MUSIC: Enter

Jonathan Cohen: So the irony is that the decline in material conditions for blue collar workers is coupled with a culture that is celebrating opulence and wealth.

ARCHIVAL: Hard not to notice, huh, Mother? It's Crystal's new engagement ring.

Jonathan Cohen: Dynasty, about this super rich family It was like the most popular show of the early 80s. The Forbes list of like the wealthiest Americans comes out for the first time in 1982 and like immediately sells out every copy that they Printed lifestyles of the Rich and Famous premieres in 1984.

ARCHIVAL: Your host on this exclusive edition of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous

Jonathan Cohen: And there's all this commentary from Newsweek and elsewhere at the time that the appeal of these shows is about sort of living vicariously through them

ARCHIVAL: Glamour palace in the sky…

Ian Coss: and Donald Trump fits in this period too?

Jonathan Cohen: Donald Trump. So many ways.

ARCHIVAL: Whoever said that money can't buy you love clearly didn't know Donald Trump.

Jonathan Cohen: I mean, the Art of the Deal is the bestselling book for many weeks, months, years, in the 1980s.

ARCHIVAL: I also have his autograph. You do? Yes. How'd you get it? Where is it? Didn't you get my picture?

Ian : Trump even had his own boardgame, in which the smallest denomination of money you could play for, was ten million dollars.

ARCHIVAL: Trump's got a new game! Hey, Trump's got a new deal! What's your game, Donald? Heard about Trump's new deal?

Jonathan Cohen: He's paradigmatic of what people want, and it's not enough anymore to like, move to Westchester and buy a nice house, you want to be a real estate mogul, you want to buy an Atlantic City casino, um, and that's sort the standard against which people are increasingly setting themselves.

ARCHIVAL: Because it's not whether you win or lose, it's whether you win. Yes! Play Trump, the game from Milton Bradley. I think you'll like it.

MUSIC: Out

Jonathan Cohen: So there's this cultural fascination with the The wealthy and their wealth, that is the flip side to this actual decline in security and stability that is defining many American households.

Ian : And into that strange contradiction steps a tantalizing possibility: chance. According to a Gallup Poll from 1984, twenty percent of Americans believed the Lottery was their only way to get ahead.

ARCHIVAL: It's called super lotto. And it gives each individual the chance for untold wealth.

Ian : You can see that theme in lotto marketing around the country. Here and elsewhere, it was the game dreams are made of.

ARCHIVAL: Hey, isn't your dream worth a buck? Yeah.

Jack Connors: I mean, I think there's, uh, we writ large, not Hill Holiday, but the entire world of marketing knew that something was happening here as the song goes, and, uh, we ought to try and take advantage of it.

Ian Coss: So on some level, you're, you're just riding cultural currents, trying to read them as best you can and stay ahead.

Jack Connors: You didn't create waves. You rode them.

Ian : And in Massachusetts, Megabucks was definitely riding that wave.

ARCHIVAL: We even asked one of the cashiers here at the Star Market Megabucks game, Would you ever play the game yourself? Oh, yeah.

Ian : The game launched in 1982, but it really took off in 1984. That's when that classic ad with the mop bucket and the boardroom was in heavy rotation. By that summer, the Megabucks jackpot grew to fifteen million dollars -- then the biggest lottery prize ever in North America.

ARCHIVAL: But I thought you said it was a silly bet. Well, you gotta have that one in a million shot there, you gotta have that try. You have to.

Ian : During that first bout of so-called 'Megamania', the Massachusetts Lottery reported that a warehouse filled with 15 million betting slips was emptied out in a single day.

Andy Solari: When I got there, it had the old, uh, modems and they worked on these phone lines

Ian : Andy Solari was a telecommunications technician at the lottery. He started there right as Megabucks was taking off, and at that time all those millions of bets came in by phone line -- not like a phone call, but as data transmitted by phone.

Andy Solari: it's like the old days when you had the dial up modem

ARCHIVAL: Okay. Thank you.

Andy Solari: and the way they troubleshoot was looking at the LEDs on the cards and they'd literally patch in and listen to the thing. But you could see, you always knew when you had a big jackpot because those lights were just like flashing away.

Ian Coss: So you could literally stand in that control room and see a light flash on the modem board every time a bet is placed?

Andy Solari: Yeah, a million miles an hour

ARCHIVAL: Oh, wait a minute.

Andy Solari: and the other thing I remember is that everybody wanted their machine fixed now, you know, so all the technicians were going crazy, going out and trying to get, You know, printers, switched out and ribbons changed and all that. So that was the big thing. Like it was all hands on deck when it was a big jackpot.

Ian : The wild success of Megabucks propelled Massachusetts up the rankings of state lotteries. In 1984, lottery revenue grew by 100 percent -- it doubled from the year before. By 1985, we had risen from the number 8 spot to the number 2 spot in terms of sales per capita, just behind Maryland. And by 1986, state officials estimated that seventy percent of Massachusetts adults played Megabucks on a regular basis. When the jackpot was big, that rose to 90 percent. 90 percent of all adults.

MUSIC: Transition

Ian : As Megamania took off, it also opened up a bidding war among the Boston TV stations. Every station wanted those drawings; they were great for ratings. And the bidding essentially came down to which station could offer the lottery the best promotion. Who could offer the best time slot with the biggest audience? Who could spend the most money on a glitzy studio set and an unforgettable host to make the lottery look good?

Dawn Hayes: So at that time, they were changing, um, Uh, stations and Channel 7 Basically put a million dollars on the table and the lottery said, okay, we're going to go with you.

Ian : This is how Dawn Hayes wound up in that pageant to be the new lottery host, which of course, she lost. So Hayes was watching from the outside as her competitor, the woman with the kelly red hair, became the face of Megamania.

Dawn Hayes: She goes off to do that, and I'm in the grocery store. I hear people talking about her.

Ian : Naturally, Hayes listens in, curious how her old competition is faring with the public. Not well, apparently.

Dawn Hayes: It just didn't click for her.

ARCHIVAL: this is Megabucks Live. We have an estimated two and a half million dollars to give away.

Dawn Hayes: This was live TV and that red light goes on and you've got to go. Okay. And that was a little challenging

Ian : And all it took was one last little twist of fate to change Hayes' life.

Dawn Hayes: A year in, towards the end of her contract, she got sick or got a cold or something.

Ian : The station called Hayes, as the runner up, to fill in.

Dawn Hayes: So here I am, the door opens, you throw yourself through it.

MUSIC: Post

Ian : In those days, Lottery drawings were held in prime time: 7:52pm, right after Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy.

Dawn Hayes: So it was the hottest time slot.

ARCHIVAL: So long, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for tuning us in. Big finale tomorrow on Jeopardy!

MUSIC: Out

Dawn Hayes: once that red light went on, I You're open to the world, I'm in your living room.

ARCHIVAL: Good evening everybody, I'm Dawn Hayes and welcome to Lottery Live. While you made it, it's Wednesday and the weekend is in sight.

Ian : Channel 7 had built a special set for each type of lottery drawing -- one for the daily number, one for Megabucks. There was the big tumbler of lottery balls of course, and as the six balls came down the chute, the number appeared on a digital display just like the scores on Jeopardy.

Dawn Hayes: So it looks slick. It didn't look like local TV. You can tell a local commercial from a national commercial, right? This show looked great, it was just like money, money, money, money.

ARCHIVAL: Now let's see what the wheels have to say tonight.

Dawn Hayes: I fill in, you know, it's a Cinderella story

Ian : It didn't click for the pageant winner, but it did click for Dawn Hayes.

Dawn Hayes: it was really amazing that people took to me that they didn't take to her that, yeah, I, I was the face of the lottery.

MUSIC: Transition

Ian : Dawn Hayes rode the crest of the Megamania wave. She did those nightly drawings for sixteen years -- from the 80s, through the 90s and into 2000s -- longer than anyone else in the lottery's history.

Dawn Hayes: I'd be someplace and someone would hear my voice, my back would be to them and they would be, you're Dawn Hayes, to this day. I've had kids, I've had grown people say that they learned to count with me. I mean, this is a gambling thing, do you know what I mean? And like, oh, I learned to count with you.

Ian Coss: It's amazing how those little, short installments, you know, you're there for a minute or two, but it's so consistent. It's such a part of the rhythm of life.

Dawn Hayes: Yeah, yeah, and that, and that felt really good.

MUSIC: Out

Ian : In 1980, the American Psychiatric Association published the third edition of its massive and always anticipated Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, usually called the DSM. The DSM is a snapshot of psychiatry's ever-changing understanding of the human mind. And that year it featured a new diagnosis, never included before: pathological gambling.

It was now a diagnosable condition alongside kleptomania and pyromania, defined as, quote: "chronically and progressively unable to resist impulses to gamble." A lot of the research on problem gambling up to that point had focused on horse racing, sports betting and casinos. But in the 1980s, state lotteries entered that conversation too.

ARCHIVAL: No other division, department, or section of state government is constructed to make losers out of its people.

Ian : And for critics of state lotteries, promotion was always the thorniest part of the whole endeavor. That's when the state crosses over from serving the public demand to creating that demand.

ARCHIVAL: You have the government out promoting gambling. You have the government encouraging its citizens to gamble.

Ian : The way I see it, lotteries have always had to walk a narrow path. They have to be competitive to survive. But they also have to be respectable to survive. They are after all government operations; they can’t offend the public. So they’re always in search of that sweet spot: addictive, but not too addictive. Pushy, but not too pushy. At one point in the 80s, the Connecticut legislature ordered its lottery to pull an especially aggressive ad from the air, for quote: “promoting sloth in the Land of Steady Habits.” Clearly they had crossed a line.

And you would think that Massachusetts, with all its liberal professors and vaunted medical institutions, would be wary of risks of gambling, that we wouldn’t want our state fueling what was now a diagnosable pathology. But for all the reasons we’ve covered in the last few episodes, it was the opposite.

ARCHIVAL: Regan cassette clips

Ian : By 1985 the state lottery's advertising budget was over ten million dollars a year, more than double that of New Jersey, which has a similar population, and second only to New York, which has a much larger population. Massachusetts is also one of the most urbanized states period, with the vast majority of the population concentrated in a single metro area – meaning in a single media market, easy to reach. We in the Bay State were immersed in lottery media, probably more than any other part of the country.

Ian Coss: so there's always been criticism of the lottery, and please don't take this as a value judgment, from me, but I'm curious, did you ever have personal reservations about, selling the lottery to the public.

Dawn Hayes: So are you asking if I had concerns about just

Ian Coss: in terms of like promoting gambling

Dawn Hayes: and promoting gambling and, and people using their, you know, WIC check to buy lottery tickets? Um, of course I thought about that. Um, I am a believer that, I can't make you do anything, um, I can encourage you, but I, I really didn't have an issue with that.

MUSIC: Transition

Dawn Hayes: my job was to present the numbers and to be, you know, a cordial, warm, welcoming face to the lottery. Like my partner says, he's like, you would get people to go out and get a ticket in the snow. You would say, it's snowing now, but go out and get that ticket. That was my job, you know, and to smile and make people feel good about it. You know, and, and I took that to heart.

MUSIC: Out

Ian Coss: Did you ever have any reservations about aggressively marketing the lottery?

Jack Connors: Not one, not one day in my life.

Ian : I put more or less the same question to Jack Connors of the ad agency Hill Holiday.

Jack Connors: Never. I, uh, we, we weren't, uh, advertising cocaine, uh, or cigarettes or alcohol. The lottery, it, it was a, a family sporting event. And everybody knew the chances were slim, but it was, We viewed it as being in the entertainment business

Ian : I actually give Jack Connors a lot of credit for sitting down with me. He passed away a few months after this interview, from pancreatic cancer, and he was a big figure in this town -- in business, politics, philanthropy. Making ads for the lottery will not define his legacy; I don't think he'd want it to, but he was willing to answer all my questions.

Ian Coss: Part of the reason I ask is because. You know, any good admin has to know who's your customer, who's your market. And for the lottery, historically, it has always been, you know, the working class and working poor who make up the, majority of lottery sales. And so was there, was that a deliberate part of the, the marketing plan is like, well, we're not going to advertise in Wellesley and Weston, we're going to advertise in Lawrence and Lowell.

Jack Connors: Well, of course. Most of the advertising was on television. So you didn't make decisions about Lawrence and Lowell or Wellesley because they were on the same market. Right. Um, We knew that, uh, as income went up, usage went down. We were, we're not unaware, we were not innocent. But, uh, We didn't stand outside homeless shelters trying to peddle, uh, lottery tickets.

Ian Coss: I was just thinking about the arc of, you know, your career. You're in some ways best known now as a philanthropist. And you're known as a master of getting rich people to part with their money. Um, I'm curious how you reflect on the lottery as a source of money for public goods is this the best way to pay for our fire engines and water taps?

Jack Connors: Yeah, I, I guess you could say I've looked at life from both sides now. Uh, but I, when I was in the advertising business, I was all in. I loved it. But I, there's, I'm not keeping anything from you, there wasn't any, uh, I wasn't, uh, ashamed to go home to my family and say, you know, we broke the record in the lottery. It was just, it was, it was part of the economic mix in the Commonwealth. And we're proud to be part of.

MUSIC: Enter

Jack Connors: regrets? I've had a few. But then again, too few to mention.

Ian : This world that Bob Crane and Jack Connors and Dawn Hayes created, it is in effect exactly what we, the state, asked for when we created the lottery. We wanted it to be run effectively, like a business. We wanted it to outcompete the illegal operators. And more than anything, we wanted it to bring in money. Crane's lottery did all that, by any means necessary. We asked for it, he delivered.

Now it was time to reckon with the lottery Crane had built.

ARCHIVAL: Massachusetts has the most powerful democratic machine in the country. And if I win, I'm going to root out the corruption and cronyism that exists in the state treasurer's office.

Ian : Just as the Megabucks wave reached its absolute peak, and just as Crane was driving the mafia bookmakers out of business – he, and the lottery, faced an unexpected challenger.

ARCHIVAL: Well, you're accusing him of doing things that are illegal. I am accusing him of doing things that are unethical,

Ian : A challenger who said the Crane himself was the real crook. And it was time to bring him down.

ARCHIVAL: Let's see the facts, Mr. Crane. Let's throw away the ads, and let's set the record straight.

Ian : That's next time.

The series is produced by Isabel Hibbard and myself, Ian Coss. It’s edited by Lacy Roberts. The editorial supervisor is Jenifer McKim with support from Ryan Alderman. Mei Lei is the project manager, and the Executive Producer is Devin Maverick Robins.

I had a chance to speak with a number of staff at the ad agency Hill Holliday who you don’t hear in the episode: Dick Pantano, Bob Curry and Jim Reilly. I’m grateful for their time and insights.

For more info on the series and full transcripts go to GBHNews.org/scratchandwin . You can also find videos of the episodes on the GBH YouTube channel with incredible archival footage.

The artwork is by Bill Miller and Mamie-Hawa Bawoh (Mah-mee How-wah Bah-woh - like whoa, slow down). Our closing song is “You Made Me Love You,” performed by Massachusetts State Treasurer Bob Crane.

Scratch and Win is a production of GBH News and distributed by PRX.