Scratch & Win

Tracy Myette: Case of lottery tickets right here.

Ian Coss: What are we looking at here?

Tracy Myette: They use FedEx now. Used to be UPS. Can

NARRATION: You might remember back in episode one, we met a convenience store owner named Glen Myette. He was behind the counter on day one of the scratch ticket era, when customers lined up to try the new instant game. That same store, Myette's, is now run by his daughter, Tracy Myette.

Ian: you say what we're looking at here?

Tracy Myette: You're looking at my delivery of scratch tickets.

NARRATION: The box is small enough to hold under one arm, but Tracy shows me a receipt listing the total value, and it's a pretty big number. In case you're wondering, there's no point in stealing scratch tickets because the state would just invalidate them. But still, staring at this box of tickets on a table, I feel like I'm standing in a bank vault.

Tracy Myette: I can say it to you, but that's, that's what's in this box. Got it. And this is where we keep them in.

NARRATION: Fifty years ago, when Glen sold that first scratch ticket, it cost a dollar. The maximum prize was $10,000, and the only way to get that prize was to match all four spots on the ticket. You had one chance to win big. Oh, and there was exactly one scratch ticket for sale, no options, no variety. All that has changed.

Glen Myette: They started with a 1 ticket, went to a 2 ticket.

NARRATION: This again is Glen Myette, the former owner.

Glen Myette: and I remember when they come out with a 20 ticket, I just couldn't believe that somebody would walk in and spend 20 on a lottery ticket that's gonna be gone pretty much instantaneously . And now, they're, they have 50.

Tracy Myette: 50, just throwing it down like it's 5. Right. I just find

Glen Myette: myself hard, um, you Understanding that.

Ian: How well do the 50 tickets sell?

Tracy Myette: Very well.

MUSIC: Enter

NARRATION: According to the Massachusetts lottery's website, the state now offers 125 different instant games, ranging in price from one dollar to fifty dollars. Myette's doesn't stock all of those, but they stock a lot.

Tracy Myette: This is the most popular 50 ticket, Lifetime Millions. This is a new 2 ticket. 100 Million Power Shot.

NARRATION: The reason I'm returning to the story of instant games, is that after the scratch ticket was invented, it was reinvented -- once again in Massachusetts. And that reinvention, that refining of the game, is maybe the most important thing this lottery ever did. It changed the way every lottery in the country operates.

Ian: 50X, Big Blue Bonus Cache Word.

Glen Myette: Usually just buy a block and throw them up on the dashboard so when I get to a red light I can just scratch off a couple.

Tracy Myette: He's joking.

MUSIC: Theme

NARRATION: From GBH News this is Scratch and Win. I'm Ian.

The triumph of the scratch ticket was not inevitable, but it is the last missing piece in the story of how this state built the most successful lottery in America. I've thrown that phrase around a bunch, but here at the end of the series it is time to also try and make sense of it. Should we be proud of what our lottery has accomplished? Ashamed? Confused? A little of everything?

This is Part Eight: The Other Massachusetts Miracle.

MUSIC: Out

BREAK

NARRATION: When we left the scratch ticket back in part one, it was still the shiny new game that promised to finally give the lottery an edge over their illegal competition. It did that, for a time, but then the scratch ticket did what all other products do: it got old. By the late 1970s, sales on instant games were actually declining year over year, just as the daily number and lotto were starting to take off. It looked for a moment like the scratch ticket might fade away entirely.

There are a few people who can take some credit for turning that around. I'm going to focus on two, both of whom happened to be named Jim.

ARCHIVAL: This is the cash cow that Crane built. The Fountain of Billions, fed by the greatest gambling instincts in America. And Jimmy Hosker has been running the game since 1983.

and I can remember it like it was yesterday when we started it,

Tom Demakis: to this day, I've never met anybody that understood people better than Jimmy Hosker.

NARRATION: Everyone I talked to at the lottery, talked about Jim Hosker.

Sheila Dubrawski: It was just, it was in him.

Andy Solari: He was the right guy for this job

David O'Reilly: he made us feel like we were part of a family actually

NARRATION: Hosker was in many ways a bold choice to run a lottery. He had just a high school diploma; he never went to college. His resume included working as a part-time cop and delivering heating oil. But he had somehow worked his way into Treasurer Bob Crane’s inner circle. And the fact that Crane gave Hosker the job shows how much the conservatism of those early lotteries had faded by the 1980s. The games were established, they were trusted, they were politically secure. They didn't need to be run by mathematicians and FBI agents. What they needed now was a people person.

Ian: I'm curious, did it change, you know, when he came into leadership?

Sheila Dubrawski: Yes. It definitely, definitely changed.

NARRATION: Sheila Dubrawski started at the lottery a few years before Hosker became director in 1983.

Sheila Dubrawski: You know, the lottery, had an image, and there was so much, how do I want to say, um, consciousness about it, you know, having integrity and being not solemn, I don't have a word for it, but you know, just very, corporate y,

Ian: It had to be serious.

Sheila Dubrawski: Serious. Yeah. and, you know, I think, I think Jim Hoska was the right person at the right time because he was. You know, it can be all that, but the players out there are looking for excitement

MUSIC: Enter

NARRATION: I think it's telling that for years when the lottery published its annual reports, Treasurer Crane and the lottery’s original director – the mathematician – would each write and sign a separate introduction. But after Hosker's first year in charge, he and Crane signed the report jointly. They shared a vision and sensibility, that the lottery was entertainment. It had to be entertaining.

Sheila Dubrawski: and he was really, you know, willing to, create that image

ARCHIVAL: one in a million chance of a lifetime A life touched by magic

NARRATION: A lot of that new image came from marketing, from those barstool brainstorms at Hill Holiday. But it also came from the design of the games themselves. And one of Jim Hosker's secret weapons on game design was the other Jim, Jim O'Brien.

MUSIC: Out

NARRATION: I was not able to contact O'Brien, but according to an interview he gave years ago to the Washington Post, when O'Brien joined the Mass lottery he was told that scratch tickets were quote "dead in the water." Sales were so bad that the Lottery was thinking about phasing them out entirely.

O’Brien wasn’t ready to give up though, so he started conducting focus groups – dozens of focus groups just on scratch tickets – to try and understand the true desires of lottery players. Then he made some changes.

MUSIC: Enter

NARRATION: He started with the prize structure.

Paul Regan: The prize structure he would work on like crazy.

NARRATION: Paul Regan was an art director with the lottery's ad agency Hill Holliday, but he worked closely with O'Brien on both ticket design and the ad campaigns that went with them.

ARCHIVAL: With the new instant game Lucky Roll, you've got a better chance than ever to win 40 or more

NARRATION: Early scratch tickets would tend to have a lot of very small prizes, like one or two dollars, and then just a few very large prizes. What O'Brien realized was that you needed more in the middle -- fifty, a hundred, maybe a few hundred dollars -- enough to make you feel like you got a little windfall. O'Brien called it "chatter money.

Paul Regan: So all of a sudden, someone's saying, Hey, maybe I'm not gonna win the million, but hey, that's five hundred got a better shot at that.

ARCHIVAL: You grab a load of those tickets, ladies and gentlemen, and start scratching! Whoo!

NARRATION: As part of this new prize structure, the lottery also gave out more money, total. Early scratch tickets were a terrible bet. On a one dollar ticket, only about 30 cents went back in prizes. O'Brien pushed that up to 40, 50, 60 cents on the dollar -- higher than any other state was offering at the time.

ARCHIVAL: The best cash payout in instant game history. Woo hoo! Another winner!

NARRATION: This was a huge gamble because what it meant was cutting into the lottery's own profit margin. But the leadership under Jim Hosker was willing to take that chance.

MUSIC: Post

NARRATION: Also due for a revamp, was the so-called 'play action' -- how the game itself unfolds on the ticket. People didn't just want a simple reveal, they wanted a series of reveals.

Paul Regan: I didn't win the first time, but I might win the second.

ARCHIVAL: You could win a first time, a second time, a third time, you could win three times on the same dollar.

NARRATION: I have a friend who teaches writing, and she told me she used to use scratch tickets to illustrate the fundamentals of storytelling. You have to reveal a little bit right away to get people interested, but not so much that the reader feels satisfied. A good story is like a good scratch ticket: it keeps you guessing until the very end.

ARCHIVAL: who knows how much you could win? Cash in a Flash. The civilized way to scratch your way to the top.

MUSIC: Out

NARRATION: But perhaps O'Brien's most important insight of all, was that people wanted options.

Paul Regan: Obviously, jim O'Brien learned at one point. I don't need to stop a game.

NARRATION: This might be hard to picture, but back when scratch tickets started, you'd walk into a convenience store and there would be a scratch ticket. Like one option. A few times a year, the current ticket would phase out and the new ticket would launch, but they didn't overlap. What O'Brien realized was that people missed those old games -- especially if they'd won on it.

Paul Regan: So, he then was the brilliant guy who came up with the fact that we can keep these games out there. Because we have fans. Everybody who won is a fan. So, why do we put him away?

NARRATION: The Lottery kept launching new tickets, but now the games would overlap.

MUSIC: Enter

ARCHIVAL: Introducing the lottery's new cash in a flash instant game

the new Instant Game Wildcard,

The Lottery's new Blackjack and Cash Roulette Instant Games

NARRATION: That's how you get to the cornucopia of glittering paper displayed behind every convenience store counter. It's not just another item on the wall. It is the wall.

Paul Regan: that had never been done before.

NARRATION: By the end of the 1980s, the Massachusetts Lottery had upped its release cadence to two new instant games every six to eight weeks -- just a constant churn.

Paul Regan: And, of course, other states picked up on that, too, you know. They said, Oh, jeez, they're leaving the games out there. Why don't we do the same thing? So they all followed everything that O'Brien did.

ARCHIVAL: So anyone who can scratch, can win.

MUSIC: Out

NARRATION: I began this series asking why residents of Massachusetts, of all states, have the distinction of spending on average one thousand thirty seven dollars a year on lottery tickets, way more than any other state? And I hope it's clear by now that there are many answers to that question. Geography, demographics, migration, urbanization, religion, politics, patronage, FBI wiretaps, property taxes. All these factors fed the strength of our lottery, and our lottery habit. But they can't entirely explain it. Other states had Catholics, other states had numbers games that were eventually put out of business, other states had political machines determined to use the lottery for their own gain. But none of them pulled it off in quite the same way. That's why I began and ended the series talking about innovation. That is the one thing that truly sets this lottery apart. Those other states didn't take the same risks, make the same bets. Or at least, their bets didn't pay off quite as well.

NARRATION: You'll sometimes hear the 1980s described as the so-called "Massachusetts Miracle." Our economy grew rapidly for most of that decade, propelled by the tech sector. But I found a book about lotteries from 1989 that borrowed that phrase -- referring instead to scratch tickets, as the "Massachusetts Miracle". From 1983 to 1989, the years that Jim Hosker ran the lottery, instant ticket revenue in Massachusetts increased fourteen-fold. Even as the numbers game and lotto games started to plateau or decline, scratch tickets kept growing. By 1991 the revenue topped seven hundred and fifty million dollars. That's close to a billion dollars a year in scratch tickets alone in this one small state.

ARCHIVAL: I'm here to show you how lucky you really are. Sure, how? Mizzle Doe, from the Mass Lottery.

NARRATION: In 1991, the Mass Lottery closed out that banner year with a Christmas ticket of course, called Mistle Dough.

ARCHIVAL: Mizzle Doe, everyone! Mizzle Doe! To my big brother, George, the richest man in town.

NARRATION: The ad was based on the classic Christmas movie “It’s a Wonderful Life.” In it, the ticket is in glowing color -- red and green -- while everything else is in black and white.

And truly, the scratch ticket was a miracle: the one lottery game that could defy the product life cycle and remain fresh for years, decades to come. McGowan’s prediction held up. Scratch tickets were the future, the bread and butter game of state lotteries everywhere

MUSIC: Out

Ian: Would staff from other state lotteries come and visit when you worked there?

David O'Reilly: Yeah. From all over the world actually.

Sheila Dubrawski: All the time. All the time. Yeah

NARRATION: That's David O'Reilly and Sheila Dubrawski, both former lottery staff.

The way they describe it, the Massachusetts lottery was not just up on top of the leaderboard; it was a source of fascination, envy. A lottery staffer from Kentucky called Massachusetts: "the mecca." And the pilgrims came from all around – from England, Spain, France...

David O'Reilly: China, Australia.

Sheila Dubrawski: Japan and I mean, they came from everywhere,

NARRATION: They all wanted to see for themselves the miracle – this magical lottery that Bob Crane built.

David O'Reilly: for what we do and how we do it, it is the best lottery in the world.

ARCHIVAL: and so today I can tell you that I'm reminded of the song.

NARRATION: This is Bob Crane, speaking to the press.

ARCHIVAL: You got to know when to hold them. You got to know when to fold them. You know when to walk away and know when to run. And today it's time for me to walk away.

NARRATION: That same year the Mistle Dough ticket came out, 1991, Crane retired. He went out on top, still undefeated after twenty seven years in office.

ARCHIVAL: For the first time in nearly 30 years, someone other than Robert Crane will be taking the oath of treasurer

MUSIC: Post

NARRATION: For a lot of politicians, the Treasurer's office is a stepping stone. They stay for one or two terms and then seek a higher, flashier job. But for Crane, this was the job.

ARCHIVAL: there he is, ladies and gentlemen, our guest of honor, Bob Crane!

NARRATION: I spoke with one lottery staffer who told me that years after Crane left he would call and ask: "How's my lottery doing?" It was not just an office that Crane held. The treasury and the lottery were his family, his personal fiefdom. He could hire his friends, play by his own rules, and be what he’d always wanted to be: an entertainer.

Christy George with WGBH once went out on the streets of Boston to see what people thought of their Treasurer...

ARCHIVAL: we're gonna play word association. I want you to tell me the first thing that comes into your mind when I say, Bob Crane. Money. I'm gonna have to say the lottery. Uh, the lottery. Rich. No, he's a treasurer,

NARRATION: A few people knew he was Treasurer, most seemed to know him as the face of the lottery. He had succeeded in his goal of reinventing himself.

ARCHIVAL: Yeah, Megabucks. Megabucks on a bar of cranes. You didn't even know him. He started Megabucks.

NARRATION: Crane had become the purveyor of dreams.

MUSIC: Shift

NARRATION: If this story were a scratch ticket, the boxes are now all scratched. The question is answered, the story lines are resolved. But we are left with a much more difficult question: how do we feel about it? How do we feel about the way state lotteries have changed us?

MUSIC: Out

BREAK

NARRATION: Besides marking the end of Treasurer Crane's career, the early 1990s also represent a kind of high water mark for lotteries as a whole. Lotto fever was still raging, scratch tickets were thriving, and the games had spread to basically every corner of the country. But already, a new era was beginning.

1993 is the last year in which lotteries were the single biggest segment of the gambling industry. In 1994, they were overtaken by casinos, which were also expanding all over the country. In the early 2000s, online poker exploded on the internet. And in 2018 we get the beginning of widespread legal sports betting.

ARCHIVAL: despite the introduction of new games and the continued success of Keno, lottery sales have gone flat.

NARRATION: The Massachusetts lottery remains the gold standard in per capita sales, but the era of explosive growth is over.

I went to a game at Fenway Park recently. On the outfield wall were big ads for Draft Kings and MGM Sportsbook. Under the scoreboard was a screen promoting a mobile gambling app. The stadium itself was running a fifty/fifty raffle with salespeople marching up and down the stands. And after the game there was a free shuttle directly from Fenway to the city's waterfront casino.

That is what your neighborhood lottery retailer is up against.

MUSIC: Enter

NARRATION: What's striking is how quickly this new era arrived. Consider this: from 1964, when New Hampshire sold its first sweepstakes ticket, to 1993, thirty seven states legalized lotteries. Thirty seven states in thirty years. As of this moment, thirty eight states have legalized sports betting. And guess how long that took? Eight years. Thirty eight states in eight years.

I've never loved the 'slippery slope' metaphor. Maybe because I grew up in the age of D.A.R.E., when kids were warned of the terrible dangers of the 'gateway drug' -- it always seemed a little overblown. So it is with some reluctance that I say: legalized gambling is a slippery slope. You start with a little, inevitably you get more and more, faster and faster. However you feel about it, that is how things played out. And probably nothing in the 20th century did more to lubricate that slope than lotteries -- these strange enterprises that carried the legitimacy of the state, and put gambling out in the public sphere like never before.

MUSIC: Out

Ian: Could you just introduce yourself for the recording?

Barney Frank: Yeah, um, this is Bernie Frank. I was a supporter of legalized gambling

NARRATION: One local figure who has been cheering that slide towards legal gambling, is our former Congressman Barney Frank. You may know Frank as the architect of the Dodd-Frank Act regulating banks, or for being the first openly gay member of congress. What you may not know is that he has a real libertarian streak. He fought for same sex marriage; he also fought for legalized sex work and marijuana, and online gambling. Basically, his attitude has always been: when it comes to people's personal lives, we should let them make their own choices. And I want to spend a minute with Frank here, because he helped me make sense of some of my own complicated feelings about lotteries, and gambling in general.

Barney Frank: The thing is this, in America there's a strong libertarian tradition. It's not popular to say, I'm going to tell you what to do. So when people want to ban an activity that other people want to do, they ginger up negative social consequences. It's not that I don't want you to enjoy marijuana. Which it really is. It is that if you smoke marijuana, it will hurt society. I don't want you to marry another person of your sex because that will undermine the marriage of other people. All nonsense.

NARRATION: But if one state gives it a try, and the doomsday scenarios don't fully materialize, then suddenly those fears don't carry so much weight.

Barney Frank: Then it spreads and it happens very rapidly. That happened with same sex marriage and marijuana, and I think it happened with gambling.

NARRATION: In Frank’s view, it was the lotteries that provided that breakthrough, that disproved the naysayers.

Barney Frank: Lotteries came and there was no great social deterioration.

NARRATION: But as he was laying out this argument, I couldn't help but think: one of these things is not like the others. Liberals are all forsame sex marriage, they love legalized marijuana. Gambling though, feels different...

MUSIC: Enter

NARRATION: It's been really interesting over the past year as I work on this project, just raising the issue of the lottery with whoever I talk to and hearing people's reactions. I find that a lot of liberals I talk to, including my fellow journalists, and academics, they tend to be instinctively skeptical of legal gambling. They are concerned that the lottery is addictive, misleading -- that a small percentage of the players account for a vast majority of the spending. And that those heaviest players tend to be relatively poor. There's a discomfort there, which I feel in myself too. Maybe that's why I do use that slippery slope metaphor. I mean, doesn't it imply we're sliding towards something bad?

Ian: This is an issue that still inspires really strong reactions from people. Why do you think that is?

Barney Frank: Illiberal liberalism.

MUSIC: Out

NARRATION: Frank calls it illiberal liberalism

Ian: Why is that? Why are liberals so uncomfortable with gambling? I

Barney Frank: think the association with crime, uh, is a part of it. It's a leftover paternalism. look, if you really want to help the poor, help them get more money. Don't, uh, Tell them how they should spend whatever money they have.

Ian: I think when we spoke on the phone a few weeks ago, you described it as a liberal glitch.

Barney Frank: Yeah, um, People who are for legalizing marijuana are against legalized gambling. I don't understand how you do that.

Ian: Is it just sort of like back to culture, like liberals smoke weed, but they don't gamble?

Barney Frank: It's part of it. I, I can't understand it I don't know.

NARRATION: Let me try on the other side of this argument for a moment. I think the liberal case against legal gambling is that the social consequences are real and not worth it. It’s a social risk, just like alcohol or tobacco, and one that’s not worth taking.

To put a number on it: according to the National Council on Problem Gambling, about one percent of all Americans, or 2.5 million adults, meet the diagnostic criteria for a gambling disorder. It causes harm to their lives. That number has increased with legalization, especially sports betting. Just a few months ago our state approved a three million dollar program to help reduce problem gambling among youth. You don't do that if there is not a problem.

MUSIC: Enter

NARRATION: And it's not just the professors and liberal elites who are concerned. Even among people I interviewed who played and worked for the lottery, I heard misgivings about legal gambling. If you ask me, most of us have just a bit of Puritan in us. We have our doubts.

Sheila Dubrawski: it's never ending debate about gaming, how much is too much.

NARRATION: Everyone drew their line in a slightly different place, but most of them have a line. Maybe it's a price point.

Geraldine Stewart: 50, that's a lot for a scratch ticket.

NARRATION: Or a marketing strategy.

David O'Reilly: I mean, it's all over the TV now

NARRATION: or maybe an entire avenue of gambling.

Paul Regan: You can literally bet on whether the next guy up is going to get a hit. It's like, what?

NARRATION: For some, even the idea of a state-run lottery crosses the line already.

Ian: Do you think that the state should be in the gambling business?

Joanne Chambers: Nah. They should find another way to make resources,

NARRATION: And so maybe the reason I find Barney Frank so interesting is that he simply has no line.

MUSIC: Out

Ian: Do you have any reservations about the ubiquity of gambling in our society today?

Barney Frank: No, I don't care what people do if they want to do it.

Ian: I guess the place where I wonder a little bit, and I'm sort of playing devil's advocate

NARRATION: I tried one last argument on Frank, to see if there were any cracks in his no holds barred position on gambling.

Part of what is weird about lotteries is that the state has this strong financial incentive to constantly bring in new customers, new gamblers. In the last year, just as the state launched that new program to reduce youth problem gambling, it also approved online lottery sales for the first time ever, specifically to reach younger players. That is the constant pressure, and it's different from other activities that also carry social risk, like alcohol and tobacco. Yes the state allows those things and even profits from those things, but it isn't paying for TV ads that promote smoking just to boost tax revenue.

Ian: Do you feel like that's a healthy relationship for the state to have with the gambling industry?

Barney Frank: What percentage of state revenues on the average do you think lotteries are?

Ian: Oh, I think it's very small.

Barney Frank: Much, much small, too small to have an effect. Secondly, I regard that as a good thing. See, I'm, I'm in favor of government. I think we, our problem today is that we have too little government spending, not too much. We do too little, on those things that only can be done if we do them together. And there's enormous resistance to increasing taxation. So something like the lottery that allows us to increase public expenditures, I think is a good thing.

Ian: So do you feel like the lottery is a realistic solution to the problem of we need government revenue and people are opposed to taxes? Or if you could write the tax code yourself, would you still make the lottery a core part of it.

Barney Frank: Yes, again, because you're implicitly citing the premise that gambling's a bad thing, or that lotteries are a bad thing.

NARRATION: Somehow no matter what question I ask, what policy issue I raise, it keeps coming back to this. A state-sponsored lottery is only a problem if you think gambling is bad – if you think betting your money on a slim chance you’ll get more money is a vice that should be limited and contained.

Ian: I think I'm actually not as critical of the lottery as I'm coming across. I'm just curious to kind of push against your arguments and, uh, hear it.

Barney Frank: But it has to start with there being something bad about it.

NARRATION: The reason I keep asking the questions is that I don’t want it to be that simple. But on some level Frank is right. That moral reservation is the root of all the uncertainty, the hand wringing, the love/hate relationship that America has had with gambling since before this country was founded.

MUSIC: Transition

Ian: Can I ask you one last question? Yeah.

A cycle in this country where, you know, we, we had lotteries in the colonial era, right? We had lotteries to fund the revolutionary war. You know, they get banned, they come back, they get banned. Do you think that the cycle will come back around? You think that fight is done?

Barney Frank: Yeah. Reality has taken over and there's no reason for it to, there's nothing that will drive it. I think the world is now, America certainly largely divided into a minority won to gamble and the majority doesn't care.

MUSIC: Transition

NARRATION: I recently walked past a poster in my neighborhood for the Problem Gambling Helpline. Someone had written across it with bright red ink: "We're all addicted to something. Who's anyone to judge?"

I immediately thought of Frank's line: "a minority that want to gamble, and a majority that doesn't care."

Ian: That's a, a, a strange but strong political constituency.

Barney Frank: Well, it's a common one.

MUSIC: Transition

NARRATION: So maybe gambling is here to stay. What I find so fascinating is that the shadow around it, the stigma, feels like it's here to stay too. It lingers in our culture and hearts in a way that doesn't feel like just a relic. It feels integral, part of what gambling is.

Stephen Robertson: You almost have to have gambling so that you can say the market isn't gambling

NARRATION: I got a fascinating theory on this from Stephen Robertson, historian of the Harlem numbers game. It's a little academic, but the way he sees it, capitalism cannot fully embrace gambling, because to do so would be to undermine capitalism itself, to admit that the free market is not really about merit and hard work after all.

Stephen Robertson: and so, you know, the easiest way to have that is to have an other, you know, and so gambling is capitalism's other. And so we can't kind of get rid of it because it's got enough of the things that we value in capitalism that it sits there kind of on the margins. But we also can't just You know, legitimated and bring it all under the same umbrella, because, The bottom line is the need To have gambling, almost to play against all of the other highly speculative ways of making money that we sort of legitimate.

NARRATION: Jonathan Cohen believes this is also why you hear so many stories about lottery winners who wind up miserable and destitute: it's just their commuppance for defying the rules of capitalism. It's also a myth. Most lottery winners do just fine.

Jonathan Cohen: There actually were a couple cases from like the late 80s, early 90s of like actual people this happened to. And, now if you read like, top 5 lottery winners who lost it all, it's like always the same people every single article. Because there actually aren't any more recent examples.

Ian: but we just love that story.

Jonathan Cohen: Yeah, I think, I think the myth has persisted because of this clinging to this idea of a meritocracy and this belief that the deserving rise to the top.

NARRATION: Gambling, capitalism; merit, chance. We can't seem to accept that these are all connected. That gambling is always a part of life, even when we don’t want to admit it. And there is one last story I’ll share, from lottery broadcaster Dawn Hayes, that just captures this dynamic perfectly.

Dawn Hayes: Wheel of Fortune came to town to do a show….

NARRATION: At one point in her long tenure, Hayes was part of a live taping of Wheel of Fortune – which like the lottery is all about giving away money to lucky winners. The game show itself was of course hosted by Pat Sajak and Vanna White; Hayes was like the local talent presiding over the whole evening. She was star struck of course; these were her heroes, but the feeling was not mutual.

Dawn Hayes: Vanna White and Pat Sajak would not take a picture with me because I represented gambling.

Ian: So they saw themselves as like, we're a game show, that's gambling. Correct.

Dawn Hayes: Yes. Yeah, and they would not take a picture with me.

Ian: And they felt that was like, that was very important for their public image?

Dawn Hayes: For their image. To not be, to not be associated with gambling. Yes.

Ian: That's really interesting.

Dawn Hayes: Yeah. Um, yeah. I was the host on the stage, but yet, they couldn't associate, so I never met them

NARRATION: Even after all the waves of lottery fever -- the ad campaigns, the prime time drawings, the fancy sets, the billions of dollars poured into local government, the whole thing still felt a little dirty. Tainted somehow.

The best Hayes could get was a picture of herself standing in front of the iconic letter board. That was a gameshow. She was gambling.

That kind of says it all to me. Gambling has to remain off to the side: forever present, forever transgressive. But then again, maybe that's part of what we love about it.

MUSIC: Transition

Ian: Do you think, uh, you know, with all the sports betting and casinos in town now, do you think the lottery will still hang on?

Customer: Oh yeah. Definitely. Look at the store.

NARRATION: I make a point of stopping by Joe's Market every month or so as I work on the series, just to see what people are playing, and try out whatever question is on my mind.

Customer: Look at the cards they have. And this, there's a, every store has them. Yeah. Yep. No one's going to stop playing.

Ian: And you're not going to stop playing, I assume?

Customer: No. No. I'm going to wait for the big one.

NARRATION: Business here is always brisk.

Customer 1: scratch tickets christmas time. We always buy Christmas tickets for my daughter, my family. So, they got you,

MUSIC: Enter

NARRATION: What I try to remember is that lotteries have always had competition, from corner bookmakers, from mafia-run numbers games. They've been outgunned before. And that's why the lottery is fun and the action is fast. That's why the marketing is aggressive, and the products addictive. Now the competition is legal, but the same rules apply as fifty years ago. Either the lotteries will compete and innovate, or they will fade away. But I wouldn't count them out yet.

Ian: How'd you do today?

Customer: I'll let you know. This is from yesterday.

Customer 1: Oh, okay. How you doing, Chief?

NARRATION: On these visits, I see a lot of the same regular customers, and the same types of customers. There's the people who just buy a couple tickets and leave. There's the people who buy a whole stack of tickets and scratch them in the car, in batches. There's the people who buy one at a time and keep coming back up to the counter again and again and again. Every time saying: just one more Jack.

Customer: All set, judge. Gimme one more. That's it

NARRATION: And more than anything, I hear the same grim humor. That's always the same.

Ian: How long have you been playing?

Customer 2: Oh, since they've been screwing us since 1972. Oh, you didn't, I'm not supposed to say the truth?

Ian: So why do you keep playing?

Customer 2: Because I'm a masochist! Hey!

NARRATION: After all the time I’ve spent loitering around this store, I figure I should at least buy something. It's been a while, but I've always liked scratch tickets, since I was a kid. I think for me it's the tactile quality of it. There's just something satisfying about the feeling of a coin against that thin scratchy film.

MUSIC: Out

Ian: Oh, I gotta try the, the 50th anniversary ticket.

NARRATION: The state just launched a special commemorative ticket, quote: "Celebrating the 50th anniversary of the first instant ticket ever." It's titled simply "The Instant Game," written in the same big block font used on that original ticket from 1974, back when it truly was the only instant game.

Ian: Can I get a couple of those?

Here.

NARRATION: The regulars watch warily as I pull out my wallet, like I'm a kid about to take a drag on his first cigarette. C'mon, it's just a scratch ticket.

Customer: Don't blame me. Don't blame me. If you're going to ask me, how do you play the lottery? Sit near a barrel. She'll tell ya.

MUSIC: Enter

Customer: Yeah. Yeah? Yeah, I've already, oh yeah, I'm back. If you don't know, don't learn. The guy with the mic. Yep. I hope you win. Thanks. Yeah.

NARRATION: I choose to scratch my tickets in the car and keep my joy or disappointment to myself. The top prize is $50,000.

Ian: the winning numbers.

NARRATION: So you can follow along, the winning numbers I'm hoping to match are 9 and 16. Looking for 9 and 16 here.

Ian: And here we go. 11, 13, 8, 19, 1, 7, and here we go. 10,

17, 14, and

NARRATION: Admit it: you want to know what that last number is. Am I about to win $50,000?

Ian: 3. Nothing.

NARRATION: Not today.

Alright, that's it.

MUSIC: Theme

NARRATION: The series is produced by Isabel Hibbard and myself, Ian. 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.

Special thanks this episode to Richard McGowan and Tom Demakis, and to Paul Regan for sharing recordings of the lottery ads he worked on. I also drew heavily from that Washington Post article I mentioned about Jim O’Brien; that’s called “Gambling’s Man” by David Segal. Here at the end of the series I also just want to thank all the folks at GBH and PRX who helped to launch this series. It was truly a team effort. And thanks to my audio pals Noam Hassenfeld and Ilya Maritz who listened to early versions of the show and gave feedback on it.

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.

—

Finally, this series is dedicated to Jack Connors, the ad man, who passed away shortly after our interview. When we spoke he told me about performing a song at Treasurer Crane's funeral, called Irish Lullaby. I hope someone sang it for him too.

Jack Connors: over in Killarney Many years ago Me mother sang a song to me In words so sweet and low, just a simple little ditty, in a good old Irish way. Oh, I'd give the world to hear her sing, that song to me today. Tora, lora, lora. Tora, lora, lie. Tora, lora, lora. Hush, now don't you cry. Tora, lora, lora. Tora, lora, lie. Tora, lora, lora. It's an Irish lullaby. Okay. By the way, all rights reserved. Okay. Yeah. In other words, you can do with it as you wish.